Digimon Story: Time Stranger – Game Review

Digimon Story: Time Stranger – For the 8X and 9X generation who have been exposed to Japanese comics and animation, it must be the name Digimon not a very strange name.

Used to be “rivals” with Pokemonthe image of Digimon evolving into cool robots has created the childhood of many people. However, Digimon increasingly weak against their “rivals” and less and less popular than before.

Although somewhat silent, fans Digimon Still loyal to this game series and eagerly waiting for its release Digimon Story: Time Stranger – which already is Bandai Namco First announced since 2017.

However, the project has “disappeared” and there have not been many announcements about its development progress, making fans somewhat worried. With no news for a while, the game broke everyone’s skepticism and was officially launched.

The debut of Digimon Story: Time Stranger Not only does it have high expectations from fans because of the relatively long development time, but it also attracts the attention of those who love the animal collection game genre, because they look forward to adding more “new breeze” to this genre.

So Digimon Story: Time Stranger Is it worth what people expect?

Let’s take a look at the following review with Vietgame.Asia!

Table of Contents

YOU WILL LIKE

SPIRAL OF FATE

Digimon Story: Time Stranger takes players to a new adventure in the Digimon universe. You will play the role of an agent of the secret organization ADAMAS and investigate the agent behind the unusual phenomena in Tokyo – which are strange entities called Digimon.

During your investigation, you are caught in a battle with a ferocious Digimon and this encounter causes destruction and takes you back to the past 8 years ago. Here, you are given another chance to stop this chain of disasters from happening before it’s too late.

At first, the story unfolds relatively slowly, mainly to build the characters and background events. This makes the first half of the game not really very attractive and somewhat dragging. However, in the second half of the game, when conflicts between humans and Digimon factions escalate, the game truly brings players to many different levels of emotions about hatred, friendship, pain when losing loved ones…

Although it doesn’t delve into too heavy topics, Digimon Story: Time Stranger still brings mature stories, enough to portray the difficulties of a world where Digimon exist side by side with humans.

It doesn’t have outstanding visuals, but the game still captures the beauty of Iliad – the Digimon world in this part. This may be the first time fans get a close-up look at every corner of the Digimon universe in the game.

A special improvement compared to previous games is that the voice acting is very well done. Not only that, almost every cut scene or dialogue is fully voiced, even during combat. They make the game experience much more complete.

If I have to “pick the leaves to find the worm”, the writer probably only regrets that the side quests are a bit “soulless” without really creating much depth or providing additional value to be able to better understand this Digimon world.

Digimon Story: Time Stranger still brings mature stories, enough to portray the difficulties of a world where Digimon exist side by side with humans.

MANY GAMEPLAY IMPROVEMENTS!

Similar to its predecessor, as well as other animal collecting games, Digimon Story: Time Stranger allows players to choose a male/female character and starting Digimon to begin their journey.

The game has a turn-based group combat style, with teams of up to 3 Digimon in battle and 3 Digimon in reserve. Each Digimon will possess different attributes, systems as well as skill sets that players can take advantage of in combat.

Attributes will determine Digimon’s counters: Vaccine is stronger than Virus, Virus is stronger than Data and Data is stronger than Vaccine. Besides attributes, each Digimon is also resistant and weak to certain elemental systems. Players will take advantage of the combination of these two factors to strike appropriately and gain an advantage in combat, because if you use Digimon with attributes and systems to counteract enemies, they will receive maximum damage!

On the contrary, if the enemy overcomes both your attributes and system, the damage you cause is like… “mosquitoes biting stainless steel”!

The core of combat depends on this “dual system” system, especially for boss battles, when in addition to being more difficult than usual, they also possess special bracing skills. When they use these moves, a stun bar will appear. To prevent them from casting, you will have to break this bar as quickly as possible.

The most effective way to do that is to use Digimon that can harden enemies. If you can’t stop them in time, these attacks are completely capable of finishing off your entire squad!

