I think Digimon Story: Time Stranger is secretly a PS2 era Shin Megami Tensei game. That’s very much my taste in RPGs. Given this is sort-of a kid’s game (OK, it’s got a PEGI 12 rating because of ‘bad language’, ‘in-game purchases’, and – bafflingly – ‘sex’), that is a pretty big surprise. I’ve come to this conclusion after sinking a good 50 hours into the game, and being taken on a surprisingly volatile journey as a result. The story is pretty guff, with a lot of shōnen-style anime filler injected into the meat to make it appear more succulent, but most of my emotive response has been to its design philosophy, its approach to dungeons, and some unbelievable pacing choices. I can close this game either loving it, or hating it. But, for the past two weeks, I’ve not been able to stop going back to it.
I adore Atlus’ Shin Megami Tensei (or MegaTen) games, for all their flaws. I have a particular soft spot for the PS2 era of games – Nocturne, Digital Devil Saga and its sequel, and Persona 3 are highlights. You can see the thumbprints of the parent series even in games as late as Metaphor Refantazio: between demons, a doomed Tokyo, cerebral reflections on the nature of humanity, and impossible philosophical choices about the fate of the universe, it’s all pretty standard RPG fodder at this point. But just as instrumental to the series are lengthy and often-unwieldy dungeons, difficulty spikes and plateaus, boss fights that feel like masochistic puzzles, and combat systems as infuriating as they are spellbinding.
Digimon Story: Time Stranger has all of this. Even down to the doomed Tokyo. But instead of demons and creatures from the pantheon of human mythology, the game is populated with the eponymous Digimon – fascinating and varied creatures that range from cute little guys made out of bubbles to leather coat-wearing dominatrixes with G-cups and a pair of desert eagles. Instead of negotiating with demons to try and get them to join your cause, you’re defeating Digimon and converting their data into living beings that can join your team.
About half the game is set in the real world, real Tokyo. | Image credit: Bandai Namco
From here, you can either train them up and add them to your ranks, or have your other allies cannibalise them to gain their power. It’s not quite the sacrificial/fusion mechanic of MegaTen, but it’s not far off. And the weird complexity in how you get your pals to evolve and grow is just as abstruse as Persona or MegaTen’s fusion systems, too. ‘What do you mean I need to Digivolve then de-Digivolve my allies in order to get the result I want?’, I’d ask my TV screen, as entertained as I am flummoxed. ‘What do you mean I need to socially engineer their personalities to get the most iconic ‘mon?’, I’d shout. ‘What do you mean my only Virus-type is now another Vaccine-type?’, I’d despair, as I get soft-locked into a battle I now have very little chance of winning.
The game is often galling, always surprising, and constantly caught me off guard. I would sleepwalk through one of the many, many beautiful biomes, dispatching Digimon like some teleplay sheriff, gobbling up their data to empower my team of devils, angels and rocket launcher-wielding werewolves. But then I’d come to a boss that would have an absurd health bar, moves that are dirty and cheap, and AI companions that were as useless as the sentient poops that I’d been grinding my team against for the past half hour.
There’s a constant level of surprising tension to Time Stranger that just kept on reminding me of the ‘too-edgy-for-you’ MegaTen games that I am enamoured with. I can imagine Young Dom (who picked up Nocturne as a teenager just because they saw Dante from the Devil May Cry Series on its cover in a games rental shop) would love this game, too: the disarming and lurching difficulty spikes and gated progression puts me in mind of the most arrhythmic PS2 RPGs. This is praise, I think. Digimon speaks to my inner child – who’d have thought?
Lots of Digimon are weirdly human, many overly sexualised. | Image credit: Bandai Namco
But every time I’d start falling in love with this peculiar, high-budget realistation of the Digital World, it would do something to aggravate me. The general pattern for progression looks like this: go to a hub, speak to loads of Digimon, figure out there’s a realm that needs saving, go to the realm. The core conceit in the game is time: maybe you’ll go somewhere, and it’s all messed up and apocalyptic. Story beats send you back in time to where it’s a bit nicer, and you figure out where the timeline schism is, then you go to fix it up. Zone complete. The next area might be the same, or it might start in a better state of repair, then you need to figure out how to stop it getting messed up. It’s linear, it’s braindead, it’s a popcorn RPG. I’m happy with that.
