デジカ

In 1998, as it’s manga shifted focus entirely to Duel Monsters, Bandai’s license to publish simple YuGiOh card game merchandise expired. The publisher sought to replace it with a new game that would capitalize upon the success of the Tamagotchi Digital Monster V-Pet, and simultaneously prime audiences for the release of the Digimon Adventure OVA. Over the next several years, Bandai would release dozens of expansions to the Digital Monster Card Game, often referred to by its ruleset as Hyper Colosseum, or simply デジカ (DeJiCa). Expansion sets were released frequently via Carddass vending machines, and Bandai hosted a robust series of organized events across Japan. The third Digimon anime, Tamers, prominently featured the game. DigiCa had such a huge following in Japan that new cards are still being released, albeit very infrequently.

Hyper Colosseum was brought to the West by Upper Deck in 1999 as the Digi-Battle Card Game. While the art and card layout were localized without any notable changes, many of the cards were poorly translated, both rhetorically and functionally. The game itself also changed quite dramatically, eliminating much of the nuance found in the original ruleset. Two booster sets were released, but the third and final release consisted entirely of reprints with different frames and backs in North America. By the year 2000, the game was all but dead. As Pokémania slowly faded, the Tamers dub was finally released in the West in 2001 to little fanfare. Most viewers were likely aware of the “Digimon Cards” which feature heavily in the show, and maybe even had a few lying around—completely ignorant of the importance the game held, even then, for the Japanese audience. 

This page is still a work in progress. It began as an attempt to play this game using the English printing with its original Japanese ruleset. However, it is worth mentioning this upfront: that’s just not possible. It is difficult to talk about game state and rules-as-written in the english release, since the game is fundamentally non-functional. I’ve included links to a handful of sources online covering both the original game and the western translation, but none really tackle just how peculiar Digi-Battle is, nor why. So this is, sadly, not a DigiCa rebuild. Rather, it is a collection of all the fascinating peculiarities of a dead trading card game.

If you want to learn more about Hyper Colosseum, all the sources I’ve used can be found at the bottom of the page, but a particularly valuable resource was the Tamer Union page, which I highly recommend for both the rules and history of TCG organized play in Japan at the turn of the century. There is also a handy database of western card sets here. Finally, in some cases, the comparisons I draw between Hyper Colosseum and Digi-Battle rely on some knowledge of other card games. As long as you have some passing knowledge of how trading card games function, you should be fine.

The first sweeping change to Digi-Battle is the victory condition. In Hyper Colloseum, you reduce your opponent’s point score from 100 to 0 by winning battles with your partner Digimon as you raise it. In Digi-battle, you increase your own score from 0 to 1000 by winning battles with your partner Digimon as you raise it. This seems like a straightforward change, serving to differentiate this game from its contemporaries, which generally involved whittling your opponents life and resources to zero. Aside from the multiplication by ten, its barely a change at all. Unfortunately, the mechanic itself, counting up rather than down, messes with certain card functionality—drastically, in some cases—and fundamentally breaks the game.

In a Hyper Colosseum match, each round is won or lost by determining who is using a stronger attack. The loser’s score decreases by a multiple of ten. Exactly how many points are lost is not fixed, but rather determined by the “lost point” box on the card itself. For example, if the Andromon to the left, a lvl5, loses to a lvl3, Andromon’s controller loses 30 points, since it ought to win against lvl3 Digimon in most cases. Losing to a lvl5 will only cost you 20 points, since most lvl5s are about the same power level. Losing to a lvl6 will cost you only 10 points, since most lvl6s have a higher power level, leaving Andromon outmatched. Cards are balanced around this “lost point” score, with weaker digimon having lower average scores.

Mechanics like this are often implemented in card games to make it more difficult for the leading player to snowball into a win. One such reward for evolving into lvl6 was a 30 point recovery to your score. Functionally, this was similar to certain actions gaining back lost life in Magic: the Gathering. You could lose a few rounds without too much worry since eventually, you’d draw a strong character and gain some lost points back.

In Digi-battle, instead of a “lost point” box, english cards have a simple “score” scale. Generally, defeating an opponent at the same or lower level will net you 100 points, and defeating something higher will net you an additional 100 points per level. While this could theoretically serve as a balancing element for stronger and weaker cards in the same lvl bracket, it is rarely used in this way. Defeating a particularly tough lvl3 would net you the same amount of points as defeating the weakest lvl5. Additionally, it is particularly challenging to come back from an opponent reaching lvl6, since these cards were translated without any changes, meaning they increase your score in Digi-battle, too. It is actually possible to win the game by gaining 300 points for digivolving into a mega (which, RAW, is easy to achieve and might even happen more than once in a match).

The box on the lower left of the card contains three colored symbols, each corresponding to an attack name and attack value. Unfortunately the localization team made some changes that fundamentally break the game.

