When it comes to games about human kids partnering with cute critters that can evolve into powerful monsters, I’ve always been a bigger fan of Digimon than Pokemon. But most of that preference comes down to what’s outside the video games: Digimon has more interesting monster designs, for example, and a far superior anime. Pokemon has always had the video games I prefer to play, usually having more engaging gameplay loops and satisfying battles.
Digimon’s latest foray, however, Digimon Story: Time Stranger, has finally shifted the needle for me. While its story and characters don’t rise to the heights achieved in the best moments of the Digimon anime, Time Stranger is a consistently fun turn-based RPG with great voice acting and rewarding, strategic team-building.
In Time Stranger, you play as an agent of a secret organization that works in the shadows of Tokyo to find, study, and confront urban legends, many of which turn out to be a strange lifeform the higher-ups have nicknamed Digimon. During your latest mission, you witness the emergence of a terrifying behemoth that destroys the city and begins spreading devastation across Japan.
Somehow, this event mysteriously sends you back in time eight years, where you get tangled up in the lives of a handful of humans and Digimon that seem to have a hand in the catastrophe to come. With no immediate means of traveling back to your own time, you immerse yourself in the lives of these people and digital monsters, hoping to find what or who ultimately dooms the future so that you can change the timeline, all while doing your best to keep your identity as a person from the future a secret.
While the start of the game irritatingly focuses on a lot of narrative setup (almost two hours is way too long to get the main plot moving), Time Stranger’s story is fairly gripping after that initial hump. There are no immediate emotional stakes in preventing this world-ending plot or continuing the success of the agency your character works for, but getting to know the people and Digimon in the past makes up for that–saving the future becomes less about doing a job, and more about ensuring these new friends of yours make it through an apocalypse they don’t know is coming. Time Stranger’s personable cast worms its way into your heart, from the aspiring internet streamer Hiroko Sagisaka and somewhat somber Inori Misono, to the sarcastic and surprisingly insightful Kosuke Misono and charmingly naive Aegiomon.
My one big gripe with the story is how hand-holdy it is at times. At the start of Time Stranger, you choose whether you’re playing as a female or male agent and the other avatar becomes your handler who keeps you on track through your high-tech cellphone, which even allows the two of you to remain in contact across the eight-year difference. The handler’s role in the story seems to be to remind you of emotional beats–like the mystery behind the protagonist’s father–every two hours or so, just in case you forgot about the main character’s backstory that’s supposed to be driving them but you, the player, have no ties to because we’re being told to care, not shown why we should. Your handler will also often chime in with quick text messages reminding you of information you already know to keep you on track with main objectives. I could see how this repetition of key information might be a helpful reminder in a playthrough spread out over months, but the texts come so close together that unless you’re spending weeks between each play session of Time Stranger, it’s going to get annoying.
Thankfully, Time Stranger does practice restraint when it comes to its more mature material, allowing it to speak for itself without hitting the player over the head with its messaging. Time Stranger doesn’t go quite as dark as past stories in the franchise, which have delved into young children and teenagers grappling with suicidal thoughts, mental disorders, traumatic natural disasters, the death of a parent or best friend, messy divorces, slavery, or human trafficking, and then packaging these stories in a manner that the largely kid-aged audience can comprehend. But even if it doesn’t go into subject matter as heavy as what’s been done in Digimon before, Time Stranger’s story doesn’t fully skirt away from it, either, respecting its audience with a mature story that touches on the lingering grief from the death of a family member.
Early into Time Stranger, your character meets a family in which father Kosuke and daughter Inori have largely come to terms with the death of the former’s son and the latter’s little brother. The introduction of Aegiomon, a satyr-looking Digimon that Inori runs into and bonds with after protecting him, clearly brings some of that pain back to the surface though, as Aegiomon acts toward Inori like her brother Yuu used to, and Aegiomon also fits into Yuu’s clothes that Kosuke can’t bear to let go. Aegiomon is a reminder for both characters of the lingering hole in their lives, and while you can feel a tinge of sadness emanating from both of them when they speak to Aegiomon, neither shuns the Digimon on account of that reminder. It’s a wonderful portrayal of how grief can linger and still affect you years later, but that it’s not always completely paralyzing or necessarily negative. Sometimes, grief is just a sad reminder.
