Digimon Story Time Stranger Review

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I’ll be honest. I have not played a single Digimon or even Pokemon game before, so I know little about these competing franchises. All I know is that they are usually turn-based RPGs with several creature types to place in your party. Digimon Story: Time Stranger looked like a really good turn-based RPG from the trailers that I saw of it, so I decided to give it a try. I’m sure glad that I did! This is a really solid RPG with a pretty good story and overall gameplay to match! The game feels like a mix of Shin Megami Tensei (SMT) and Monster Hunter Stories.

From the start, you choose a male of female agent, that serves as a “you” character. The agent is a member of ADAMAS, a company that investigates digital anomalies in Tokyo. While out on an operation, you witness the “Shinjuku Inferno”, a catastrophic war between Digimon. As a result of this event, you are propelled eight years into the past where you must try to uncover the cause of the disaster and prevent it from happening. Knowing nothing about Digimon, I was expecting the story to be extremely confusing, but it actually wasn’t at all. The story is very standalone. You do not have to know a thing about Digimon or its games to enjoy the story. The game explains everything very well and doesn’t expect you to have any prior knowledge of Digimon.

The character dialogue is fully voiced in English for the most part. There are some sections (such as side missions) where you’ll have to read the text. There is plenty of dialogue and cutscenes to go through but not an overwhelming amount. At times, the game does sink a bit too deeply into dialogue that doesn’t have much to do with the story, but the main plot is overall very good and kept me involved. I was expecting to be speeding through dialogue in this game, but it kept me amused enough to listen/read it all.

Your agent is basically a trainer. The agent mainly gives commands for the Digimon in your party and only attacks when using an Agent Skill. Your party is composed of three Digimon and you have a reserve of three extra Digimon, that you can call in and out of battle, so you basically have a party of six. You can nearly recruit any enemy that you face. As you face off against, Digimon, you build a certain amount of data percentage with each one that allows you to make a digital copy of them and place them in your party. Each Digimon has their own unique skill and attack. You can equip each of them with extra skills to give them more attacks and you can also equip them with items to increase their attributes.

As your Digimon level up, they will get stronger and you can also evolve them. Digimon that are not in your active party will gain levels, so you don’t have to worry about the Digimon on the sideline getting weaker. Once your Digimon are high enough in level and have passed certain stat requirements, you can evolve them into another form. If you haven’t run across a certain form, the evolution choice will be blacked out until you evolve at least one Digimon into that form, so you never do truly know what you’ll get through evolution unless you’ve run into the Digimon or evolved into them before. You can also devolve Digimon in order to experiment with other evolutions. Thankfully, you can create more than one Digimon type and have more than one type in your list of Digimon at once so that you can experiment with evolutions of one type. You can also power-up your current Digimon by sacrificing another Digimon to boost the other Digimon’s stats.

Battles carry out much like your standard turn-based RPG. As the agent, you get to choose how each Digimon attacks during a battle. Items can be used on your Digimon without sacrificing a turn once per Digimon turn. Once Digimon in your main party are defeated, they can be replaced with Digimon from your reserve party. Digimon can also be switched in and out from your reserve party during battle as well. It’s important to keep both your main party and reserve party full ready for battle. With each Digimon attack, you’ll build up points to where the agent can launch their own super attack, such as an attack that hits all enemies, a stat boosting power-up for all Digimon in your main party, etc.

The battles in the game seem quite easy from the start, but man, they can get really tough. Even some normal enemies can put up a pretty good fight. Even with a main party and reserve party, there were some battles that got the best of me. The game seems to get a bit easier as you keep progressing thanks to unlocking extra skills and actions. There are also guest party members that can help out a lot. The game has a good bit of boss battles that you’ll eventually come to. These baddies will require a lot from your party so I often had to result to my reserve party as my main party got taken out.

While not in battle, you’ll be exploring areas out in the field. There are tons of item pickups to find and chests to open. The game has a good bit of side missions to do as well. You’ll explore areas such as underground areas and building wreckage while outside the cities. The “dungeon” type of areas has a lot of enemies in the field. The enemies can’t really be sneaked by easily. One thing I really like about the game is the option for a preemptive strike that you get whenever you run across an enemy. You can press the R2 button to perform a preemptive strike against an enemy once spotted and that will instantly damage the enemy as you go into the usual turn-based fight. It is possible to instantly defeat single enemies without even the need to transition – those are the really good times!

The only real flaw that I found with Time Stranger is that some of the background textures look too simple at times. There is rock debris in the beginning areas that looks so very low resolution quite often. Other areas later in the game look fine though. Despite these little worries, the graphics engine is overall quite good. The Digimon look fantastic. All of them are so lively animated and have so much charm and expression all over them. The music and voice overs are really good too. The game has multiple difficulties. I played on the default normal difficulty and it was challenging at times. There is an easier “Story” difficulty and another harder difficulty. The game allows you to stand still (for a few seconds) to recharge your party’s HP and MP while out in the field. This does make the game easier than your standard RPG while battling normal enemies, but even some normal enemies are hard enough to get the best of you during a single battle.

Given my limited knowledge of Digimon, I was not expecting to enjoy Digimon Story: Time Stranger all that much but it really surprised me. The game has a good story and it’s just overall a good turn-based RPG. The game is quite long and it has a lot Digimon to filter through if you’re going for adding them all to your list. If you like RPGs such as SMT, be sure to give this game a try. Even if you don’t know anything about Digimon, you can easily pick this game up and enjoy it like I did.

The Good:
+ Very good turn-based RPG
+ Tons of Digimon to recruit into your party
+ Overall good story

The Bad:
- Some environments don’t look so good early on
- Characters can get too deeply involved in meaningless conversations at times