Review: DIGIMON STORY TIME STRANGER is a Blast
Bandai Namco released a new Digimon game in the past couple of months called Digimon Story Time Stranger. They were kind enough to supply me with a digital copy for PC (via Steam) and after putting over 30 hours into the game, I think it’s time to share my thoughts.
I played on a mixture of my Steam Deck OLED and gaming PC and all thoughts below are my own. You can play Digimon Story Time Stranger now on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S platforms and it’s available on your favorite storefronts including the Humble Store (affiliate link) and Fanatical (affiliate link).
Digimon Story Time Stranger is an RPG with monster-taming elements that explores the deep bond between humans and Digimon in an epic story that unravels the mystery of the world’s collapse.
Embark on an adventure that spans across the human world and Digital World, collecting and raising a diverse array of Digimon to fight in turn-based battles.
As previously mentioned, I’ve played more than 30 hours of the game. I’m not finished with it though and my best guess is that I’m roughly two thirds through the main story.
I am going to do my best to keep my review spoiler lite, but if you want to go in completely blind, this is your warning. If you’re on the fence, even after reading my review, go download the free demo and start playing it!
The general premise of Time Stranger is that you are an agent for a secret organization that investigates anomalies which are quickly determined to be Digimon appearances in the human world.
You then end up going on a time travel adventure and teaming up with a couple of humans and Digimon in order to help save everything. As you might imagine, a lot happens throughout that requires you and your team to take care of business in both the human and digital worlds.
I have found the story of Time Stranger to be engaging even if it’s not the most original thing. There have been a few twists and turns that maybe weren’t the most surprising, but were more interesting than where I initially thought the story was going.
Throughout the game there are multiple opportunities to select a line of dialogue from a field of two or three choices and they are typically lackluster choices with no apparent consequence. This isn’t awful, but given the number of small game systems, I think they could have found a way to make those choices have a minimal impact on things.
The one story aspect that bothers me is that the main antagonists are called Titans, but are seemingly no different from other Digimon other than having more “evil” ideals.
If the game made it sound like the Titans was a group of Digimon that were causing trouble, I wouldn’t have a problem with it (and sometimes it does), but most of the time it just uses the word Titans as a classification of beings/Digimon. Maybe this is a localization problem, but it is a little confusing.
Most of your time traversing the worlds, it’s your typical 3D adventure game experience. You control your character in whichever world you are currently in and you can talk with NPCs, shop, and interact in a variety of ways.
Then, when you enter combat, you’ll switch to a turn-based system where you control up to three Digimon plus any guest Digimon against however many opponents you have (typically up to 3). The various Digimon have a variety of stats and factors that you’ll want to consider as you determine which ones you have in your party (up to 6 with 3 active and 3 reserved).
Overall, I felt like the combat was okay. Nothing fantastic, but it wasn’t bad. I do feel like attacks often don’t do as much as I’d like with enemies seemingly having high HP and/or DEF/SPI (the two defense stats), but I can live with it and I appreciate that you can adjust the speed of battles if you are trying to rush through.
I also appreciate that when you go to select an attack, it will inform you what percentage of damage it will do against a given target assuming that you either have collected that Digimon or used an attack of the same element on that Digimon before. It really does help streamline decisions so you don’t feel like you are wasting your Digimon’s SP (the resource needed for using skills) or your time.
In combat, it’s also really nice that you can use one item on each Digimon’s turn in addition to performing an attack as it helps me feel like I’m not wasting turns just recovering or boosting Digimon with items and therefore not making any progress on defeating the enemies. Especially against big bosses that feel like HP sponges.
Once you’re outside of battle, if you stand still, recovery mode will activate. After a designated amount of time (in seconds), your Digimon will be fully healed and recovered. This helps reduce stress in areas that feel like dungeon crawls without feeling like you’re burning through items.
I’ll admit, a lot of these aspects I find positive do make the game easier and less appealing to gamers looking for a hardcore experience. I’m playing on Balanced, but with more difficult options available granted, the main difference is that enemies have increased stats/quantities.
Mega+ mode does also prevent item use in battle and does not allow you to run from combat, but none of the features that I appreciate are removed so be aware. Also, Mega and Mega+ modes do require you to beat the game before you can access them. Heads up.
Graphically, the game looks great. I approve of the art direction and think that it looks really good overall with minimal exceptions. Those mostly revolve around some Digimon such as Birdramon and Meramon looking weird.
Both are depicted as being made of fire which lends itself to different textures and I can appreciate that detail, but it does make them look out of place. This is especially weird with Birdramon in my opinion because they were never depicted (to my knowledge) as being made of fire, but rather just had fire attacks.
In terms of performance, I didn’t really have any problems. On my gaming PC I was able to set everything to the max and it ran with no performance problems. On the Steam Deck OLED, I set it to 45Hz with an in-game FPS target of 60fps and settings on Medium.
Most of the time, the game would be between 40-45fps but in some instances it did get down to around 30fps, especially in big crowded moments, but that probably would have been alleviated if I changed Character Density to Low. It still looks great though and plays phenomenally. No notes.
I feel it’s important now to discuss the many small stats and attribute mechanics that really impact your Digimon, so please bear with me. First, there are the basic stats:
HP = Health
SP = Points used to use skills
ATK = Physical attack
DEF = Physical defense
INT = Magical attack
SPI = Magical defense
SPD = Speed
I’ll be honest, most of these I figured out, but SPI threw me for a loop until I actually went and looked into it. Now, it’s important to know that in order to Digivolve, your Agent needs to be of a certain rank (3 for Champion, 5 for Ultimate, 7 for Mega, unsure about others) and the Digimon has to have certain stat levels. I actually like this aspect, especially since each Digimon typically has multiple options to go into. These stat requirements help guide you to different Digivolutions.
