Digimon Story: Time Stranger

• Genre: RPG
• Spoiler Free Review: Story-wise yes, content wise no.
• Time Played: 100 Hours
• Too Short/Long: It's not that I think it was too long, but the pacing felt a bit rough. It has you trek entirely through some areas, then trek entirely through them again later. Plus you unlock most side quests at the end of the game, which should you do, will have you trek through each of these areas again. They could have broke it up a bit by having some more sidequests available throughout gameplay and it would have been more fun to go through these areas again if they were identical upon revisit aside from enemies.
• Soundtrack: Soundtrack isn't all that great in my opinion. There are a couple fun tracks, but most of it almost sounds like stock loops and it makes me sleepy listening to it.
• Why I played: I loved Cyber Sleuth, and my biggest complain with Hacker's Memory - at least up to where I played, was it was just more Cyber Sleuth. I had hoped Time Stranger was going to be an entirely new, refreshing experience.
• Did I cry: Maybe a little on a few occasions.
• Jank: Not entirely much jank outside of invisible walls - though they are intentional invisible walls, they still feel out of place when you're not looking at the map. I'd say the jank lies more in some of the actual design decisions and such. Like not be able to look at your digivolution possibilities/digivolve while they're in a farm.
• Difficulty: At first I thought the game was going to have some challenge, earlier battles of the game required me to restructure my party, adjust my movesets, equipment, etc. At some point, it just didn't matter and I used the same digimon/moves the rest of the game. It could be my fault for trying to create the ultimate life form/doing this games version of grinding a little too much.
• Recommend to others: I think I would to people who like Digimon, sure, but I'm more likely to recommend Cyber Sleuth. It's been some time but my memories of it are still fonder. There are places where Time Stranger stands above it in, but it's not enough to take it's place.

Digimon: Time Stranger was alright. I like Digimon a lot and it satisfied an itch for a bit, I'm sure, but it didn't blow me away. I see a lot of posts in either Digimon-centric communities, or anti-Pokemon centric communities, how Digimon: Time Stranger is proof that Digimon is finally beating Pokemon or something.

This is... just not possible. I love Digimon, but Pokemon, as a brand is just something you can't compete with. Pokemon ZA may have it's issues, but it's still Pokemon, and the people I know who played that vs Time Stranger is 10-1. Even if somehow Time Stranger managed to sell better, it didn't "Win". In the time since Cybersleuth since I mentioned it and Pokemon also released it's mainline Sun and Moon games that year, Digimon has released a couple seasons of new anime, also a couple movies/ova type things, and a new card game. 4 "real games", and a whole bunch of service games, most of which are service terminated at this point, 3 remain, though one is China only and the other South Korea only. Overall, 11 games. Which isn't too bad.

Pokemon by comparison has released over 25 games in that same time. Only 1 service game has retired and a far larger percent are "real games" 16 in fact, with 8 of them being mainline games. Pokemon has never stopped airing anime, and their card game has caused retail stores to have to/attempt to enforce regulations on card purchases in the past few years due to it's popularity. It's just not a comparison, these two "mon" franchises aren't even on the same playing field. But I doubt anything will ever "beat" Pokemon at this point. It's too established, too ubiquitous. It's like Star Wars, Lords of the Rings, Harry Potter. It's place in pop culture set.

Anyway back to the game at hand. I liked it, but it was just missing that special something. As I mentioned there were areas where it may be better than Cyber Sleuth. There were more digimon, not quite, but nearly double. My biggest problem with that is it just built on the ones that and Hacker's Memory established. There are over 1500 digimon and they just keep using the same ones over and over. Granted a +100 here, and a +100 there, but if you're building the game from the ground up, keep some favorites but use an entirely different chunk! There are so many cool Digimon. My end game team ended up mostly the same as the ones I had in Cyber Sleuth. Not because I was so hung up on using my favorites, but because there were only so few options from the highest evolutionary paths. The +100 they added were mostly in the middling evolutions.

They could have used an entirely different chunk. They also didn't use that many new Digimon. Only like a couple special appearances of anything within the last 8 or so years. There are just so many good digimon and all of those 4 "real" games since Cyber Sleuth have built off that same set. Between 5 games, there are less than 1/3rd of digimon presented.

Okay Digimon aside. I pretty much made my main complaints in pacing and jank. While it was nice that there were different biomes in this game, it did kinda fall under "generic jrpg world" biome categories in some aspects. There was the Sewers, the Forest Area, the Water Area, the Fire/Ice Area was kinda combined, as far as how you got there, but then they were separate. Then there is the Light Area, and the Dark Area, too. I'm not saying it's wholly unoriginal, but it's largely uninspired. You know what it didn't have at all? A Digital Area. Well, not a real one. The digital was reserved for some extra bonus stuff and mini games. I guess I shouldn't complain since that's almost all of Cyber Sleuth/Hacker's Memory, but even so, it would have been nice to see more digital elements.

The farm, the primary way of raising stats where they need to be to evolve your digimon was a pain in the ass since you couldn't evolve digimon in the farm and you couldn't even see what they needed while there. So you have to remember exactly what they need before you put them in, or, like I eventually did, write the stats they need on paper/notes on phone each time before you drop them off. It simply should not have been like that. You should be able to evolve them from the farm. Shoot, that's the ONLY place you can't evolve them. You can literally evolve them any other time. Which was probably trying to be a QOL upgrade when compared to Cybersleuth/Hacker's memory, where you could only evolve them in the place where you accessed the farm, but it was just so clunky. It was also annoying because these is a needlessly long transition going to/from the farm. I mean it's just a couple dialogs, a selection, and a pan in and such. But when you have to do this over and over and over, it's a bit more annoying then just selecting a menu option and really stuck with me as one of the points that annoyed me about the game.

I spent a lot of time in the farm though. Maybe not everyone will. Maybe not everyone will have perfect Digimon like me and maybe that will prevent the combat from devolving to just always hitting enemies with the highest weakness attack you can and winning in a couple rounds. Usually single rounds for standard encounters and maybe a few for bosses. It's a shame because it seemed like combat was going to be far more dynamic, going in, but once your capable of a lot and have all the options at your fingertips, turns out the best thing to do is the highest damage all the time, you sort of auto-heal after every combat, so you don't even need to be too tanky or heal much at all between battles. I literally just had two of each main type of Digimon(Vaccine/Data/Virus) with as varied elemental attacks as possible on them so I could hit those big weaknesses as often as possible and that got me through with little trouble.

That is until the very last boss battle, which took quite awhile. I'm not sure if there was a specific percentage I had to hit each time and maybe I was in luck and doing so much I was hitting that threshold each turn? But the way the final boss battle played out felt entirely scripted. There are obviously scripted events in it, but it almost felt like nothing I did mattered. They were trying to have an epic moment and do some cinematic things, but it just felt like I, the player, had nothing to do with it.

As far as the story overall though, there were some neat aspects, some neat surprising, some predictable surprises, etc. They traded having more human characters(that matter to the story) for having a lot of digimon characters that matter to the story, but each only a little bit. So there weren't really too many character I felt I could really latch on to, and for me, characters are one of the most important elements of an RPG, often more so than the overarching story. Not to say other 'mon games do much better than this, but... maybe some Megaten games would be a good example of games that do... but Digimon itself did better with it's last few entries, even if Time Stranger might have a better overall story.

So overall, it has it's ups and downs, but I liked it, and I'm sure anyone who just wants a Digimon fix it's great, but there was just too many things that left me unsatisfied for me to dethrone Cybersleuth as my favorite Digimon game.