The core of Digimon Story Time Stranger is improbable.
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 usually, 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 skilled member of a secret organisation that offers with ‘anomalies’. Mainly, every 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 includes hopping throughout timelines, just about on the mercy of the continued anomalies. And whereas time journey could be a difficult narrative hook to get proper, the sport does provide up some cool twists and turns — finally.
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 could 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 will to easily grind ranges and experiment with the powers of your new companions is robust, however past a single sewer setting that you just revisit manner too usually, 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. Not like the sport’s repetitive recreation of our personal actuality, the house of Digimon is splendidly nicely realised. These places are filled with every kind of creatures and odd structure, leading to what’s probably essentially the most convincing depiction of the Digital World in any Digimon recreation to this point.
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 mentioned monster. And so the grind begins — but it surely’s an satisfying grind, because of 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 true 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 working 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’ll be able to actually get caught into the mechanical aspect of the expertise. As an alternative, you have to make do with a collection of short-lived corridors that hardly accommodate the expansion of your foremost Digimon celebration — by no means thoughts the lots of of creatures that you could carry round as again up.
Transferring on, the turn-based fight is strong however a bit unspectacular. It revolves round Digimon’s typical rock-paper-scissors weak point system, however depth is added via additional elemental weaknesses, non permanent buffs, and standing results.
Naturally, the bottom line is to kind a celebration that covers most bases, throughout each Digimon varieties and their out there talents. You will want to consider stuff like stat distribution as nicely, since a extremely defensive foe, for instance, will be capable to shrug off bodily injury — and so you may want an ally that is proficient in magic expertise to carry it down.
There may be a number 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. Nonetheless, boss fights particularly could be a main sticking level.
Typically talking, it looks like bosses have manner an excessive amount of well being on the sport’s regular issue setting. Though distinctive mechanics do typically break these battles down into extra manageable phases, they will nonetheless significantly check your persistence.
The overarching drawback right here is that if you do not have a staff constructed particularly to take care of the opponent, then you definately’re in for a slog of epic proportions. There have been quite a few instances all through the marketing campaign the place we have been primarily stonewalled by a boss as a result of we hadn’t introduced a very particular kind of Digimon with us.
At that time, you are both burning via therapeutic gadgets in a battle of attrition otherwise you’re knocking the issue all the way down to straightforward. Or, you are loading up an older save in an effort 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 in opposition to such a notion.
You are in all probability pondering that Time Stranger appears like an absolute chore, however as we have touched upon, it does get a number of issues proper. It is simply an almighty disgrace that many of those parts 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 price drops are plentiful. The title struggles to keep up its 30fps goal outdoors of battle, and though efficiency by no means fully tanks, the dips make for a disappointingly stutter-ridden journey.
