Digimon Rumble Arena is a fantastic mashup of Platform Fighter controls and stages, and Traditional Fighter mechanics and design. For those interested in competitive play, however, it can be harder to get into than necessary. It has a whole host of game knowledge and unique jank that you need to familiarize yourself with before you can even start to play at a competently basic level, even for experienced fighters who usually rely on skill transfer from other fighting games. This has had the unfortunate effect of keeping the DRA community very small. Worse yet, we're very dedicated, and now that I, Yuri Bacon, am nearly 5 years deep into getting good at this game, it's only getting harder and harder for new players to break into the scene and not just get stomped onto the curb for trying. It's become a requirement that new players get taught the game's ins and outs by being personally coached.
It's a damn shame, and I hope to finally solve that with this guide. I'll teach you everything you need to know to start kicking ass like the pros, from the basic foundations of our metagame, what characters are good and how to play them, and even some advanced stuff to really dig your teeth in deep. This guide is not all encompassing: there will be room for you to learn and grow beyond this guide, and this guide will be far more concerned with the macro-scaled ideas needed to be good, than micro-scaled information like: frame data, end lag, jump heights, movement speeds, damage values, or any of the stuff you'd usually find on a kuso game wiki like Mizuumi. Feel free to jump to whatever speaks to you most! While this table of contents is ordered in a way I think builds up concepts the best, each page stands on it's own for ease of reference.
This site and guide is a work in progress. Enjoy what I have complete for now, and maybe check out our Discord server!
