When I first started playing Digimon Story: Time Stranger in October, I was surprised how little response it had generated. It seemed like only the “Digimon people” and I were playing and talking about it. How could that be? Digimon’s a large, recognizable franchise, and it even got a couple State of Play spots. It feels like common knowledge among gamers and especially J/RPG fans that these games are well-liked. I shotgunned some 30 hours of the game and found so much to enjoy! I had to put it down to catch up on other games, but I returned and played a further 50 or so to finish the main story and all the side quests.
Oh, there is so much about Time Stranger that is truly awful.
Something that begins to stick out more and more as the game goes on is the dungeon design — or lack thereof. The majority of them are (you can say it with me) a collection of hallways. This isn’t something I inherently mind. There are many subjective game design choices to be made, and how well they work will be largely project-dependent. I didn’t feel one way or the other for the first few dungeons, which are: a sewer with a lever on one side and a closed door on the other, a sewer that is a spiral staircase with three extra rooms, and a spiraling radio tower. There’s nothing to them, and that’s fine. I’m here to collect, train, and battle Digimon, so the idea of more engaging or puzzling physical spaces isn’t necessarily appealing. The reality of Time Stranger elaborating its dungeons is, in fact, not appealing.
In one late game dungeon, Dark Field, there’s a new character, Gekomon, who inexplicably begs to hear corny platitudes because they make him nauseous which makes him teleport, and you both need to go see Lord Plutomon, and Dark Field is a sort of asteroid field of floating rocks. So, you walk down a series of one-way paths, enter dialogue with Gekomon, and hope you chose the corniest of the two options or get sent to the wrong place and forced to loop back around. You do this one twice in a row, as opposed to most of the other dungeons, which you also do twice, but on a circuit, and with stronger enemies. You later spend a brief period in the heavenly penitentiary Guardian Palace, which has three (3) enemies and starts off with a scripted boss fight — not the first or last in the game, to say nothing of the final boss. At least it’s not one of the story fights where an allied Ultra Mega Plus Super Form DNA Digivoled Digimon automatically attacks until it’s over.
In general, boss fights are mostly kind of bad. Not bad bad, but kind of bad. Time Stranger is aware its systems are so ripe for exploitation, but fails to do anything interesting with that information. Boss fights are simplistic and nearly identical, with big numbers and a few shared gimmicks: frequent, total immunity to status effects; the ability to attack 2-4 times in one round; the ability to grant themselves buffs, cleanse all debuffs, and “lock” buffs from being affected by the player, all without actually using a turn; and a charge move which can only be disrupted by blasting their newly revealed “weak point(s)” until their poise meter charge bar depletes. Interestingly, weak points don’t always have the same type weaknesses as the boss. But there’s no consistent, comprehensible logic to the elemental type matchups — unlike Pokémon, Digimon’s universe is not built on the concept of elemental types, and Digimon are not innately elemental characters — so what will be most effective against a new Digimon is often a guessing game. This can be fun, but it means that every stage of every boss fight is a guessing game, too. On a first playthrough, the first attempt of most any given boss is not a fight, but dull research that plays out the same way each time with slightly different answers. They’re completely standard JRPG fare: make sure the party is leveled enough to deal and take enough damage and spend the occasional round buffing and/or healing. The bosses that do have extra gimmicks invariably amount to even straighter level checks. ZombiePlutomon, for example, apes the classic “zombie means healing hurts” schtick, but Time Stranger’s design can’t accomodate it. You can’t use buffs or heals on opponents, nor can you attack or use debuffs on allies. But ZombiePlutomon can use Heal on you because he needs to for this concept to work. There’s no Zombie or Undead status in Time Stranger either, though, so the concept is narratively justified by a mysterious mist that lasts for the entire fight. Yet when ZombiePlutomon uses Heal on himself… he just heals himself. With no strategy to be had, as with most boss fights, the correct answer was to beat the fuck out of him with my main casters. This is a relief in a way, because usually the correct answer is to beat the fuck out of the boss with Aegiomon, who is explicitly designed to sidestep most of the game’s mechanics and counter most bosses. He is (heavy sigh) your companion character for much of the game and the de facto protagonist.
