Digimon Story: Time Stranger Review – The Digivolution Is Up And Running

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I’ve always preferred Digimon to Pokemon when it comes to games featuring kids teaming up with creatures that grow into strong monsters. While Pokemon usually has the better video game experience – with more fun gameplay and rewarding battles – Digimon stands out with its more creative monster designs and a much stronger anime series.

I haven’t been completely won over by Digimon games until now, but Digimon Story: Time Stranger has finally changed my mind. While the story and characters aren’t as strong as the best parts of the Digimon anime, it’s a consistently enjoyable turn-based RPG. It features excellent voice acting and a satisfying system for building and strategizing with your team of Digimon.

In Time Stranger, you’re a secret agent working in Tokyo, tasked with investigating urban legends. Many of these legends are actually strange creatures the organization calls Digimon. Your newest mission takes a terrifying turn when a massive creature appears and starts destroying the city and spreading chaos throughout Japan.

Suddenly, you’re thrown back in time eight years, finding yourself involved with a group of people and Digimon who seem connected to a future disaster. Stranded with no way home, you must navigate their lives, uncover the cause of the coming catastrophe, and try to alter the timeline – all while carefully concealing that you’re from the future.

The beginning of Time Stranger takes a while to get going, with a lot of story setup that feels overly long – nearly two hours before the main plot really kicks in. However, once past that slow start, the story becomes quite engaging. It doesn’t immediately feel urgent to save the world or protect your agency, but you quickly become invested in the characters and Digimon from the past. Saving the future then becomes less about duty and more about protecting the friends you’ve made and ensuring they survive an impending disaster they don’t even know is coming. The game features a likeable cast of characters, including the hopeful streamer Hiroko Sagisaka, the thoughtful Inori Misono, the witty and perceptive Kosuke Misono, and the sweetly innocent Aegiomon, all of whom will capture your heart.

My biggest issue with the story is that it sometimes feels overly guided. In Time Stranger, you choose a male or female agent, and the other becomes your handler, communicating through a high-tech cellphone – even across an eight-year time gap. This handler frequently reminds you of important emotional points, like the mystery surrounding the protagonist’s father, every couple of hours. It feels unnecessary because the game *tells* you to care about the backstory, rather than letting you connect with it yourself. The handler also sends frequent text messages reiterating information you already know, just to keep you focused on the main objectives. While this repetition might be useful if you play the game over a long period, the messages come too quickly, and will likely become irritating unless you take weeks between play sessions.

Thankfully, Time Stranger handles its more serious themes with subtlety, letting the story speak for itself instead of being overly preachy. While past Digimon stories have tackled very difficult issues like suicide, mental illness, trauma, loss, and even slavery and human trafficking – all while trying to make them understandable for a younger audience – Time Stranger doesn’t go quite as far. However, it doesn’t shy away from mature topics altogether, and respectfully addresses the lasting pain of losing a family member.

In Time Stranger, you’ll encounter a father, Kosuke, and his daughter, Inori, who have begun to heal from the loss of their son and brother. However, when Inori meets and befriends Aegiomon, a Digimon who reminds her of her late brother Yuu – even wearing Yuu’s old clothes that Kosuke can’t bring himself to discard – old pain resurfaces. Aegiomon serves as a poignant reminder of their loss, and while both characters feel sadness when interacting with him, they don’t reject him. The game beautifully illustrates how grief can stay with you for years, not always as a crippling force, but sometimes simply as a lingering sadness.

The voice acting in Time Stranger is crucial to conveying the game’s emotions. While characters repeat animations, their personalities truly come alive through the voice performances. Though not used constantly—often relying on text boxes—key emotional scenes are always voiced and accompanied by stunning visuals. This combination makes the game’s happy, funny, sad, and intense moments much more impactful and enhances the overall story.

The player character doesn’t have a voice, but you shape their personality through dialogue choices. I chose to make mine fun and a bit sarcastic, avoiding overly dramatic or silly responses. These choices don’t change the story’s main path, but they do affect how individual conversations play out. Importantly, how you talk to your Digimon partners influences their personality, which then impacts their stats, abilities, and even how they evolve.

At the beginning of the game, you’ll choose a Digimon partner: Gomamon (Vaccine type), DemiDevimon (Virus type), or Patamon (Data type). This introduces the core battle system, which revolves around a type triangle. Vaccine types are strong against Virus, Virus against Data, and Data against Vaccine. This simple system makes it easy to understand your strengths and weaknesses in each battle.

The game starts out simple, but it quickly becomes more involved. Battles can include up to three of your Digimon and three opponents, and you’ll often face two to four enemy Digimon at once. Attacks have different elemental types—like fire, water, or air—and each Digimon has strengths and weaknesses against these elements. On top of that, some moves don’t directly damage enemies but instead cause status effects, such as poison or sleep.

Okay, so the battle system is pretty standard for turn-based RPGs, which is great – even if you’ve never played a Digimon game before, you’ll pick it up fast. I quickly started noticing patterns too – if a Digimon looks like a plant, I immediately thought ‘fire attack!’ And honestly, if a Digimon just *looks* evil, it’s usually a Virus type. But if I was really stuck, I could use Time Stranger’s scanner. It gives you the basic rundown on any Digimon you haven’t seen before, which is super helpful for figuring out what kind of moves to use. The more you battle, the more info you unlock about each Digimon until you’ve got them totally figured out.

