What's a "Moral Compass Cricket Thingy"?

[Moonface]

That game existed; it's called Digimon World 1. Granted, when the Digimon died, you also got sent back to the area, and Digimon would eventually die from age, but that's the core loop of the game: explore the world, fight a boss, recruit villagers, figure out the mystery of the world. Alternatively, if you want to relive Digimon Adventure, there's a PSP game that's literally just that. Sure, it was Japan-only, but Fan Translations do exist.

Oh, so in that case were you thinking of something different to what I thought in regards to Digimon using the core gameplay loop of Pokémon?

Personally, given how overdone "Open-world" is nowadays, I wouldn't want to see an open-world Digimon game. I've had enough of open-world. I've bitched about this before, but ooen-world feels more like a reaction to the public consensus revolting against "linear" games, and I still blame Spoony and Yahtzee for that popular opinion. Now it's used to suck out "replay value" out of people, because engagement is the only metric that matters anymore. It's bullshit.

True, I was just thinking of an open world Digimon game because of how at least in Adventure 01 everyone is sort of just wandering about or exploring the islands/continents in the show rather loosely as opposed to travelling a particular set route (at least my mind remembers it that way).
I feel the opinion on open-world games is slowly leaning back towards scaling things down though. Assassin's Creed seems to be a series in particular where people are getting sick of how big those games are and how a lot of the stuff in them is just there for the sake of it, and if the players don't get fatigue from open world first I won't be surprised if the industry fatigues first instead just from the ballooning costs of those games compared to more focused affairs.