I actually have an empty night for the first time in
two weeks? forever. Time to post random bullshit!
The original
Digimon World is one of, if not
the, best-worst game of all time. Everything about the game is/was alien, hostile, and intentionally obtuse and temperamental from top to bottom - up to and including the basic game mechanic of taking care of your newborn Digimon. And I wouldn't have had it any other way.
If you stick with it and learn, or carefully use a guide I suppose, the experience of coming to understand the way File Isle works, how raising and empowering Digimon works, of actually going out and exploring the dangerous wilderness - of finding the various former residents you can recruit and have come back to town, expanding facilities and options for your Mon's next cycle - is just absolutely goddamn amazing. Allegedly one of the PS4 games is a kinda-sorta remake/sequel to it, but as with everything else I haven't actually gotten around to playing my copy yet.
Nothing can recreate the magic though. And I have never so much as gotten a whiff of anyone having the intestinal fortitude to
consider trying to replicate it, with or without the hostility. Here's a video I watched a couple years ago that does a good job of explaining it in more depth, and filled me with all sorts of nostalgia.
Excerpt from the above video said:
The original Digimon World is an interesting little beast from January 1999, which means it actually predates the Digimon anime by just a few months. It was one of the first monster raising games of its scale and featured a surprising open-world structure, a massive amount of optional content, dozens of unique Digimon to raise and a lot of fun characters to meet.
It's also one of the most ludicrously complex games I've ever played in my entire life. And I'm sure that sounds ridiculous. "How could this game for little kids be so complex?" But, I assure you, it is. There is, to this day, a large-scale international effort diving into the code, trying to figure out how in the name of sweet Christ this thing is supposed to work. And that is not an exaggeration, I have met several of these people while streaming it. It's like Sid Meyer designed a monster raising Sim.
Full disclosure: Final Fantasy XI is my favorite game of all time and that game's entire schtick for ~22 years has been wishing suffering and death upon you and everything you love. I-I might be a masochist, maybe.
I played S2, but I did play it fairly recently so it's not fair to judge it. At the time it was probably great but I didn't connect with it. I loved S3, I played it at launch and then never touched the series again.
Loading times notwithstanding, S5 was also fantastic.
A lot of games don't necessarily "hold up" as well simply by virtue
of being so good. I think of a game like Chrono Trigger, which I didn't play until... probably 2000, 2001?
(After playing Chrono Cross ) And the vastly inferior PS1 port that was on Final Fantasy Chronicles (alongside FF4) for good measure. I could still recognize that it was a solidly built game, but everything felt a little flatter because the entire genre basically copied its homework.
See also FF6, which would have been my 5th(?) game in the series (8 -> 9 -> 7 -> 10 -> 6, IIRC), minus even seeing what the hype was 'cause 1) awful port and 2) not exactly the most briskly paced game to begin with. I dropped it during the boss battle where you're jumping down out of the airship. Bought the GBA port when that released hoping to try again, but I don't really do handhelds and never got around to it. Only hope left is Xbox getting a Pixel Remaster port! Or them actually remaking it... but I'm already so, so scared about FF9R.
S2 surely hit a lot harder back in the day, but also the one strike I have against it is that you really only get the full experience if you played S1 first, and works AMAZINGLY if played back-to-back with the original.
This was honestly just A Thing™ in the genre for a while there, but especially on PS1. Immediately reminded of the original Arc the Lad, which was an okay-ish game but
very short and without a ton of meat. You'd have to either view it as a preview for AtL2, or a very long optional tutorial for it. But playing AtL2 without doing AtL is sacrilege and missing the entire point. And the, uh, reason/spoiler for it is another of those things that ended up being repeated a lot and probably loses some/all effect if played for the first time today. But still, incredible game.
Shadow Hearts both does and doesn't count, too. Wherein the first game is completely fine and perfect on its own, and you
can play and enjoy Covenant on its own as well. But playing SH1, then SH2
then SH1 again lol is what makes it one of my favorite games/series of all time.