The core of Digimon Story Time Stranger is implausible.
As is the case with the Digimon Story Cyber Sleuth video games, the underlying system of discovering, elevating, and evolving your Digimon is the place this long-awaited RPG excels.
Nonetheless, all too typically, Time Stranger stands in its personal means, sidelining its brilliantly addictive gameplay loop in favour of a linear, story-driven construction that persistently limits your freedom.
You play as an Agent, a specifically educated member of a secret organisation that offers with ‘anomalies’. Mainly, each time unexplained phenomena happens, it is your job to test it out and report upon the disturbance.
The sport opens as you are investigating one such anomaly in downtown Tokyo, which simply occurs to have been the positioning of a sizeable strangeness years earlier. It is an intriguing intro, and it is not lengthy till you are nose to nose with the mysterious Digimon themselves.
Because the title Time Stranger suggests, the plot that follows entails hopping throughout timelines, just about on the mercy of the continuing anomalies. And whereas time journey is usually a difficult narrative hook to get proper, the sport does supply up some cool twists and turns — ultimately.
Earlier than you even hit the title card, you may be subjected to round ten hours of uninspired detective work, as you stroll the streets — and sewers — of Tokyo. Predictable story beats and tiresome, poorly introduced facet quests could have you questioning the sport’s intentions.
All of the whereas, you may be increase a celebration of allied Digimon to be used in turn-based battles. Once more, the need to easily grind ranges and experiment with the powers of your new companions is robust, however past a single sewer atmosphere that you simply revisit means too typically, you are given no room to mess around with any of the title’s RPG mechanics.
Fortuitously, issues take a flip for the higher when you attain the Digital World. In contrast to the sport’s repetitive recreation of our personal actuality, the house of Digimon is splendidly properly realised. These areas are full of every kind of creatures and odd structure, leading to what’s probably essentially the most convincing depiction of the Digital World in any Digimon sport up to now.
Arriving in these areas for the primary time is a real spotlight, and Time Stranger lastly feels prefer it’s discovering its footing. What’s extra, a plethora of latest Digimon are launched, and your party-building potential skyrockets.
Certainly, there are over 450 ‘mon to gather all through the sport, and so your choices virtually really feel infinite. However to see even half of those Digimon, you may must take full benefit of Digivolution — that’s, levelling up, evolving, and likewise de-evolving your companions.
There are fixed selections to contemplate. Every ‘mon has its personal evolutionary tree, which branches off in a great deal of totally different instructions relying on the present stats of mentioned monster. And so the grind begins — but it surely’s an gratifying grind, due to the sheer quantity of freedom that the Digivolution system presents.
There’s all the time one thing new to find, and as talked about, that is the actual pleasure of Time Stranger.
However the frustration units in when the sport so hardly ever affords alternatives to truly interact with the aforementioned grind. Stunted, story-driven dungeon design is a big impediment right here, as operating forwards and backwards to reset enemy spawns is an unnecessarily tedious course of.
Time Stranger is begging for some type of randomised dungeon — like Persona 5’s Mementos — the place you possibly can actually get caught into the mechanical facet of the expertise. As an alternative, you have to make do with a sequence of short-lived corridors that hardly accommodate the expansion of your most important Digimon celebration — by no means thoughts the lots of of creatures that you would be able to carry round as again up.
Shifting on, the turn-based fight is stable however a bit unspectacular. It revolves round Digimon’s typical rock-paper-scissors weak point system, however depth is added by way of further elemental weaknesses, short-term buffs, and standing results.
Naturally, the secret’s to type a celebration that covers most bases, throughout each Digimon varieties and their accessible talents. You may want to consider stuff like stat distribution as properly, since a extremely defensive foe, for instance, will have the ability to shrug off bodily injury — and so you may want an ally that is proficient in magic abilities to convey it down.
There will be numerous shifting elements to Time Stranger’s battles, and that is usually why it is a good suggestion to lift a small military of Digimon. Nonetheless, boss fights particularly is usually a main sticking level.
Typically talking, it looks like bosses have means an excessive amount of well being on the sport’s regular problem setting. Though distinctive mechanics do typically break these battles down into extra manageable phases, they will nonetheless severely take a look at your endurance.
The overarching downside right here is that if you do not have a workforce constructed particularly to take care of the opponent, then you definitely’re in for a slog of epic proportions. There have been quite a few occasions all through the marketing campaign the place we have been primarily stonewalled by a boss as a result of we hadn’t introduced a really particular kind of Digimon with us.
At that time, you are both burning by way of therapeutic objects in a warfare of attrition otherwise you’re knocking the problem all the way down to simple. Or, you are loading up an older save with the intention to rejig your celebration — however that is going to require some grinding, and as we have already established, the sport’s design is all the time pushing again towards such a notion.
You are most likely pondering that Time Stranger seems like an absolute chore, however as we have touched upon, it does get numerous issues proper. It is simply an almighty disgrace that many of those components aren’t given the eye that they deserve.
And talking of deserving issues, PS5 gamers deserve higher technical efficiency. Bafflingly, Time Stranger is capped at simply 30 frames-per-second on PS5 and PS5 Professional.
That is not essentially a deal breaker on condition that it is a turn-based RPG, however for some mad cause, further body price drops are plentiful. The title struggles to take care of its 30fps goal exterior of battle, and though efficiency by no means utterly tanks, the dips make for a disappointingly stutter-ridden journey.