After each match, you will increase the Scan score of the opponent’s Digimon, which is a way to “capture” Digimon in the game. Scan can be increased beyond 100%, up to 200%, the higher the Scan score, the stronger the Digimon’s starting stats will be.

Besides accumulating Scan points, the Digimon you bring will be awarded experience points to level up. Digimon Story: Time Stranger Not only will Digimon in the main and reserve team gain experience points, but all Digimon you bring will also receive a small amount. This helps you “plow” many Digimon at the same time without having to think much, thereby easily evolving and testing countless different formations.

When leveling up, Digimon will increase their stats based on their personality, which has been comprehensively “upgraded” compared to the previous part. With 16 different personalities, each personality will help Digimon focus on 2 types of necessary stats in combat, along with an accompanying passive in combat. This makes Digimon training more in-depth, because you will need to choose the right development direction and personality to fully exploit their strengths.

One of the other new points that this part brings is a change in the way of evolution. Now, you can evolve Digimon whenever they meet the stat or personality requirements for evolution, instead of relying on level as before. This makes it easy for you to experiment with evolution, as well as… “move back and forth” between Digimon generations more comfortably than before.

With the huge amount of Digimon that the game possesses, surely choosing to evolve will also cause headaches for new players. Therefore, binding the evolutions based on the main character’s level is also relatively reasonable. This also limits players from “plowing” to level up to evolve Digimon, instead they will have to build a more spread out squad. Because you will not be able to Mega evolve while the agent is still level 3 or 5!

But, your character also has levels? That’s right! With Digimon Story: Time Strangerthe main character not only stands there watching his Digimon fight, but you can also supplement directly with Cross Art skills, which will accumulate points based on the Digimon’s actions in battle, attacks that engrave attributes and systems will receive more points.

Cross Arts will include many different types: dealing damage, enhancing your side’s stats, or reducing the enemy’s stats… You will learn them through the agent’s skill table. Upgrading the skill table will help the main character level up.

In addition to “unlocking” new Cross Art, you can also “unlock” other effects that help your Digimon become stronger, or make the evolution process easier.

With such wonderful changes, Digimon Story: Time Stranger Truly makes the Digimon series extremely accessible for first-timers, but still retains its inherent characteristics for old fans.

Digimon Story: Time Stranger Truly makes the Digimon series extremely accessible for first-timers, but still retains its inherent characteristics for old fans.

YOU WILL HATE

THE “STAINS” STILL EXIST

Even though it’s a common experience Digimon Story: Time Stranger brings true satisfaction to those who love Digimon in particular and JRPGs in general. However, the game still has minus points that make it incomplete.

First, the fact that you can heal anytime, anywhere after fighting makes the game a bit easy compared to other JRPG games on the market. You will not feel the importance of managing resources (health and SP) throughout the game, because if you are short of SP to use skills or low on health, you can completely wait outside the map for a few seconds to fully recover.

Combined with the self-fighting mode, you almost won’t have to worry too much about passing the levels anymore, but only need to focus on the boss battles.

Speaking of bosses, another minus point appears, that is, most of the bosses in the game have the Virus attribute, which makes building a team mainly made up of Vaccine-attribute Digimon much more advantageous. If unfortunately there is a boss that has its attributes, you can just use Reverse Status to reverse their systems and attributes!

This is a bit of a pity, because the game emphasizes understanding the attributes and systems of each Digimon to build a team, based on the huge amount of Digimon, but does not create enough challenges to force players to adapt and change many different types of teams.

Finally, it is impossible not to mention the extremely “disastrous” interface Digimon Story: Time Strangerat first glance, it is relatively beautiful and friendly. However, every operation you do in there is extremely confusing, especially when interacting with Digifarm to train Digimon.

You can’t see their levels and evolution requirements on the farm, so you have to constantly take them back to your inventory, check them out (or look them up online), then leave them back on the farm to train them to the appropriate personality and stats.

If you only do it with a few Digimon, it’s okay, but in the second half of the game, there will be dozens of Digimon that you need to train, and repeating this operation will easily make the player… shake his head in frustration!