Time Stranger’s voice acting shoulders a lot of this emotional weight. Each character cycles through the same collection of poses, which are admittedly expressive, but the characterization is largely set through the voice acting. Time Stranger doesn’t utilize voice acting in every scene, primarily using text boxes, but leans on voice acting in every major emotional beat, all of which are also visualized with beautiful cutscenes. This makes the most joyous, humorous, tragic, and tense moments really pop, bettering the story overall.
The main character is the only voiceless character in the story, but choice-driven dialogue allows you to imbue some semblance of a personality into them. I opted to avoid the overly serious and ditzy answers, for instance, making my agent playful and a little sassy. These choices don’t seem to have ramifications on the overall direction of the story, and instead direct the flow and overall tone of individual conversations. Conversing with your character’s Digimon partners can influence how their personality develops though, and that in turn can impact how their stats and passive abilities change, as well as what they can digivolve into.
Your agent starts with one Digimon partner, choosing between the Vaccine type Gomamon, Virus type DemiDevimon, or Data type Patamon. This choice introduces you to Digimon’s type triangle: Vaccine has a type advantage against Virus, Virus against Data, and Data against Vaccine. This type triangle is at the center of Time Stranger’s combat and its simplicity makes it very easy to grasp whether you have an advantage in every fight.
This simplicity grows more complex as the game goes on, though–you can have up to three Digimon in a battle at a time and keep another three in reserve, and you’ll usually face off against two to four enemy Digimon at a time. Each attack tends to have an elemental typing as well, like fire, water, or air, and each Digimon is strong or weak to a handful of elemental types. Then there are moves that don’t deal damage but inflict a status effect, like damaging poison or turn-deleting sleep.
It’s a familiar system for a turn-based RPG, and even Digimon newbies should grasp it fairly quickly. Is that Digimon plant-shaped? Probably weak to fire. Does that Digimon give off major villain vibes? Nine times out of 10, it’s a Virus type. If you’re still having issues, though, Time Stranger has a scanner that lets you get basic details on unfamiliar Digimon, giving you a good starting point for what moves you should be using. As you use more types of moves, more information about the foreign Digimon will be unlocked until you know everything.
You’re naturally incentivized to battle Digimon and collect this information anyway. As you defeat enemy Digimon, the percentage of their known data increases in your phone. When it hits 100%, you can convert this data into a Digimon of your own, adding it to your storage (from which you can move it into your roster if you’re interested in fighting with it). This is the only way you can add a new Digimon to your party–no ball-catching mechanic here! Unless you just want to avoid fights and get on with the story, it’s always worth jumping into a quick battle to either learn more information about a Digimon’s weaknesses or gather more data on a Digimon to eventually add it to your roster (or both!).
You can wait to convert a Digimon until its data percentage goes even higher, but the benefits are negligible. For every percentage you push a Digimon’s data above 100% (up to 200%) before you convert it, the Digimon partner you create will accrue experience points faster in battle. The difference is so small though–especially in the latter half of the game when you’ll be getting tons of experience from every battle–that the wait isn’t worth it.
As your Digimon battle, they accrue experience to level up and improve their stats. If their stats fulfill specific requirements, they digivolve into a new form. And this is where Digimon can get a little bit complicated. While each In-Training-level Digimon can usually digivolve into only one to three different Rookie-level Digimon, each Rookie can typically digivolve into four to five Champion-level Digimon, and that Champion usually has four to five Ultimate-level options. Some Digimon can switch between different forms, certain Digimon can DNA-digivolve and combine into one more powerful Digimon, and most Digimon change types and learn entirely different attacks when they digivolve; and then there are Mega-level Digimon. Each new partner is a vast branching tree of possibilities, and each digivolution carries with it its own requirements, most of which require you to carefully train and speak to your Digimon in a specific way to grow certain stats.
