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 method, 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’. Principally, 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 positioning of a sizeable strangeness years earlier. It is an intriguing intro, and it is not lengthy till you are head to head 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 continuing anomalies. And whereas time journey generally is a tough narrative hook to get proper, the sport does provide 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 sturdy, however past a single sewer atmosphere that you just revisit method too typically, you are given no room to mess around with any of the title’s RPG mechanics.
Happily, 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 nicely realised. These areas are filled with all types of creatures and odd structure, leading to what’s presumably probably the most convincing depiction of the Digital World in any Digimon recreation thus far.
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 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 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 — nevertheless it’s an pleasing 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 not often presents 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 may actually get caught into the mechanical aspect of the expertise. As a substitute, you have to make do with a collection of short-lived corridors that hardly accommodate the expansion of your predominant Digimon get together — by no means thoughts the a whole lot of creatures you can carry round as again up.
Shifting on, the turn-based fight is stable however a bit unspectacular. It revolves round Digimon’s standard rock-paper-scissors weak spot system, however depth is added via additional elemental weaknesses, non permanent buffs, and standing results.
Naturally, the hot button is to type a celebration that covers most bases, throughout each Digimon varieties and their accessible talents. You will want to consider stuff like stat distribution as nicely, since a extremely defensive foe, for instance, will be capable of shrug off bodily injury — and so you may want an ally that is proficient in magic expertise to convey it down.
There may be a number of transferring elements to Time Stranger’s battles, and that is sometimes why it is a good suggestion to lift a small military of Digimon. Nonetheless, boss fights specifically generally is a main sticking level.
Typically talking, it appears like bosses have method an excessive amount of well being on the sport’s regular issue setting. Though distinctive mechanics do generally break these battles down into extra manageable phases, they’ll nonetheless critically check your endurance.
The overarching drawback right here is that if you do not have a group constructed particularly to cope with the opponent, then you definitely’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 basically 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 objects in a battle of attrition otherwise you’re knocking the problem all the way down to straightforward. Or, you are loading up an older save with the intention to rejig your get together — 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 considering 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 provided that it is a turn-based RPG, however for some mad cause, further body charge drops are plentiful. The title struggles to take care of its 30fps goal exterior of battle, and though efficiency by no means fully tanks, the dips make for a disappointingly stutter-ridden journey.