The next little mechanics we’ll talk about are Talent and Bond which are not explained great (if at all) in-game.. Each Digimon’s Talent level is their level cap. A Digimon with a Talent of 20 will have a max level of 20. Meanwhile, Bond impacts a few things.
It allows increased stat values to be inherited when a Digimon Digivolves, it increases the chance for an Extra Attack, it increases your critical hit chance, and it increases the item drop rate. It can also impact other things via Personality Skills that look at Bond values, but that is more clear in-game.
Both Bond and Talent can be increased through battle, items, and through different means on the DigiFarm. Bond can also be increased by talking with your Digimon while Talent is also increased when a Digimon Digivolves.
Speaking of Personality Skills, let’s talk about that aspect. In Time Stranger, there are four Personality Types and each one has four Personalities. These change as Digimon Bond or Talent increases depending on what happened. When talking with a Digimon, some choices will have a Personality Type symbol next to them indicating that the choice will move the Digimon more that way and potentially change their Personality.
When training on the DigiFarm, different training options will adjust a Digimon’s Personality in specific ways. Each Digimon has different Personality Skills depending on what their Personality is such as increasing a stat, always attacking first, etc.
Agent Skills also impact Digimon differently based on their Personality such as lowering stat requirements for Digimon that match their Digivolution’s Personality, increasing specific stats for Digimon of a specific Personality or Type, etc. If I’m being honest, this system seems cool at first, but at the end of the day feels very cumbersome to manage and I end up ignoring it almost completely. I think it might have been a little better served if it was just the four main types.
Next we have Attributes. Most Digimon fans will know about Data, Vaccine, and Virus attributes. They’ve been around a long time in the franchise and have a weakness/resistance triangle sorted out. There are four more Attributes though that are all free agents.
They provide no weakness nor resistance to the other Attributes. I don’t mind having more attributes, but when only three out of seven have any impact on literally anything, it feels superfluous. They surely could have left No Data as the only Free Agent (since it’s only available to the two tiers of In-Training Digimon), but developed more of a combat hexagon or at the very least a second triangle to complement the pre-existing one.
I don’t begrudge a game for getting granular like this in its systems and I’m glad that at least on Balanced difficulty, I don’t really have to pay too close attention to most of these. I do think that if a game is going to be this granular though, each aspect should feel fine-tuned and in my opinion a couple of these feel half-baked.
It is important to remember though that if you’re more hardcore and play on harder difficulties, you’ll probably have to pay more attention to these but if you’re playing on Balanced or Story, you can ignore some of the smaller mechanics with little to no problem.
Other aspects of Time Stranger that I enjoy include the DigiFarm and the ability to ride certain Digimon. In the Digital World, you can ride on some Digimon to move faster and this is really cool and fun. Obviously there’s Garurumon and Greymon, but you can also ride around on the bicep of Ogremon.
This is fun. Meanwhile, the DigiFarm is an area where you can put Digimon to either train stats or feed food to increase Bond. As you traverse the world and through other means, you’ll get Materials which are then used to “craft” various items that you can use to decorate your DigiFarm or upgrade training items.
I personally don’t care about the decorating part and feel like the materials for training items could be tweaked so it’s a little easier to access certain ones, but overall it’s a cute little system that is very useful (dare I say mandatory) for helping to get Digimon ready for Digivolution.
The final thing I want to talk about is the card battle mini game. I want to like this mini-game so much more than I do. I’m a sucker for card games. I like the idea of collecting cards in the world of Digimon and using those in some simple fashion to have fun as a mini-game.
Unfortunately, the mini-game we got is not good. I wouldn’t say it’s bad, but it’s really close. In-game, you’re told the basics which explain that the same combat triangle is part of the card game and that Digimon of a higher level (numbered 1-7) are stronger. Seems simple enough. However, I have seen Level 2 cards beat Level 6 cards on multiple occasions which sounds like it should be basically impossible, but moments like that happen a lot more often than you’d think.
From doing some internet sleuthing, yes, the numbers give very slight advantages, but it’s mostly a die rolling game that actually happens which makes it about 80-90% luck. This isn’t helped by the fact that at the beginning you draw 5-6 cards randomly from your entire collection with a total of about 450 available meaning you can’t even strategically adjust a deck.
I do like the mechanic of combining two cards (same level or Attribute) to create another card. That’s a nice mechanic, especially early on when you only have low level cards. All that said, I do play the card game about every time I find a new opponent. I just wish a little more effort had gone into it.
One final note though about the card game is that sometimes I get more than one copy of a card somehow, but there doesn’t seem to be any way to actually track that nor any useful means of using a second copy of a card, so I’m confused about why in my rewards section after a fight or opening a treasure chest or something it will say I got more than one copy of a card.
At the end of the day, Digimon Story Time Stranger is a really fun game that any fan of Digimon would likely love. The story isn’t revolutionary, but it’s decent. The combat is fun albeit a little slow at times (I think most, if not all, attacks could get a boost to their base damage) but being able to speed it up with a simple toggle helps ease that a bit. There are tons of systems and mechanics that more hardcore gamers can dive into for higher difficulties and more casual gamers can get by with only a cursory understanding of them.