In the original iteration, each card features a strong attack, A (red), dealing the most damage but liable to be countered; a reliable attack, B (green), usually dealing a middling amount of guaranteed damage; and Guard, C (yellow), which deals the least damage but reduces incoming damage from an A (red) attack to zero. Players don’t choose which attack to use, though. The opposing Digimon’s battle type (top left) determines what attack will be used against them in a battle round. It is this rock-paper-scissors dynamic that, in my view, best captures the feeling of taming a digital monster. While you can exert some level of control over where or how your pet moves—in this game by using option cards—you cannot control its movement exactly.

Continuing with the Andromon example, its localization sees the numbers changed, with 120 subtracted from the A (red) attack, Defend, and 120 added to the C (yellow) attack, Gatling Attack. Spiral Sword is the sourcebook name for Andromon’s main attack, but that’s a small change compared to the other element missing entirely from the translation: Guard (A->0). While Guard sounds a bit like Defend, no rules or card text indicates that Defend reduces incoming damage.

I posit that the attack order has been reversed. Red is now the weakest attack, but has a name that suggests it can counter other attacks; green is the strongest attack, and yellow the middling attack.

Since Andromon’s battle type remained the same, but his attack information changed, the card is functionally quite different from its original printing. All red type cards received this change in attack order and attack values. What first seems innocuous in fact completely neuter a key mechanic of the original game, even if one extrapolates Defend to function the way it does in Hyper Coliseum.

Vilemon, a Digimon with the yellow battle type, exhibits the same changes to attack order as Andromon, and the A and C numbers have been altered as well, in this case by 180 points. Vilemon is also a direct example of the “lost point” translation error. The card on the left will lose 30 points to a lvl3, but 10 points to every other level (implying it is strong for a lvl4). Opponents have a ‘comeback’ opportunity if they play their cards right. The card on the right will only gain more than the baseline 100 points for a player if it defeats a lvl6. This makes the card both hyper efficient and frustratingly slow, as failing to play around this nets the opponent a flat 100 points per round. An agonizing death at the hands of Vilemon.

A final noteworthy change is the evolution requirements box at the top of the card, which, while not game breaking, does bend the rules in such a way as to make them less interesting for players to engage with.

In english, the required pre-evolution stage Biyomon is the same, but the cost reads “offline 2 cards”—discard two cards from your hand. The Japanese release features symbols instead. The O indicates that a card must be discarded horizontally (landscape or ‘tapped’), while the X indicates that a card must be discarded vertically. Multiples of either symbol require a card for each. Further, these cards are not discarded from the hand, but placed directly from the top of the deck (‘milled’) into the requirements area, face down.

As translated, there are ten cards (out of a possible thirteen) that a Biyomon could become if two cards are discarded, and only three for a single discard. But in Hyper Coliseum, Biyomon’s evolution could be predicted based not only from whether the opponent discarded one or two cards, but whether those cards were discarded vertically or horizontally—if two vertical cards are discarded, then Vilemon is a possible evolution; if two horizontal, Monochromon; if one of each is placed, Dokugumon. At this point in the game’s development, this gave a strategic advantage to players with a comprehensive knowledge of the card pool, as they may be able to predict what their opponent is doing based on whether one or two cards are discarded, and whether those cards are placed horizontally or vertically; later cards actually used this mechanic in more creative ways. It goes without saying that this element of prediction was removed for the english release, and due to the game’s early cancellation, never built upon.

In short, the evolution and attack mechanics were subjected to several seemingly random, pointless, balance-destroying changes in the localization. The order of attacks is different, the numbers are different, and Guard (A->0), a key element of the rock-paper-scissors dynamic, has been completely removed from the game. Points are increased rather than decreased, and how they are scored is less conducive to comebacks. The Digivolution mechanic has lost much of its complexity. But can it really be said that the game itself is unplayable because of these changes?

This is where the localization transcends poor execution and becomes downright bizarre. Every Digimon with a green battle type was translated to english with no changes to their attack order or damage values.

While the changes to evolution requirements and scoring are in line with the english localization, it wouldn’t be hard to adapt an entire set of cards that looked like this into a working version of Hyper Colosseum. If you wanted to, you could make a deck that uses only green Digimon and play against an opponent using Hyper Colosseum cards. But as soon as you incorporate even a single card with a different battle type, the game is lost in translation.

That’s not even considering the headaches this causes when trying to play with english cards. There is no reason, under any circumstance, that you would want to be using your yellow attack. I haven’t talked about option cards yet, but the three that change your attack type were translated with no changes, meaning you always want to force the red or green attack and never the yellow one; and playing against a yellow deck with red or green meant your attacks were always outclassed by their default attack.

As nonsensical as these changes seem, I think they are explicable. As far as I can tell, every yellow lvl4 has had their first and third attack altered by 180 points. Most cards at each level across all three types have had a uniform points alteration to their attack power. It is possible that this was an error, and it is equally possible that this was done to compensate for one. Either a translator made a genuine error, and to save time they made a blanket change to each card where the order had been switched, subtracting points from A and adding them to C. Alternatively, the localization team wanted to change them all, but for some reason did not (or could not). Maybe they realized they were torpedoing a good game, and stopped halfway through. It is impossible to know exactly, but one thing is certain: someone on the localization team noticed the issues and tried to compensate by writing asinine rules.