Digimon Story: Time Stranger (2025)

So this game plays a lot like SMT, which is a wonderful thing for me. But also it also makes it less appealing for a general audience. You won't like this game if you don't like walls of texts that expose you to bunch of lore to explain why your cute monsters evolve into literal gods that hold the threads of another dimension.

But on the side sometimes you will manage to reach 3000 ATK on your robot and make it evolve to that

And that's where it shines, I think the monster evolution is probably the most fun I had in any monster taming game, that's including a bunch of pokemon and SMT/Persona games. This is where they put the most effort and I spent probably 10 hours just trying to discover what hides behind those black silhouettes. The fact that some designs are really out there is definitely a big bonus for me but I assume it will be a deterrent for many peoples when your cute flower monster evolves into a waifu.

Some of them will require specific stats and you will need to put them in the digifarm for a while, some of them will be unlocked through fusion between two specific digimon that need to have the proper personality, for some of them you will need to craft specific items etc .... It's really fun in my honest opinion, but it's a bit "Excel the game" some times.

Regarding the gameplay, while I really liked the second half of the game getting more challenging and requiring to swap your entire roster to make sure none of them are weak to a specific element or you will get oneshot by late game bosses (that's on normal difficulty) there's definitely some area for improvement because the "stagger" mechanic is really weird and the overall experience feels like the preparation for the fight is more enjoyable than the fight itself. I finished in story difficulty in the end. The great animation on special moves made the fights visually pleasing though.

What positively impressed me is the story, it got a lot more interesting at some point and even the sidequests had some cool moments. Mild spoiler warning, but some NPC you engage with in the first half digivolve and when you encounter them again after the timeskip they are in ultimate form, but that also applies to the ones you chat with during sidequests i thought that was neat.

overall it took me 50 hours to complete the sidequests (except those outer dungeons because f that) and the field guide.

I'd recommend this game to anyone who loves turn based JRPGs, monster taming games, has nostalgia for Digimon or a combination of the 3. But for sure if none of those apply to you I don't think it will click because there's nothing revolutionary either, just a very well-made game that leans into a niche genre.

I had a good time with this game and being able to fight using some of my favorite Digimon of the old anime series gave me a lot of nostlagia... but this is a very traditional turn-based RPG that does nothing special. There are a few good ideas when raising the Digimon, but then there are others that make it boring. There's also a few boss fight against Digimon with life bars so long that doesn't matter how good is your build or how much have you grinded, its gonna take a while.

You can read my full review here.

You can ride Leomon (he he he). That's great.

I think Digimon fans are gonna have an amazing time with this. For the rest, its just an okay JRPG.

So I managed to get an early copy and after 5 hours in, it's everything I wished for. A solid JRPG with an interesting plot AND monster taming game that seems to have a really cool evolution system. All the digimons have their own victory animation, they look really cool, the voice acting is more than decent. They really stepped up from Cyber Sleuth in all the best ways. I'm just a bit worried about dungeon variety but from the reviews it seems the game opens up in the second half. There's auto battle and speed x5 for the fights (looking at you Pokemon scarlet), but I didn't use it that much yet because the fights can be challenging when you encounter new monsters and don't know their weakness yet. The attack animations are good, I'm just having a blast.

Only major downside for now would be the soundtrack. There's a lot of time when you can't escape the Persona comparison: JRPG set in Tokyo, limited maps and dungeons with a "time bubble room" for upgrades and fusions of your monsters, mysterious plots and opponents who use some kind of force to control the world .... And although no one expects this to be on par with P5 or P3Reload, sometimes it gets close, but then you remember that those games are carried by the most epic OSTs in JRPGs which is definitely not the case here. There's a good chance I will be grinding this with a Playlist on as is tradition for monster games, so I'm not too sad about it.

Overall, I'm just glad to finally have a good "mainstream" digimon game that acts as a spiritual successor to Pokemon Colosseum and XD. I tried to scratch that itch for ages but it's the first game that gets there, no offense to temtem and cassette beasts. I'm not the most hardcore digimon fan and I haven't played all of them but it seems the consensus is that it's the best digimon game since Digimon World 3 which was my favorite PS1 game as a kid.