I’ve been watching and playing Digimon since I was a kid, and no other franchise has managed to grab me like it has. In 2007, I played the second game in the Digimon Story series, Dawn and Dusk. I spent over a thousand hours on Dawn, collecting every Digimon and completing all available tasks. The series has come a long way since the Nintendo DS games. I loved Digimon Story Cyber Sleuth and its sequel, Hacker’s Memory, so I was really excited to hear they were working on another Story game, based on the Olympos XII. Many years after Hacker’s Memory, Digimon Story Time Stranger has finally arrived, and it might not only be the best Digimon game ever but also one of the best monster-taming games to date.
Welcome to Digital World: Iliad
Digimon, which is short for Digital Monsters, is a media franchise created in 1997 to be the masculine counterpart to Tamagotchi. This series started as virtual pets and evolved into an anime and numerous games, with the first game in the Digimon Story series releasing in 2006, titled Digimon World DS in the West, and the mechanics of Digimon Story have evolved much since the first entry. The Digimon franchise operates on a multiverse system, allowing the anime and games to tell wholly unique stories. This freedom allows for infinite originality, which Time Stranger capitalizes on.
Starting in a world completely unfamiliar with Digimon, you play as ADAMAS agent Yuki, investigating the anomalous phenomena known as phase electron lifeforms, or as we know them, Digimon. A cataclysmic event known as the Shinjuku Inferno sends you back in time, where you meet Inori Misono and her partner, Aegiomon. Together, you go on an adventure through Tokyo and the Digital World: Iliad, in an attempt to stop the end of the world.
Cyber Sleuth and Hacker’s Memory were intense and emotional games, and Time Stranger takes it to a whole new level. For the first time in the Digimon Story series, an English voiceover is present. Cyber Sleuth and Hacker’s Memory were incredible games that I constantly adore and mention to my peers, but some of them find them inaccessible due to them only having Japanese voiceover. Luckily, the English voiceover for Time Stranger is remarkable and has multiple notable performances, and I even found myself tearing up a few times throughout the story. As a current-generation game, Time Stranger makes a significant leap from its PlayStation Vita predecessor. Digimon Story now directly competes with Persona and Shin Megami Tensei, and Time Stranger stands as a compelling and impressive title in its own right, especially with its visuals.
In Digital World: Iliad, players can explore various locales, each offering breathtaking sights and captivating sounds. A floating town with colorful buildings and gears, a giant factory with a huge pit in the center, a beach with beautiful blue waters and reefs, a village high in the trees, and more. These maps are teeming with Digimon, both friendly and hostile, each possessing distinct personalities and animations. Time Stranger boasts an impressive record of over 450 Digimon, the most for a Digimon Story entry. Each Digimon has its own voice-acted battle lines for its unique skills, accompanied by special battle cutscenes. Even in the field, they have their own idle animations and walk cycles. All of this comes together to make an impressively detailed game, one that represents the pinnacle of what monster-taming games can be.
The plot itself is dark and captivating. Time Stranger takes itself incredibly seriously and leans into its maturity more than any other entry in the franchise. Themes of loss, grief, and self-destruction combine with an incredible English voice cast to make one of the most memorable Digimon experiences yet. In this emotional adventure filled with trials and tribulations, you need a place of reprieve, and the In-Between Theater is just that.
Mirei Mikagura has returned, and I’m delighted to see her back in this installment. In Cyber Sleuth, she managed the DigiLab, and in Time Stranger, she resides in the In-Between Theater. It’s a place to purchase items, revisit the Outer Dungeons that you’ve encountered throughout your journey, manage your Digifarm, and more. You will normally see these pop up on your adventure in the form of glowing white tickets, which, when clicked, transform into a door. Clicking on or walking into the theater will heal your party and restore their SP, and these doors often appear before a difficult battle.
The Digifarm is your Digimon daycare. It returns as an editable globe that you can place your Digimon onto, with treadmills and various other training options to power them up while you’re away. You can enhance your Digimon’s stats and change their personalities here. They’ll also gain the same experience that your boxed Digimon do.
The side quests are average. They give you a bit of unvoiced dialogue, sometimes tell you to go somewhere and gather items, or fight a boss, and none of them are really all that interesting. This is not unusual compared to other RPGs, but this game doesn’t make a huge effort to make the side quests exciting. That’s okay, though, because for what the game lacks in its side quests, it makes up for with its optional content.
