#digimontimestranger

But a lot of the problems strike me as a result of it having a 10 year troubled production.

The writing is very incoherent and slapshod as it pretty much is a series of not very consistently tied together set pieces. Like I'm not expecting War and Peace but in a modern game I do expect some level of dignity and consistency.

Basically the game wants to be two-three things at once:

A) A time-travel detective noir about Digimon following up on Cyber Sleuth and Hacker's Memory (which I think was the original plan, to just Like A Dragon it onto the PS4/PS5, i.e. lots of asset reuse)

B) An epic about the Iliad Digital World to show off a clear origin story for the Olympus 12 (basically the Greek Gods as Digimon) to the general public that isn't a phone game (Digimon Crusader).

C) A story about the dangers of time travel.

And it somehow mishmashes all three things into a clunky mess that never feels fully baked. And the director did confirm this was an issue, as they had to backload like the vast bulk of the game's side quests/side missions to the start of the last dungeon because all the editing to the main scenario meant that the connective tissue for where those side quests should have been got excised.

Beyond issues with the writing being a mess, the game basically has a full heal mechanic if you just stop moving anywhere in a dungeon, you automatically heal back to full health, which kind of removes NEARLY any real challenge from the game?

And basically any of the actual like "Pokemon Center" you had in the Cyber Sleuth duology got shoved directly into your menu to prevent friction and they basically made the training mechanic near useless until the end of the game.

The game basically feels like it went through at least two dev cycles, and this is conjecture, that by 2024 Bandai management told the team to haul ass and ship something within a year in a playable state.

It's very pretty. It's fun. You'll probably enjoy yourself. But it's very very clearly a Frankenstein'd Chimera of disparate parts hastily stitched together.

But.

I cannot really recommend getting it at $70.00, but I cannot ultimately tell you what to do.

I do think Digimon Story Cyber Sleuth Complete Collection, while 2 Vita era RPGs, is much more complete, has two much more emotionally satisfying stories, with fairly similar monster rosters. And costs $10.00.