You’ll naturally want to fight Digimon to learn about them and collect data. As you win battles, you’ll increase the amount of information you have on each Digimon. Once you reach 100% data, you can turn that information into a new Digimon to keep. This is the only way to expand your team – there’s no catching Digimon with balls! Unless you prefer to skip battles and focus on the story, it’s always a good idea to jump into a quick fight to discover a Digimon’s weaknesses or gather the data needed to add it to your team – or even both!

You can wait to evolve your Digimon until its data reaches a higher percentage, but it doesn’t make a big difference. Increasing a Digimon’s data percentage above 100% (up to 200%) before evolution does give your partner Digimon a slight boost to experience earned in battle. However, the benefit is so small – especially later in the game when you’re already getting lots of experience – that it’s usually not worth the wait.

As your Digimon fight, they gain experience and become stronger, eventually digivolving into new forms. Digivolution can be complex because each Digimon has multiple potential paths. A Digimon starting as ‘In-Training’ might become one of a few ‘Rookie’ forms, but that Rookie can then evolve into four or five ‘Champion’ forms. Each Champion then has even more options at the ‘Ultimate’ level. To make things even more interesting, some Digimon can change forms, others can combine to become even stronger, and most gain new abilities and attacks with each evolution. Finally, there are the powerful ‘Mega’ level Digimon. Each Digimon you partner with offers a huge range of possibilities, and unlocking each digivolution requires careful training and building a strong bond with your Digimon.

The game has a lot to offer, and it could be overwhelming for new players if everything was available right away. That’s why the game starts by limiting your choices, focusing on just a few dozen Digimon and team combinations. This is a smart way to make the game accessible for those new to the Digimon series, but it also holds back what makes these games really fun. Discovering, training, and building your perfect team of Digimon is a key part of the experience! Having more options creates more strategic possibilities, and by limiting those options early on, the game takes a little while to reach its full potential.

If you’re unhappy with how your Digimon team is developing, or if you accidentally max out a Digimon’s level before building its stats correctly for the digivolution you want, you can always revert it to its previous form and start over at level 1, choosing a different path. This helps overcome the biggest challenge with digivolution: it often feels like a gamble. When you haven’t encountered a Digimon before, the digivolution screen only shows a blurry, black outline of its potential form. While some outlines are easy to recognize if you’re familiar with Digimon, most players will need to consult a guide to know what they’re getting, and I definitely recommend doing so.

I’m familiar with Salamon’s digivolution line: it transforms into Gatomon, then Angewoman, and ultimately Magnadramon. All four of these forms are classified as Vaccine types. Interestingly, Salamon can also revert to its original form and then digivolve into BlackGatomon, which changes its type to Virus and unlocks a different set of evolutions and powers. However, it’s confusing how a dog can become a cat, let alone an angel or a dragon! Plus, when Gatomon and BlackGatomon are completely silhouetted, they look almost identical. It’s difficult for someone new to the series to notice the small details, like the ring on Gatomon’s tail that BlackGatomon lacks.

When you’re first learning about Digimon, figuring out how to evolve them often involves a lot of trial and error – or just getting lucky. The ability to de-digivolve (revert to an earlier form) helps with this, as it lets you undo evolutions you’re unhappy with. It’s still annoying to evolve a Digimon you like, realize you don’t like its new form, and then have to work to evolve it into something better. However, de-digivolution means you’re never completely stuck with a choice you regret.

You can beat Time Stranger on the easiest setting by simply trying everything, but the harder difficulties require a deep understanding of each Digimon. I really appreciate how complex the game is, and how it pushes you to try out different Digimon. Several times, I randomly decided to use a newly evolved Digimon and was surprised to discover a fantastic new strategy that I started relying on heavily.

My favorite moment so far was adding BlackGatomon to my team just before fighting Parrotmon, a powerful, lightning-based Digimon. Most of my Digimon were relatively weak at that point, and my strongest attackers were either Virus-type or already strong against lightning. I expected to lose, but then I remembered BlackGatomon had a move that could completely change a Digimon’s weaknesses. It flipped Parrotmon’s resistances, making it vulnerable to the very things it was strong against! I easily defeated it, and BlackGatomon quickly became a key member of my team. She eventually evolved into LadyDevimon, and later combined with Angewoman to become Mastemon – a ridiculously powerful angel who gleefully defeats enemies. I’d give her a 10/10 and highly recommend adding her to your team!

Digimon Story: Time Stranger proves that Digimon deserves its own spotlight in the monster-collecting genre. With excellent voice acting and surprisingly deep themes, this time-traveling story becomes a moving experience about loss and finding yourself. The game also offers a lot of choices in building your team and keeps battles engaging. If you’ve been overlooking Digimon in favor of Pokémon, you really should give Time Stranger a try – you’ll be glad you did.

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2025-10-14 22:43