The first thing I have to mention is the Jogmon Ultimate Card Game. If you loved Final Fantasy VII Rebirth’s Queen’s Blood, this is Time Stranger’s equivalent. This game is very simplistic, with only a few rules. You either go first or second, playing a card from your hand. The cards do battle, and whichever succeeds is the winner of the round. There are five rounds, and you must win three rounds or more to win the game. Effective attributes are very important, especially when battling the same level cards or higher against each other, and level 1 cards have a “bug” where they have a chance to win against level 7 cards. The more rounds you win, the more cards you can pick from. You can refight Jogmon opponents after beating them, and you can also buy cards from dealers across the game. These card battles are an entertaining break from the mostly stressful plot.
Time Stranger also has a colosseum where you can face off against groups of challenging Digimon. This gives a reason to level up your Digimon past the main story, which is great for those wishing to spend time with the game beyond the narrative. Sometimes, RPGs tend to leave you with not much to do outside of quests, but the colosseum, while not anything super substantial, at least gives an incentive to get more powerful.
Outer Dungeons are another solid offering of side content. These are rifts that allow you to jump in and complete challenges to earn rewards. There are time attacks, races, boss battles, and missions where you have to protect something while enemy Digimon are attacking it. Like the colosseum, I don’t expect many players to find this content substantial, but it does give a nice break to the narrative and traditional gameplay loop.
Of course, this content would not be fun to experience whatsoever if it weren’t for a thrilling combat system, and thankfully, Time Stranger delivers an excellent gameplay loop that never fails to be fun.
The Battle System
Digimon Story Time Stranger is a turn-based monster-taming RPG. If you’ve ever played Shin Megami Tensei or Persona, the battle system in Time Stranger will feel very familiar. As the protagonist, you can fight with three Digimon partners (four with Aegiomon) as well as three Digimon in reserve. Up to three Digimon can join in as guests, as well. The battle interface is the best that I’ve ever used in a turn-based RPG, and I really mean this. A wheel on the bottom left side displays your command menu, with the typical options to attack, use skills, use items, guard, swap to your reserve Digimon, and run away. You can also analyze your enemy in battle, which will give you vital information on their weaknesses, information that must be gathered first by attacking them with various elements through trial-and-error. The speed (SPD) of your Digimon determines how many times they can attack within a round, and the turn order is recalculated when the SPD changes for any Digimon. This turn order is displayed on the right side of the user interface.
When discussing the game’s battle mechanics, I must first talk about attributes and elements. Each Digimon in the game possesses both attributes and elements, and these all tie into the combat system as a whole. For starters, there are seven different attributes in the game, and each has favorable, unfavorable, or neutral compatibilities with one another. This can be a difficult concept to grasp, but in essence, the attribute Vaccine is twice as strong against the Virus attribute, and Virus is twice as strong against Data, which, in turn, is twice as strong against Vaccine. The opposite is true for unfavorable compatibilities, where the damage is halved. The other four attributes, No Data, Free, Variable, and Unknown, are neutral. Combine these with the eleven different elemental affinities and resistances, plus each Digimon’s traits, and you get an incredibly complex damage calculation. This had me tinkering with different movesets and parties, and I am confident that strategizing around the battle system will be half of the game time on harder difficulties. There are also numerous buffs and debuffs, as well as status changes.
Unique to Time Stranger are Critical Points (CP). Charging your CP to the max is necessary to use Cross Arts, which is your Agent’s Ultimate ability. There are many different Cross Arts in the game, with some that heal your party, buff your team, revive your party, and even damage and debuff your enemy. Powerful enemies, which act as bosses, also charge their own Critical Points. As they gain CP, they can obtain additional actions at the end of a turn order, get stat buffs, and more. These bosses also have a charging state, where they won’t act as they’re readying a powerful move to use against you. As the enemy is charging, a “breaking point” gauge will appear underneath their HP gauge, which will need to be focused on with attacks to stop the enemy from charging. Fully depleting this gauge is called a “charge break,” and it will reset the enemy’s CP and their stat enhancements, and their special skills after charging. If you fail to break this gauge, you will have to guard and heal up, as the enemy’s next attack can do major damage and possibly wipe your party.
