Not every community starts out the gate swinging with passionate modders capable of tailoring the game for better competitive play. As you'd expect then, there was an era of Digimon Rumble Arena competition where we played on the completely unmodified game, for better and for worse: The Items Era. The biggest difference between then and now is that we could not disable items or remove stage hazards. Thus, knowing what each item does and how you can best use it to your advantage was crucial information.
Taking an item is simple enough: just walk through it. But not all items are good for us, so how do we avoid picking it up? Also simple: you can't pick up items while doing any attack or special; you'll push them instead. Obviously, this lets us pick up the items we want while leaving behind the ones we don't, but you can also sometimes push undesirable items into your opponent. It rarely works, but between fighting you, dodging hazards, keeping track of items as they spawn in and out, and navigating the stage's platforms, juggling everything can overload your opponent's mental stack and they'll fall right into it! ...or maybe they just had no way to avoid everything and had to get hit by something, and they took you up on your generous deal rather than whatever lovely offer the stage had.
Also important to know, is that you can't take or push items while invincible (similarly to how you can walk through your opponent while invincible), so you can't be forced to pick up items after being knocked down. You can, however, be thrown or launched into an item!
Unlike Super Smash Brothers, items can only spawn in predetermined locations on each stage. It's also known that certain locations can only spawn certain types of items, such as only being able to spawn Evil Ring, Power Down, or Queen's Device cards but not any others, or only being able to spawn Max Digivolve face down, and seemingly every map has a spot that can only spawn bombs and food. The full details of what can or can't spawn in every locations and their associated odds isn't known, but you can ask OG players from the items era about some of their observations and everyone will be able to offer up something. Reapermon's Den is the only stage to not have card spawn locations, and thus no items.
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Aside from stages having set item locations with fixed items odds, the only randomness that items have is what item spawns where. When items spawn is actually on a timer of [Placeholder to research exact interval, but it's probably about 5 seconds], indicated by the "BBBRRRRMMMhttps://digimonrumblearena.neocities.org/systemmechanics/charFormatsM" sound effect. Further, there is a limit of 3 items that may be on stage at once (not including any item you may be "holding").
Let's start with the one everyone always asks about. This card forces you to digivolve. Ah, but if it was just that simple, you would've known by now, wouldn't you? Well, it only forces you to digivolve once you meet both of the following conditions:
In other words, only when you could Digivolve normally. That's it, really? Yup! You never noticed because every time you have a full Digi meter, you probably popped it immediately. Honestly, I think this card only exists to make sure players who don't know they can Digivolve are eventually forced to, so they try to figure out how to do it themselves once they see it, similar to the 512 mechanic in the original version of Street Fighter 2.
The worst item by far: Evil Ring and Evil Spiral. They both do the same thing, but Evil Spiral lasts for way longer than Evil Ring (or at least it feels like it!). This is certainly a card you should avoid (or try to push into your opponent), but eventually you're gonna be forced to pick it up. When you do, you'll become unable to block (by far the most evil part about the card), and you'll start making left and right inputs at random. Everyone deals with this differently, but I got 2 tips for dealing with this. Firstly, if you hold up, you cannot dash. This is simply true normally, but it helps prevent being put into a laggy state. The other tip, is to just try and jump. You can't block anyways, so the only thing you have to lose is your ground normals (and specials, for the specials that can't be used in the air), and using forward air tends to overpower the random air drifting, at least a little. Usually tho, picking up this item just means that you're screwed, and you're better off flying off stage or getting hit by hazards than taking this card. Avoid at most costs.
By far the most interesting and fun item. Once you pick the card up, just press Circle to throw! It auto aims at the opponent as long as they are in front of you. Shooting it when your opponent is almost right above or below you is possible but tricky, because if they aren't at in front of you enough, the game will just shoot it straight forward and whiff. Despite it's simplicity, it's easily the item with the most depth and strategy. But first, I should probably explain the "Elemental Triangle".
Fire beats Nature, Nature beats Water, and Water beats Fire. Not everything in the game has a typing however! Most characters have an elemental typing, but that only affects what elements they are weak or resistant to. Tornado Penis.
