| Digimon UP | |||
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| Release Date | Gameplay & Story | Pre-Register & Pre-Order | Review |
Digimon UP is a new Digimon mobile game, but this time, it’s an idle monster-raising RPG. Read our review to see what it did well, what it didn't do well, and if it's worth buying.
Overview
What is Digimon UP?
Digimon UP is a monster-raising idle RPG developed by Bandai Namco Entertainment globally released on Android and iOS in July 2026. It was unveiled during the Digimon Con 2026 livestream on March 21.
The game adopts a pixel-art aesthetic, a visual choice that calls back to the series’ origins on handheld virtual pet devices. Based on the game’s website, the mobile title "a Digimon journey that moves with your life." As such, the title appears to prioritize "Raising and Training" mechanics such as feeding, powering up, and guiding these creatures through various stages until they reach Mega Digivolution.
Digimon UP features:
⚫︎ Monster-Raising Idle RPG
⚫︎ Power-Level-Based PvP
⚫︎ Almost 300 Digimon
⚫︎ Skill Cards and Digivices That Improve Power Level
For more gameplay details, read everything we know about Digimon UP’s gameplay and story.
| Digital Storefronts | |||||
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 App Store |
 Google Play |
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| Free-to-Play | |||||
Digimon UP Review: Digimon Fans Deserve Better Than This
Digimon Cannot Get It Right on Mobile Somehow
Digimon UP has a lot riding on it. Not simply because it’s the newest Digimon game at the moment, but because it’s asking fans to once again believe that the franchise can finally find a home on mobile. That’s easier said than done, though.
Digimon’s mobile games haven’t exactly had the longest lifespans, with many of them disappearing just a year or so after launch. Outside of Digimon New Century, which may or may not even see the light of day outside China, it has been difficult to invest in a Digimon mobile game without wondering how long it’ll actually be around.
Unfortunately, the more I played, the more I realized I was rooting for Digimon UP more than I was actually enjoying it. It’s an exhausting game to play for an idle RPG, not one I’d recommend even to other Digimon fans. Once the novelty of seeing Agumon, Gabumon, and the rest of the anime cast wears off, you're left with an idle RPG that rarely does enough to distinguish itself from the countless others already available on mobile.
At Least the Sprites are Good
First, the good.
One thing I don’t want to take away from Digimon UP is just how good its sprite work can be. It was the first thing that caught my eye when the game was announced back in March, and after playing it for a good while, I’m glad to say it wasn’t just a good first impression. Nearly every Digimon has been given an entirely new set of pixel sprites that look and move adorably. Their idles are full of personality, and their signature techniques have a charm that instantly reminded me of the Nintendo DS era of Digimon games.
Even the player has its own pixel sprite. There’s not much customization to work with at the moment, but I appreciated that the game lets you freely mix hairstyles and outfits regardless of their stats after you obtain them.
What I liked the most, though, was the Digimon here. Of course, Agumon, Gabumon, and the other faces from the anime are part of the almost 300 Digimon, but the game also digs deep into its catalog to include lesser-known mons that I rarely ever encounter outside of maybe the TCG or the official online Digimon Encyclopedia.
I mean, even Digimon Story: Time Stranger shied away from including MarineBullmon, KoKabuterimon, Tobiumon, the fan-favorite Ludomon line. Beatbreak’s Gekkomon is here as an actual Digimon and not just a cameo! I found myself reading through their rather short encyclopedia entries in-game whenever I discovered someone new. They’re not lengthy, but they’re a nice touch.
And that’s about it for the positives.
It’s Just Another Idle RPG…
I really wish I had more good things to say about Digimon UP, but it didn’t take long before even its wonderful sprites became something I barely noticed outside of that first hour.
If you've played an idle RPG before, you've basically played Digimon UP already. Your Digimon automatically fight through stages, defeat enemies, and collect resources while you watch the numbers go up. Even after closing the game, they'll continue progressing on their own until the idle rewards eventually stop accumulating, at which point you log back in, collect everything, spend a few minutes upgrading your team, and do it all over again.