But whilst the earlier biomes (forests made of gears, oceans teeming with data, endless real-world sewers) are fairly straightforward RPG dungeons, the later-game zones are appalling. One area – which looks like something from anime Dark Souls – needs you to convince a frog to teleport you towards a Transylvania-esque castle. Pick the wrong dialogue option and you’re back to the beginning. D’oh! Not too bad on its own, but the dialogue takes an age to complete, the animations are atrocious and slow, and there’s no real indication of what the right answer is. Immediately after this, you’re in a zone caught between heaven and hell (read: ice and fire) that requires an unbelievable amount of backtracking, and seems to be populated exclusively with elevators that take 15 whole years to complete their animation cycle. It absolutely destroys any sense of momentum you have as you approach some story-critical climax markers.
Why? Why? I thought we left this kind of game design back in the 00s. But, for all my adult impatience, there’s something in it that reminds me of the final dungeons of my favourite MegaTen games – areas littered with atrocious teleportation devices, riddled with sadistic traps that reduce your party’s HP to practically nothing, bosses that gain sudden immunity to moves you’ve been using without pause for the past 60 hours. Digimon Story Time Stranger is the same. After breezing through most fights (even if they took a while, in some cases), later bosses suddenly ambush you with baffling modifiers: you can’t heal in this fight, you can’t use items in this one.
I play these games as a completionist: wrapping up every side mission and bonus quest as they become available. If the game had given me any indication that I might not be able to heal or use items in the later fights, I’d have baked strategies acknowledging that into my playstyle. Instead, I often found myself in situations where the only way to proceed was to de-evolve, re-evolve, and retrain all my best ‘mon just to dispatch one boss. Just as I had to, say, fuse and level a whole team of Physical Repellant demons in Nocturne, some 20 years ago, to overcome one unavoidable fight. Go figure.
I’m glad I’m not scoring Time Stranger. My experience with the game ranged from a two-star to a five-star, and it could flip on a dime. Yet, I can’t put it down. There’s something compelling about these egregious ‘gotchas’ that makes me despair as much as it galvanises me. ‘You’re not gonna beat me that easily, you cheap bastard’, I mutter to myself as I begrudgingly DNA Digivolve two of my best ‘mon into one superbeast (that proves just as ineffective as my last setup). Back to the drawing board.
I’ll defeat you with the power of friendship and this gun I found. | Image credit: Bandai Namco
In combat, in level design, in its seemingly utter disrespect for your time, Time Stranger feels like a relic of the PS2 era. Yet I know that there are a lot of people, myself included, that get a cheap thrill from this kind of anachronistic game design. When I first saw Time Stranger announced earlier this year, I assumed it’d be an easy romp, a nice, warm hug from times gone by that would remind me of playing Digimon World and puzzling how to further improve my meat farm back on the PS One. I didn’t expect it to throw up half-buried trauma memories from getting soft-locked by one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse in Nocturne on the PS2.
I got what I asked for, I suppose, even if it is a bit of a Faustian pact. I think I’m also going to go for the Platinum trophy on this absurd, unpredictable, and unexpectedly huge game. I might not be the same person at the end of it, but there’s a stubborn 13-year-old inside me that refuses to let go. And I really wasn’t expecting to have that strong a reaction to a Digimon game after the half-baked experiences in Next Order, Survive, and even the slightly (slightly) better runs through Hacker’s Memory and Cyber Sleuth.
Whatever illicit catnip developer Media Vision has laced Time Stranger with, it’s got its hooks in me, and I just pray that it lets go in time for Pokémon Legends Z-A. But, honestly, I doubt it will.
