This is a hack for Digimon World released for the original Playstation, a very interesting and ambitious mix of adventure, pet-raising simulator and some RPG elements.

As it is to be expected from this author, this modification touches a large number of aspects of the original game in an attempt to improve or tweak a large amount of elements to make a smoother, more polished and hopefully more varied and fun experience.

Here is a summarized list of the changes:

• Reworking Evolution. This entails a large enough number of changes by itself, from redoing the requirements for each species to avoid overlap that would cause unintentional evolutions, simplifying how the inner working of certain requirements, providing equal number of evolutions to each species, remove the Priority system that could change the resulting evolution even if the player did things right, etc.

• Tweaks to Techs, trying to make all of them have a niche to fill to feel useful, toning down the ones that were absurdly powerful, making weak Finisher Techs more in line with the standard power of each tier of evolution, improving the chances and fairnes about learning Techs, changing the moveset of a few species, etc.

• Tweaks to Items, to provide more variety in their effects, make more of them more useful to the player, specially related to food. Items lying around the world have also been extensively changed so there are more than Digishrooms out there. Evolution Items now provide Stat Gains and Lifespan boost when necessary.

• Changes to enemy Digimon. From minor stat tweaks to either fortify or tone down specific ones, to improving the Item drop chances and variety, increasing the amount of Bits obtained by battle to amounts that actually help the player, Boss battles providing guaranteed Item drops where possible, some Tech changes to provide more ways to learn Techs that were a single-time-only chance, etc.

• A big number of changes for other mechanics, such as extending Lifespan, File City’s Restaurant, the sleep and eating habits of Digimon to fix things like Gabumon’s absurd feeding needs, improving Drimogemon’s Item search shop, changes to the Arena to be more fair, expanding Factorial Town’s Evolution system, raising the chances for random Boss Digimon to appear to a more sane amounts, and quite a few more.

• Extensive text cleanup where possible. This is not to change the weird feeling of the script which gives it its own weird charm, but to fix the many, many typos, incomplete lines, glitched text, game-breaking textboxes that would hang up the player and others. No way Maeson would touch gems of writing such as “He ruined my research with Evil”!

• Inserting three* unused Digimon species as playable and fully functional, that can be obtained through normal evolution, and have different Techs to differentiate them from the original versions they’re copying.

• Several optional patches that can restore or alter a few of the elements changed in this hack, disable the Tech Bonus requirement that could negatively affect evolution, and a collection of extra patches that will change the Starting Digimon when beginning a new game, providing much needed early-game variety.

Beyond this, for this project Maeson was joined by Vice04 with the goal of squashing a large amount of glitches that were present in the game, for which this game is very infamous. The vast majority of the fixes were made by Vice04 by reworking the code itself, doing a magnificent job, while others required less serious changes.

Provided alongside Maeson’s hack, a version of Vice04’s fixes plus a few other changes was also added, plus a for-fun patch that makes random opponents appear during the Curling mini game.

A very detailed readme was also added, that not only goes through the changes, but also informs the reader about mechanics of the original game so they don’t need other source of information for such elements, some of them rather obscure and not well known. A smaller readme containing basic information for quick checking in the form of lists is also included.

The hack should be applied to an NTSC-US .BIN copy of the game, using PPF-o-Matic.

Note: Hack updated to 1.03.

• All patches were remade with correct ECC and ECD sectors to prevent issues when playing it on specific places.

• Also fixed an issue with three evolutive Items that did not work as intended.

• Based on feedback, the Minigame for Monochromon’s shop was tweaked in order to reduce the money goal that the original game in order to make it less dependant on luck. There’s an optional patch to restore the original value.

• Based on feedback, a few Items had their fishing bait data tweaked, and an oversight related to this that affected a small handful of Items was also corrected, so now all Food Items work as they should when used as bait.

• Digimon World [SLUS-01032]
• CRC32: E6FDD00E
• SHA1: 5611645da66183e30d11fb6c11a2784ff47e1fdb