That's the entire loop. Digimon UP rarely does anything to separate itself from it.
You begin by choosing one of several partner Digimon from Adventure, Adventure 02, or Tamers. They’ll start as a Baby Digimon before gradually following their usual evolutionary line all the way to Mega. Personally, I picked Terriermon because I wanted every day to be a day full of "moumantai" (no worries).
I remember thinking it was ridiculous that people already had Mega-level Partners just a few hours after the servers went live. Those were probably the players willing to spend whatever it took to climb the PvP rankings as quickly as possible. I wasn't one of them. I just logged in every day, did my dailies, tried to maximize my resources, and let the game take its course.
It took me around three to four days to raise Terriermon all the way to MegaGargomon. Once I did, the game unlocked the other Digi-Eggs so that I could move on to a completely different Partner Digimon. If you keep up with your dailies, I really don't think it'll take very long before you've raised all of them. That's probably the next thing Digimon UP has to figure out because sooner or later, players are going to need new Partners to work toward.
That doesn’t eliminate, though, how slow things can get as a free-to-play (F2P) player. Upgrade costs keep climbing; enemies begin surviving longer. Before long, you start to hit a wall. You, then, are forced to wait. Waiting for another timer to finish, waiting for another batch of idle rewards, waiting until you’ve gathered enough resources to push through another handful of stages before running into the same problem.
If you’re impatient, the game is more than happy to remind you that there’s a shop waiting.
But that’s the thing. Despite the game playing itself most of the time, you never really feel like you’re spending that time raising a Digimon. You’re mostly opening menus and deciding where your resources should go. The Hologram Device constantly spits out equipment for both your Tamer and Partner Digimon. If a piece of gear has better numbers, you equip it. If it doesn’t, the game automatically converts it into experience points.
Even after just a few hours, I realized I was more concerned about the Hologram Device than how Terriermon was doing.
The problem is that Digimon UP isn’t fun as an idle RPG either. I’m fine with checking back into a game later to see my team get stronger, but this game constantly asks me to do things that don’t feel rewarding at all. There’s no goal to work for except to get your numbers higher.
I’m checking the Hologram Device, finishing Training, harvesting DigiMeat, and upgrading my systems, but all of it eventually leads back to the same thing: waiting for another timer, watching another ad, collecting enough resources to try again the next day. It’s a lot of busywork that just does not equate to a fun time.
Little to No Strategy Beyond Seeing Bigger Numbers
That feeling carries over into PvP, which is just as disappointing. As is expected of an idle RPG, all you’re really doing here is putting together a team, picking an opponent, and watching both sides fight on their own. Once the battle starts, your job is essentially over. Whether you win or lose comes down almost entirely to how well you’ve built your team beforehand.
The problem is that, at least as of writing, it barely feels like there’s a need or incentive to try out different builds because everyone is running the same overpowered one.
After hitting a wall myself, I switched over to the SP Battle Type, which focuses on recovering HP throughout a fight. The difference was immediate. I climbed several PvP ranks almost overnight and started clearing hundreds of stages that had previously stopped me when I was using the Attack Battle Type. It wasn't because I'd suddenly come up with some clever strategy to beat a boss; I had simply started using a build that stops my Digimon from dying immediately.
Technically, there are alternatives. I’ve tried running attack-speed builds (which really just means having all your Support and Skill Cards say "Attack Speed Up"), but every time I did, it felt pointless. HP Recovery is just too strong and reliable. Critical-hit setups can sometimes burst through the healing before it matters, but those are the rare exceptions, and a lot of the time, they fail at even doing that. SP Battle Type is so overpowered that it kills any room for experimentation.
The Hologram Device doesn't help much either. Every new piece of gear is usually just another small stat increase, and once you replace your old equipment and Digimon plugins, you lose them forever. Sure, you can still use it as a cosmetic, but your actual build ends up looking like some Frankenstein creation stitched together from whatever happened to have the biggest numbers.