Time Stranger offers numerous significant quality of life improvements from its predecessor, which should all become the norm in every turn-based RPG moving forward. The most noteworthy being the option to speed up your battles. This game has 2X, 3X, and even 5X speed, which is blindingly fast. At 5X speed, the game will completely omit the unique skill animations, which makes a lot of battles go by quickly. If you are grinding for experience or drops, I would highly recommend turning on 5X and auto-battle. I found this really useful when aiming to level up my Digimon in a hurry before tackling a boss. There’s certainly more to be found in the quality-of-life world, but we’ll dive into that later.
Truthfully, Time Stranger is a fairly challenging game, even on its Normal difficulty. You will be healing, swapping party members, and strategizing on how to overcome a boss battle. I normally play all of my games on their hardest difficulty option, as I love being challenged, but for this review, I turned Hard mode off right after the first major boss. On your first playthrough, Normal feels like the right option to pick. It is challenging enough without requiring grinding or a near-perfect battle strategy. Don’t expect it to be a walk in the park, but most players should have no issue clearing the game on Normal.
Revamped from Digimon Story Cyber Sleuth, Agent Rank is incredibly important in this game, and levels of Digimon, like Champion, Ultimate, and Mega, are locked off until you reach their required rank. Essentially, this system acts as a progression system for your Digimon that increases as you complete missions and different tasks. I would personally recommend completing all side quests, as they’re easy to do and give you Anomaly Points that you can use to learn new Agent Skills. Learning new Agent Skills is required to actually apply your Anomaly Points to your Agent Rank, so if you don’t actively spend those points, you won’t rank up.
The majority of these Agent Skills are focused on the game’s four main Personality types, each with four subsidiary personality types of their own, for a total of 16 personality types. Occasionally, during field gameplay, your partner Digimon will get an idea for a personality change, which will be in the form of a question, or if they’re not in your party, a Digivice message. These personality types influence the growth of your Digimon, which makes certain stats grow more, changes the type of Personality Skills, and the impact of Strike Effects. Leveling your Bonds in the Agent Skills accordingly is important if you want to meet the requirements for Digivolution, as certain nodes in the Agent Skill trees reward flat stat percentage bonuses. Not only does your Agent Rank determine what stage of Digimon you can Digivolve to, but each Digivolution has specific stat requirements as well. All of this culminates in an incredibly addictive gameplay loop, where you’re min-maxing to get the best out of every Digimon.
Quality Of Life Heaven
Quality of life is important in video games, especially turn-based RPGs, where tedious gameplay and random encounters often make people drop them entirely. Time is more valuable than ever, and especially with RPGs that span well over 50 hours, the more accessibility and quality-of-life options, the better. Luckily, Time Stranger is incredibly fun to play, and it kept my attention throughout its runtime.
Experience gained in this game seems to also level up the Digimon in my box, as they gain experience even when they’re not in the party. This is an incredible quality-of-life improvement compared to the previous games in the series, as the game has hundreds of incredibly complex monsters to train and digivolve. No longer do you have to keep Digimon in your party or in the DigiFarm for them to gain experience, and this helps a lot with the grind and tedium that a lot of games in this category face.
Additionally, the auto-save in Time Stranger is incredibly frequent, seemingly happening in every room that you visit, and after nearly every interaction. This is incredibly important in Digimon Story Time Stranger, as you’ll be in many situations where you’ll have to go back before a difficult fight and rearrange your party. There were times when my team composition wasn’t working for a boss battle, so I just loaded the Auto Save from Game Over, paused the game, and swapped my team around with equally strong Digimon from the bank.
This attention to quality-of-life carries over to combat, as when on the field, you can use your DigiAttack, Time Stranger’s preemptive strike, to attack a Digimon and get a head start, or, if your Digimon are powerful enough, completely eliminate the field Digimon. The game will automatically select which Digimon from your team is the most effective against the monster you are DigiAttacking, which is super impressive and efficient. DigiAttacks also work on field objects, and some of them require element-specific skills to be equipped on your partner Digimon to be activated. This introduces a fun puzzle mechanic to the overworld reminiscent of the old Pokémon Ranger titles, which was a pleasant surprise. If your DigiAttacks aren’t working on an object, you can easily switch your attachment skills in the Setup menu using Attachment Skills that they have already learned, or the newly introduced Skill Discs. These Skill Discs are similar to Pokémon’s Technical Machines, but you can equip and remove them at any time.
