The core of Digimon Story Time Stranger is unbelievable.
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.
Nevertheless, all too typically, Time Stranger stands in its personal manner, 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 location 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 continued anomalies. And whereas time journey could be a tough 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 aspect quests may have you questioning the sport’s intentions.
All of the whereas, you may be build up 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 powerful, however past a single sewer setting that you just revisit manner too typically, you are given no room to mess around with any of the title’s RPG mechanics.
Thankfully, issues take a flip for the higher when you attain the Digital World. Not like the sport’s repetitive recreation of our personal actuality, the house of Digimon is splendidly properly realised. These places are filled with all types of creatures and odd structure, leading to what’s probably probably 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 recent 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 nearly really feel countless. However to see even half of those Digimon, you may have to take full benefit of Digivolution — that’s, levelling up, evolving, and in addition de-evolving your companions.
There are fixed selections to think about. Every ‘mon has its personal evolutionary tree, which branches off in a great deal of completely different instructions relying on the present stats of stated monster. And so the grind begins — nevertheless it’s an pleasurable grind, because of the sheer quantity of freedom that the Digivolution system presents.
There’s at all times 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 provides alternatives to really interact with the aforementioned grind. Stunted, story-driven dungeon design is a large impediment right here, as operating backwards and forwards to reset enemy spawns is an unnecessarily tedious course of.
Time Stranger is begging for some form of randomised dungeon — like Persona 5’s Mementos — the place you may actually get caught into the mechanical aspect of the expertise. As a substitute, you have to make do with a sequence of short-lived corridors that hardly accommodate the expansion of your foremost Digimon celebration — by no means thoughts the a whole bunch of creatures you could carry round as again up.
Shifting on, the turn-based fight is stable however a bit unspectacular. It revolves round Digimon’s regular rock-paper-scissors weak spot system, however depth is added by way of additional elemental weaknesses, short-term buffs, and standing results.
Naturally, the secret is to kind a celebration that covers most bases, throughout each Digimon sorts and their out there 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 harm — and so you may want an ally that is proficient in magic abilities to convey it down.
There will be quite a lot of shifting components to Time Stranger’s battles, and that is sometimes why it is a good suggestion to boost a small military of Digimon. Nevertheless, boss fights particularly could be a main sticking level.
Usually talking, it appears like bosses have manner an excessive amount of well being on the sport’s regular problem setting. Though distinctive mechanics do generally break these battles down into extra manageable phases, they will nonetheless significantly check your endurance.
The overarching drawback right here is that if you do not have a staff constructed particularly to cope with the opponent, you then’re in for a slog of epic proportions. There have been quite a few instances all through the marketing campaign the place we had been primarily stonewalled by a boss as a result of we hadn’t introduced a really particular sort of Digimon with us.
At that time, you are both burning by way of therapeutic objects in a conflict of attrition otherwise you’re knocking the issue right down to straightforward. Or, you are loading up an older save as a way to rejig your celebration — however that is going to require some grinding, and as we have already established, the sport’s design is at all times pushing again in opposition to such a notion.
You are in all probability considering that Time Stranger feels like an absolute chore, however as we have touched upon, it does get quite a lot of 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 this can be a turn-based RPG, however for some mad cause, extra body fee drops are considerable. 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.