What makes it even more awkward is how PvP shares the exact same loadout you're using everywhere else. If I'm raising a Rookie Partner in the regular stages, that’s also the Digimon I’m taking into PvP unless I stop what I’m doing, dig through menus, and swap everyone back to my strongest Mega team. I really wish the game would let us save separate teams for regular stages, Offense PvP, and Defense PvP. It would make experimenting with Partners much less of a hassle.
It Doesn’t Feel Like Digimon
The more I played, the more I realized Digimon UP is an idle RPG first and a Digimon game second. That might sound obvious considering it is an idle RPG, but my problem isn't the genre itself. It's how little of Digimon's identity survives once you start peeling away the familiar faces.
Take your Partner Digimon, for example. It follows a single, predetermined Digivolution line from beginning to end. Terriermon becomes Gargomon, then Rapidmon, then MegaGargomon. That's it. For a lot of creature-collectors, that would be perfectly fine. Digimon, however, has always been different.
One of the franchise's defining ideas is that Digivolution isn't fixed. Depending on the game, a Terriermon could branch into entirely different Digimon, and sometimes even De-digivolve before taking a completely different path altogether. That freedom has always made the series be about you raising your Digimon.
Here, though, you can’t even get Digimon outside of the evolutionary lines of the 15 Partner Digimon given to you at the start. That means despite cool Digimon like Ludomon and Espimon being in the game as Support, they cannot be your Partner.
The Support Digimon don't fare much better. You obtain them through the gacha, slot them into your team of six, and... that's about the extent of your relationship with them. They can't Digivolve. They don't really grow in interesting ways. Outside of making their numbers bigger by just getting duplicates of them, there's very little to customize or experiment with here.
Even the Buddies that accompany your team suffer from the same problem. They're introduced as if Buddies like Tai & Agumon bring something unique to your party, but their "Unique Skills" aren’t particularly unique at all, seeing as even some random Digimon like MadLeomon have that same "Skill" as its "Battle Effect."
It’s the same with Skill Cards. Mechanically, they’re little more than extra attacks that activate automatically whenever their cooldown finishes. There’s almost no decision-making involved because you never get to choose when to use them, and once you actually start reading what each card does, there isn’t much separating one from another beyond how much damage they deal.
A few offer small buffs or other effects, but not enough to really change how you approach combat. I eventually just left them on Auto-Select because there wasn't much to gain from trying to optimize them when the game barely lets me build around anything in the first place.
That’s really what’s bothersome here for me as a Digimon fan. Once you put all of those bad decisions together, they paint a picture of a game that’s uninterested in what has always made Digimon different from every other creature-collectors out there.
And because so much of the experience is automated, I never formed much of a connection with Terriermon either. That's probably the biggest disappointment of all. Digimon has always been about growing alongside a partner. Whether it's the anime or games like Digimon World and Digimon Story, the bond between Tamer and Digimon has always been the center of the experience.
Here, though, my Terriermon was just another unit on my team.
Watch an Ad. Watch an Ad. Watch an Ad. Watch an Ad.
Like most idle RPGs, you’ll eventually reach a point where your team simply isn’t strong enough. You can then close the game and come back later after your idle rewards have piled up, spend some money to speed things along, or do what the game constantly encourages you to do: watch an ad.
I don't think ads are inherently a bad thing. They're a perfectly reasonable way for free-to-play players to support a game, and I've played plenty of mobile titles that use them well. Octopath Traveler: Champions of the Continent, for example, lets me watch a couple of short ads each day for some extra rewards. They're completely optional. If I ignore them, I never feel like I'm falling behind.
That’s not the case here.
The first few ads didn’t really bother me. "Sure," I thought. "I’ll watch another one so I can unlock 2x battle speed." Then another one asked so I could get another dungeon attempt. Then another to speed up training. Then another to get extra idle rewards. There’s a limit for each act that replenishes every day.
That means watching ads will become part of your daily routine, especially since they’re attached to so many little conveniences that saying no almost means choosing to make the game harder for yourself. To make matters worse, there were times when the game didn't even recognize that I'd watched one, leaving me to watch another for the same reward.