Another great addition to Time Stranger is Analyze Mode. Not only can you analyze your enemies in battle to figure out what weaknesses you’ve uncovered, but you can also analyze the field. If you’re missing a treasure chest, or don’t know how to proceed in a level, just click the Analyze button and the game will not only tell you if treasure is remaining on the field, but also highlight objects to DigiAttack. Additionally, standing still for a few seconds in the field starts a short countdown, which, when finished, replenishes your HP and SP. This only comes at the cost of time and uses none of your resources.
Finally, navigation through the game is also incredibly convenient, as you can swap the minimap to a full overlay like Diablo. I found myself using this feature constantly when speeding through the map. Time Stranger also introduces DigiRide, a system that you can use to ride a capable Digimon partner. Rideable Digimon will have an icon in the setup menu next to their level. You can both DigiAttack and Analyze while DigiRiding, and if you run into objects or Digimon, it will automatically DigiAttack them. There is also Birdramon, who, as you complete the map of each location, gives you the option to fast travel between areas.
No longer do you have to run through numerous rooms and enemies to get to a certain quest NPC, as Birdramon can just jump between important points of the map. You’ll be returning to the same locales many times throughout your adventure, so this is incredibly helpful. This makes it very easy to complete side quests, as some areas have a ton of unavoidable encounters. Fast traveling between locations with Birdramon became second nature for me, and all I could think about was how much easier this game was to navigate than any other RPG that I had played in recent memory.
A Solid PC Port
Digimon Story Time Stranger runs on a proprietary engine made by Media.Vision, which was used for the Cyber Sleuth games. With my build, I was able to cap out the game at 144 frames per second at a native resolution of 4K. This game includes an ultrawide (21:9) setting, which is both uncommon and impressive. It comes with a surprising amount of graphical options, considering that its predecessor, which ran on the same engine, only had an option to change the resolution.
The visuals are stylized like an anime, with the characters being cel-shaded and the environments appearing more similar to traditional 3D RPGs. Areas are saturated and vibrant, and vistas stretch impressively far. Background detail is also striking, and there were many moments where I would just stand in one area and pan the camera to take it all in. Additionally, facial animations during important cutscenes are stunning and have tons of detail.
Unfortunately, in my playthrough, I noticed a faint diagonal separation of the screen, and no matter what monitor, resolution, or graphical setting I changed, it stayed. This line is not present in the menus, and unfortunately, now that I’ve mentioned it, you will notice it too. I also experienced one crash early on, but this was not a recurring issue.
The soundtrack for Time Stranger has no skips. Masafumi Takada, best known for his work on No More Heroes, Danganronpa, and both Cyber Sleuth games, returns to compose Time Stranger, and this soundtrack is more multifaceted than the last. From synthetic songs to orchestral ones, this soundtrack is one to remember and works to solidify the excellent presentation of Digimon Story Time Stranger.
The Love The Series Deserves
Digimon Story Time Stranger has taken everything I loved about the previous games and improved on them tenfold. With its captivating characters, beautiful environments, and incredibly complex gameplay, I am certain that Time Stranger will be the game to launch the Digimon Story series into the mainstream. There is so much to love here with the narrative and its exploration of themes, and the gameplay system offers enough to keep players engaged well past the 50-hour main story. The 450+ Digimon to collect throughout the game are a great incentive to keep playing, and everything packed in serves as proof of the work the development team did to showcase how far the series has come since its first video game.
Above all, I find myself most impressed with Time Stranger’s extensive quality-of-life offerings, as these truly cement it as one of the genre’s best in appealing to as many players as possible. The battle speed options, in particular, were an absolute blessing to have throughout my time with the game, and I greatly appreciated the addition of certain navigational features, too.
There’s no telling what lies ahead for Digimon, but if Time Stranger is anything to go by, it’s safe to say that the future of the series has never been brighter. This was the Digimon game I’ve been waiting for my entire life.
Disclaimer: Bandai Namco provided a PC (Steam) copy of Digimon Story Time Stranger for review purposes.
