Lots of open world monster-raising fun!
It's been over a year and a half since I finished this game, but it still sticks in my mind as one of my favorite games that I played last year. I was initially put off by the battle system, and it's admittedly not great, but once you get used to it, raising your monsters and exploring the world is a load of fun.
From the gameplay I've seen of the original Digimon World game, this one did seem pretty similar. However, I've not played that one myself, so I was reminded more of Monster Rancher. Like the Monster Rancher series, your monsters can train their stats through training machines, but can die after enough time passes, so efficient training is important. As you progress in the game, you can increase their lifespans, and each monster has the potential to start with better stats than the previous one started with, so there's a strong sense of progress as you go through monsters. Once you reach endgame, it's possible to extend your monster's lifespan faster than it depletes, meaning they can live indefinitely.
The world is quite big and opens up more and more as you progress. There are fast travel points, making it easy to get back to whichever location you want quickly. Various Digimon across the world will show up throughout the game with requests for you to fulfill. Upon completing their quests, they usually (maybe always? I don't quite remember) come back to your town and offer some sort of new service or improvement of an existing one, such as the fast travel station that becomes available early in the game.
My recommendation is to get the European version of the game instead of the North American version since you can get the NA preorder DLC for free.
