Digimon Story: Time Stranger review – It’s about time

Digimon games have always been a little bit rough around the edges — they’re made on shoestring budgets and it shows. The Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth duology showed the worst of it, with shockingly poor localization that often bordered on unintelligible. Digimon Story: Time Stranger, Cyber Sleuth’s follow-up, is by far the most polished game in the franchise to date, but it’s not long before the cracks start to show. 

Time Stranger’s opening is incredibly well-directed, with a flashy and bombastic introduction to our main character. You’re stepping into the shoes of an agent of ADAMAS, a shadowy organization that explores unexplained and paranormal phenomena. When weird stuff starts happening over the skies of Shinjuku, you’re tasked with investigating it. Digimon start showing up in the world, and everything goes terribly awry, effectively destroying the world and sending the agent eight years back in time. 

In the past, your mission is clear: try to find a way to prevent the tragedy in the future without messing anything up too badly. That requires a journey to the Digital World, and that’s where Time Stranger takes a big step up from its predecessors. Cyber Sleuth and its interquel Hacker’s Memory took brief steps into the Digital World, but mostly focused on traversing digital networks, which were bland, repetitive dungeons that were some of the worst parts of the game. 

In Time Stranger, we’re taking a trip to the full fat Digital World, specifically the server of Iliad, which is an alternate Digital World to the one that appears in the anime and in prior games. It’s filled with a variety of lovely environments, from lush forests to undersea caverns, hot, steamy volcano forges, and more. 

These environments are segmented into sections, rather than big open areas, which feels a little bit limiting at times, and they’re also frustrating to get around. Each area has a traversal gimmick that’s used to get around; a friendly Submarimon lets you push through scripted underwater currents in the Abyss Area, while the Gear Forest has you enlisting the help of a Palmon that whips you through the trees using its vine arms. 

These gimmicks are often accompanied by a short but annoying animation, and it gets worse as the game goes on. One late game area in particular has you giving specific answers to a Digimon to jump to the next platform, with one answer taking you to the next platform and the other taking you back to the very start of the area. There’s no way of knowing which answer will get you to where you need to go, and each time you want to move between the area you need to initiate a conversation, pick an answer, and sit through a 5-10 second animation as you’re transported. It’s a little bit annoying the first time, but it adds up over time, and by the end of the area I wanted to drop the game and never pick it up again. 

The back half of the game is also filled with backtracking through familiar areas. There are a few changes to each, which helps hide the repetition somewhat, but it’s hard not to feel frustrated. I do think there’s a lot of worth in revisiting these areas from a story perspective, which is handled quite well on revisits, but some streamlining of the process would have made it significantly more enjoyable. 

The story, thankfully, fares much better. It’s a fantastic tale that focuses on surprisingly thoughtful themes, including moving forward after a loss, finding purpose in the world, and what different communities sharing a space owe to each other. It can get a little bit cheesy and juvenile at times, often veering into Saturday morning cartoon territory, but it strikes a fine balance between cheesiness and earnest storytelling, with some fun little connections to past Digimon properties thrown in for good measure. 

Honestly, I was feeling very down on the game as a whole, thanks in part to the backtracking in the back half, until the story reached its climax. From then on until the game’s finale it landed hit after hit, only rarely misstepping by flooding me with admittedly optional side quests just before the game reached its conclusion. There’s a phenomenal moment at the game’s climax that, while foreshadowed quite heavily prior, is very well done, recontextualizing the game as a whole and retroactively making the whole thing sit much better with me.

I also loved the turn-based combat, which has seen small but meaningful refinements since Cyber Sleuth, where it was already quite well-developed. It’s been streamlined a bit, decoupling elemental typing from Digimon and tying it directly to moves, which makes a huge difference in understanding the flow of battle. Instead of each Digimon having a type like Fire or Water, in addition to an attribute like Data or Virus, Digimon now solely have an attribute and a table of resistances and weaknesses against elemental moves. 

That change to combat means you have to experiment more with different Digimon to create a team that’s ready for any situation, and getting and evolving Digimon is also much more streamlined than in the past. You no longer have to visit specific save points to evolve a Digimon — instead, you can do it wherever you please. The requirements for some Digimon are still a little bit too high, requiring a lot of evolving and devolving to slowly build up to the strength required, but it’s easier than ever to do so, since all Digimon in your box now gain experience, not just the ones in combat or on the Digifarm. Yes, the Digifarm does return, too, but it’s not really necessary to engage with it if you don’t want to. 

My major frustration with evolving Digimon is that some evolutions require specific personality types – of which there are over a dozen – and changing personality types is both random and time consuming. It can be sped up a bit with the Digifarm, but it’s never an easy task, and it means I sometimes had to give up evolving into a specific Digimon I wanted and settle for something else instead. I did, at least, get to see a wide variety of the game’s over 400 Digimon because of this, so there was a small silver lining. 

The major thing holding back Time Stranger is when those limitations in budget start to show through. Most of the game’s dialogue is voice acted, which is fantastic to see, and it has some wonderful cutscenes, but it’s also packed with fades to black that imply something is happening rather than showing them on-screen. Some in-engine cutscenes and animations are a little bit janky, too, and it leaves those moments feeling a little bit cheap. I’m still impressed with how much Media.Vision has been able to pull off with what’s sure to be a very stifling budget, but a slight reduction in scope would have been beneficial to leave more room for polish and refinement. 

This lack of polish is most evident in some of the minigames in Time Stranger, which take place in separate areas called the Outer Dungeons. These are scattered throughout the worlds, tucked away in nooks and crannies for players to explore, and entering them gives you a challenge of some kind. Some of these are fairly straightforward, like defeating a powerful enemy or avoiding enemies in the overworld, but some are outright awful, and a clear sign of unchecked scope creep. One, in particular, is a racing minigame that is dreadful to control and almost impossible to actually clear — it’s borderline unplayable in its current state, and while it is optional, the game would have been better had it been removed altogether. 

As it stands, Digimon Story: Time Stranger is a massive step up from Digimon Story games before it, improving on just about every aspect. Huge amounts of work have gone into streamlining frustrations seen in prior entries, and it mostly delivers in its presentation, combat, and storytelling, but it falls short of feeling like the triple-A game it’s trying so hard to be. It’s a step forward for the series nonetheless, and likely the best Digimon game to date, which will hopefully lead to better, more polished, and better-funded games in the future.