Digimon is one of those rare 90s phenomena that keeps coming back even though it’s not as widely gabbed about as something like Pokémon, yet it’s been going strong in the gaming world and received some snazzy modern anime stories too. Starting with Cyber Sleuth, a Persona-like adventure JRPG, Digimon has found its calling. Now releasing as the third game of this style, Digimon Story: Time Stranger promises more of the same solid JRPG and monster collecting madness as its predecessors. Can it provide a compelling world to back the mechanics up?
Starting off with a bang, players are quickly introduced to the main protagonist who can be male or female, their handler, and a mysterious girl who knows them but they do not know her. Digimon are attacking the city, culminating in a huge explosion that knocks the protagonist back in time as their timeline is destroyed. It’s an insane way to start a story, especially one with time travel.
As the story progresses players will get to enjoy a time-skipping, mind-bending adventure in both the human and digital worlds as they try to prevent the opening conflict from happening again. It is compelling and full of some cheesy but well-written dialogue breaching pretty dark themes. It is genuinely surprising how much actual death is in this story. The final twist was a conclusion easily reached but excellently presented, with some really interesting moments leading to it. It felt like being trapped in a weird dream!
Gameplay is a hard topic to get started on. Digimon Story: Time Stranger has a lot of mechanics but they exist in bubbles. It’s not that fun to get started with, but there are some helpful tools to get stuck in. Battles are the main minute-to-minute attraction; however, their overbearing simplicity at the beginning is unfortunate as the static cameras and basic holding animations don’t offer any life. Imagine if Final Fantasy X had no swinging camera and vibrant character animation and you basically land on Digimon. It just needed a bit more to happen visually to entertain at the lower difficulty areas.
Once the game progresses and players have more strategic options, though, things ramp up in enjoyableness because Time Stranger gets really difficult with battles that go on for some time. It incentivises using the other systems to supplement the battles, unlocking more skills, powers and maxing stats, then making use of Digimon types to try and manoeuvre around the giant health pools. Some fights might even technically be bullet spongy to a frustrating degree, but as ever with these games, the correct planning will get players far.
Easily the most fun to be had is in collecting, evolving and devolving monsters in search of the maximum power. There are over 400 monsters to collect, resulting in a lot of chasing and grinding to see them all. However, the hours spent dealing with digivolving are some of the most satisfying. The way the system is so flexible, how it controls consumables, and the ability to go back and forth from forms hits a really niche catharsis. There isn’t a away to adequately explain it in a succinct way, but it again has that strategic element.
Exploration is also pretty entertaining, with a lot of dialogue and world building to interact with outside of dungeons. It’s a little bit less in depth than something Atlas might produce, but it’s surprisingly interesting and reactive. Each area also looks and feels unique; not too many places feature bland visuals, and the ones that do are usually on the shorter side. Some of the unique digital world environments have very cool aesthetics, including things like mixed culture buildings and surprisingly dense architecture.
Characters also look great, with a decent amount of detail and a sweet art style. This is where some Digimon fans might want to look away, though… The Digimon, despite aligned colour schemes and rendering, are just not visually appealing or congruous enough for this reviewer. It’s easy to favour ones that look “cool”, but they just don’t really fit into the environments in the human or digital worlds well enough. It’s distracting, and unfortunately that’s definitely a problem.
Overall the atmosphere is enjoyable. The visuals, including the slick user interface, and music combine to make something that feels good moment to moment. In fact, the music here can be exceptional. Some of the cutscenes and bosses have excellent soundtracks. It still feels a bit odd that so many Digimon have speaking roles and human-like appearances, and although the voice work in English is decent, in Japanese it feels more natural.
Digimon Story: Time Stranger has some length to it as well, especially for players who want to get to that illusive 100% Digimon digivolved. It’s at least a 30-hour adventure if chasing the mainline, assuming players fight enough to level up to kill bosses in a single go. The difficulty is dissuading at times, but the fun schlocky story with some good twists will keep most players invested.