This system is vast and would be entirely unapproachable to newcomers if Time Stranger introduced it all at once. But Time Stranger restricts your options early on, funneling the plethora of team-building options the game has into only a few dozen. I understand why this is done–it makes Time Stranger a strong on-ramp for folks who might be intimidated at trying a Digimon game for the first time–but it unfortunately restricts the best part about these games. Finding and converting new Digimon, digivolving them, and building your ideal line-up is cool! More options means there are more variables for you to consider and play with, and limiting that scope for the first five or so hours means Time Stranger takes a bit to go from good to great.
If you’re ever unsatisfied with your team (or mess up and max a Digimon’s level before you grow their stats in the way you should for the digivolution you’re aiming for), you can de-digivolve a Digimon into its previous form, reverting it to level 1, and then take a different branch. This covers digivolution’s greatest weakness: It’s largely a guessing game. If you haven’t seen a Digimon and that Digimon is one of the options that your Digimon can digivolve into, it’s displayed as an extremely zoomed-in black outline on the digivolution screen. Some of these blacked-out images are easy to identify, but only if you have a history with Digimon. Otherwise, you don’t really know what you’re getting unless you turn to a guide (which I highly recommend).
I know the dog-like Salamon can transform into the cat-like Gatomon, and then digivolve into the powerful bow-wielding archangel Angewoman, to one day become the dragon Magnadramon. I also know all four of those are Vaccine types, and that at any time, I could de-digivolve them all the way back to Salamon and then divivolve the digital dog into BlackGatomon, which transforms them into a Virus type and opens up a whole new line of darker forms and abilities. But there’s no rhyme or reason to the evolutionary path of a dog becoming a cat (and certainly not an angel or dragon), and Gatomon and BlackGatomon’s outlines look virtually the same when they’re completely blacked out–a newcomer isn’t going to know that Gatomon has a ring on her tail and BlackGatomon doesn’t, a small detail that’s hard to notice.
Without prior knowledge, a lot of digivolution is experimentation (or just luck). De-digivolution eases the frustration of that, allowing you to revert to previous forms if you don’t like the direction you’re going. It’s not perfect, and it’s still irritating to digivolve one of your favorite Digimon partners into a new form that has a typing or aesthetic you don’t like, de-digivolve them, and then have to grind back up to digivolve them into something else. But at least the option is there, meaning no choice is ever fully locked in.
While you can brute-force your way through Time Stranger on its easiest difficulty, you’ll need to involve yourself in the vast intricacies of each Digimon to have any sort of chance on the harder modes. I love the level of complexity, especially in how it encourages you to experiment with new Digimon. More than once, I decided to try playing with a recently converted or digivolved Digimon on a whim, only to quickly fall in love with and become dependent on the brand-new strategy it offered.
So far, my favorite was adding BlackGatomon to my team right before the boss fight with Parrotmon, an Ultimate-level, lightning-wielding, Vaccine-type Digimon. Going into that fight, most of my roster were the weaker Champion level, and my strongest attackers were Virus-type or lightning-wielding Vaccine types. I figured it would be a loss and I’d just have to try again with a different team, but then I remembered: BlackGatomon knew a status move that could reverse every aspect of a Digimon. I used it, and suddenly Parrotmon was weak to lightning damage and Virus types, not resistant. I mopped the floor with the giant bird, and BlackGatomon became a mainstay on the team (eventually digivolving into LadyDevimon and then DNA-digivolving with Angewoman to become the delightfully broken Mastemon, an angel who laughs maliciously as she rips the heart/soul out of enemy Digimon). 10/10 team member. I’d highly recommend them.
Digimon Story: Time Stranger is a strong argument that it’s high time to give the digital monsters their own space in the critter-catching genre. Strong voice acting and mature themes digivolve this time-traveling tale into an emotionally-rewarding journey of grief and self-acceptance, and a vast array of branching options keeps team-building and the turn-based combat exciting. If you’re still ignoring Digimon for its more mainstream pocket monster cousin, you owe it to yourself to at least try Time Stranger. You won’t regret it.