Unfortunately, most of the game’s conveniences are locked behind a paywall. For instance, if you want to forgo ads permanently, you’d have to pay $9. There’s also a separate "Pass" for daily Farm supplies, 2x Battle Speed for a month, and so much more. They’re all sold separately and will burn a hole in your pocket if you buy them all.
It’s Not F2P Friendly At All
But the monetization doesn’t stop there. Most of the game’s summon banners are fairly reasonable. There are five in total, and three of these use tickets you earn just by playing. I never really had an issue with those three, as the game treats them as part of the grind.
It’s the remaining two banners that left a sour taste in my mouth. These are where you recruit the featured Buddy and Special (SP) Support Digimon. Although the game lets you perform a ten-pull each day using DigiEmeralds earned through doing dailies, the currency it really wants you to use is DigiDiamonds, which can only be obtained with real money.
The largest bundle costs around $65 and gives you 11,300 DigiDiamonds. That might sound like a lot until you realize a single ten-pull costs 3,000 DigiDiamonds. In other words, the game’s most expensive bundle doesn’t even buy four ten-pulls.
Featured Buddies and Support Digimon also have a 0.5% pull rate, and if you want to guarantee one, you’ll need to make 200 pulls on that specific banner. Worse still, those pity counts don’t carry over once the banner ends.
I will say this in Digimon UP's favor. I never spent a single dime, and I still felt like I could eventually get the featured Buddy and SP just by playing every day. The game hands out enough DigiEmeralds to make that possible. You just have to be patient because you're limited to one free ten-pull a day.
However, that’s at most 20 days of you waiting, actively playing, and maximizing your rewards daily before you can get that guarantee. Based on what's presented to players, it's difficult not to come away feeling that the game is asking for an awful lot before it's willing to give much back.
You feel like the game wants to milk you dry, even in the battle passes, since there are four! There’s one tied to the Hologram Device, another for Skill Cards, another for the standard Support banner, and a premium pass that includes "Deluxe Tickets" for you to roll within the featured banners alongside a healthy pile of resources.
Ironically, the last one, which costs only $6, might actually be the best value out of everything the game sells. The problem is that the entire system feels unnecessarily fragmented. Why are there four? You’re presented with several overlapping passes that all ask for separate purchases.
Free-to-play players don't fare particularly well either, as some of these passes offer little to nothing unless you're willing to pay.
Is Digimon UP Worth It?
No, It’s a Bad Idle RPG, and It’s Not a Digimon Game
I really, really wanted to like Digimon UP. More than that, I wanted it to be the game that finally gave Digimon a home on mobile, especially with Digimon Alysion waiting in the wings. It’s an exhausting game to play, yes, but I don't think the people behind it lacked passion. You can see that in the sprites and the roster. I just wish that same care had gone into building a game that actually felt like Digimon instead of another idle RPG wearing the franchise as its skin.
I envy those who are having a great time with Digimon UP because I really wanted to be one of them. If you’re having fun with it, more power to you.
Unfortunately, I just can’t recommend it over so many other games, even within the mobile space. If you’re simply looking for a good idle RPG, there are plenty that feel more polished. If you’re looking for a good Digimon game, there are plenty that understand that franchise better. Digimon UP just isn’t either of those.
I do hope that changes and that I bite my words in the coming months. For now, though, I'm walking away more disappointed than anything else.
Digimon UP FAQ
How to Access Apocalymon Wall in Digimon UP?
Digimon UP’s Apocalymon Wall dungeon, as of this writing, is not working as intended. A potential workaround is to tap the "Rankings" button before pressing "Attempt," scroll all the way to the bottom for 20 or so seconds, then return and press "Attempt."
For a more in-depth explanation, check out our article below!
Digimon UP Wiki
| Wiki Contents | |
|---|---|
 Partner Digimon |
 Beginner's Guide |
 Support Digimon |
 Skill Cards |
 Banners |
 News |
 Review |
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