Sometimes I think about Digimon World 1’s final battle in the story and think about how fitting it is that the final boss calls it a battle to determine if digimon are better as friends or slaves. If this was a game like Pokemon, that would ring hollow since there’s no real difference in how pokemon are “raised.” It’s just throwing them into battle and watch the number go up. In DW1, however, your actually raise your partner (singular since you only have one that grows old, dies of old age, and becomes an egg to start the raising process all over). You have to feed it, take it to the bathroom, let it sleep, and train it either with gym gear or battles (there’s no exp in DW1). And you are punished for failure, such as it evolving into the poop digimon by letting poop on the ground too much, it becoming the joke champion Numemon if it fails to meet the requirements for any other champion, it’s lifespan getting shorted by losing battles, and training failures that can lock you out of certain evolutions. It’s a game where outside of speedruns and the like, you have to raise it right if you want to see the end of the game.
