Anime Expo 2022 - Interview with Digimon Survive Game Producer Habu Kazumasa

Celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Digimon Anime, Digimon Survive presents a brand-new adventure set in a mysterious world where your choices matter. With an interesting mix of combat and visual novel-esque presentation, wrapped in a more dramatic, almost horror-filled tone, Digimon Survive looks to be an interesting addition to the franchise we all know and love. The game is being produced by Habu Kazumasa, who has helped create numerous beloved Digimon games throughout the past couple of years including Digimon World: Next Order and Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth. Anime News Network was given the opportunity to speak with Kazumasa at Anime Expo 2022 about the game's development, the obstacles faced during development, and what such an ambitious project hopes to achieve.

Habu Kazumasa: Well yes, a lot of things happened during development. I would say that because I wanted to create Digimon Survive for the core Digimon fans, the ones who wanted something different, I considered this project to be a challenging project for me. I wanted to create something different from the other Digimon games that came before, something with more of an indie theme that Digimon fans would still be able to enjoy. So we tried to start small with a very small team but because of that, development itself wasn't going super well at the start, and at one point I needed to make the decision to change developers in order to continue with the project.

Because of the change in the development team, I needed to essentially throw away everything that we previously worked on for those first 2 years and start everything new with this new team. Fortunately, this new team was able to understand the idea I had and basically create a game in accordance with the skeleton that I had been thinking about. I hope that this idea I've been working on will appeal to those core fans.

Regarding the idea of making a Digimon game different from what we had seen before, a lot of the previous Digimon games either had a lot of RPG elements or were just simple beat-em-up games. This game almost seems to have a visual novel approach to it, with a big emphasis on player choice and horror. Let's start with the latter. Currently Digimon Ghost Game is airing and that definitely has more of a horror tone to it. Was that a coincidence or part of a larger shift for the franchise as a whole?

KAZUMASA: It's mostly like a coincidence for me. From my understanding, the anime Ghost Game focuses more on a target audience that is already watching a lot of other dark-themed anime. Nothing too dark, focusing more on supernatural myths and legends. For Digimon Survive, it's more about the older audience with a stronger horror theme. So there is quite a big difference between these two projects that have completely different staff. But even if the game has more of a darker theme, the message that I want people to take away from this game is similar to what I was trying to do with Digimon Story. What I want to explain to the fans is what Digimon really are. What kind of creatures are they and why do they exist in the digital world?

So long-term fans will understand that different projects under the same Digimon IP will have different settings. For example, the actual toys that the Digimon are based off of are living in the digital world. However, starting with the Digimon Adventure anime, it starts to take the route that Digimon are more like spiritual beings. They are not just data. So depending on the media, different fans will have different ideas about what Digimon are. And for myself, it has always been a struggle to explain what Digimon are. So with Survive I'm trying to link everything together. This way people at different stages in the Digimon Community will have a better idea of what Digimon are.

So ideally this is a game that really focuses on what Digimon are in a way that all fans who grew up with the franchise can understand and come together on? Do I have that correctly?

KAZUMASA: Well Digimon Survive is a way for me to communicate what I think Digimon are. There are people who might feel the same way after playing, and there are those who might feel differently. Both are completely fine. I just want to explain one of the definitions of Digimon and expand the understanding of them for the future as well. A similar thing happened when I was working on Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth, where I tried to give another explanation about what Digimon are and at the time, a lot of people felt the same way. I did that by having the Digimon come out into the real world that people live in and see the drama between the Digimon and the human beings. These monsters who were just data were turning into real partners that people didn't want to lose, and I wanted to bring out a different feel from a different aspect of that with Survive. With this game, I hope people will feel the same way, but it's completely fine if they don't.

It's actually interesting you say that, because I am a long-time Digimon fan myself. I grew up with the western localization of the Adventure series and even though a good chunk of it was altered, it still kept that core aspect of kids learning to deal with difficult things while their Digimon were there with them. Can we expect more of that human drama in this game? And if so, does that correlate to the idea of choice that we mentioned before?

KAZUMASA: Yes, your assumption is correct. When it comes to past Digimon games, especially the RPGs, the connection that happens between the human characters and the Digimon would manifest with leveling up and getting stronger. However, there wasn't always a way for me to express the drama between the Digimon and their human partners, which is what I wanted to create in Survive. The implementation of all these different systems and the ability to choose will reflect this relationship. When the players choose differently during the visual novel parts, the Digimon will take on different forms, emphasizing the idea to the players that your choices can really affect what your Digimon can become.

I want to emphasize that this is very different from the anime stories. The anime wants to tell the audience that the human characters and Digimon are strong together. Since their bond is strong, they can overcome everything together. It's a very positive message and all the characters are heroes. But in the real world, not everyone is a hero. Many will have weaknesses and will be afraid of what they don't understand. So in Survive, when the characters are sucked into this parallel world and see these monsters, I wanted to emphasize how real people would react to that. And because of the weakness of normal human beings, the characters will face failure, make a lot of wrong decisions, and they might even die. So having such a dark theme made sense when you consider that's the kind of stuff that would happen if Digimon were a real thing in the real world.

Well I was definitely curious while doing research on this game, but now you have my full attention. Thank you so much for your time.