Time Stranger’s story is poop from a butt. It is awful by every standard: video game, JRPG, sci-fi/fantasy, shonen for little kids… It is shoddily constructed, shoddily written, and shoddily told. There are constant melodramatic attempts to inject stakes into a plot where you time travel after any death or despair because God is literally rearranging the fabric of the universe in your favor. It is cutscene, into cutscene, into mission where you do the same thing from the cutscene for some reason, into cutscene of meandering bullshit, made worse for the fact that Time Stranger’s music isn’t very good and there are only like three songs. The pace is agonizing. You will watch 10 cutscenes in a row (not an exaggeration; I counted). There are frequent sepia-toned flashbacks, shown just after a character reminds you of what happened or who someone is anyways. It’s that horrid political-but-not-political plot that geek culture adores where there’s a war and War Is Bad, but the cartoonishly ghettoized refugees are talking dogs from another world, everything could be avoided every second with a single conversation, the villains are actually just brainwashed nice guys, and no one ever really dies. Like many a bad time travel story, it’s more concerned with looking clever by creating, revealing, and overexplaining time loops than presenting an intriguing plot or characters. And the game is designed, from the cluttered physical spaces to the pristine minimap and persistently vague directions, for a waypoint to lead you around by the nose. So what merit is there to paying attention? Maybe the only enjoyable thing Time Stranger does with its time strangeness is keep track of the side characters during the game’s primary, eight-year time skip. Digimon will move across the Digital World, change occupations and motivations, and, of course, Digivolve. When they change form they change name, too, leading to casual reintroductions, mistaken identities, not-so-missing persons, and many small glimpses of storytelling. This is no major thing, but it’s a consistently charming point of narrative design in a game otherwise lacking it.
Spending so much time and money on a bad story is particularly baffling when you consider the staggering cost of modeling and animating 470+ Digimon. Each Digimon has animations for (at least) basic attacking, using a skill/spell, being buffed, idling, nodding, walking, running, and a lil victory pose. They’re all voiced on some level, and they all have one or more unique skills, which have unique voice lines and animations. These are simple for the lower stage and/or presumably less popular Digimon, like SkullMeramon, who yells “Heavy Metal Fire!” and sprays a mercury-colored flame from his mouth. But then there’s Alphamon: Ouryuken’s Soul Digitalization, where he creates a giant summoning circle in the sky and a holographic dragon man comes out and shoots a Death Star laser from his claws. Save for some annoying organizational and menuing issues that you more-or-less get used to, the Digimonning is great and complex. As previously mentioned, there are a lot of systems ripe for exploitation. You can acquire any Digimon you can grind battles against, and Digimon can turn into and out of a whole bunch of other Digimon via a frequently diverging and converging evolutionary ladder. Digimon have personality types that you can manipulate, and each personality type has a pair of stats it helps to train as well as a number of personality-exclusive passive skills; but you can get a personality skill and then retain it as you switch to another personality more appropriate for grinding, or vice versa. Oh, and you can take any non-unique skill off of any Digimon at any time and put it on another one with no limitation or cost… and a lot, lot more. If only there was a reason to do any of it!
Engaging with Time Stranger’s training and combat systems — or at least thinking while you do so — is not totally advisable. The dungeons are boring. The boss fights are boring. The difficulty is snapped in two with the slightest effort. As far as skills go, there’s the stunningly versatile Character Reversal, which inverts all of the target’s type matchups. Vaccine Digimon become weak to Virus Digimon, and an immunity to Darkness now means they take twice as much damage from it instead. Reverse cannot be cleansed or re-reversed (i.e., there is no way to revert a Digimon to their normal type matchups during a battle, even by using Character Reversal on a reversed Digimon). You can simply opt out of abiding by one of the game’s core systems at any time. I said earlier that the correct answer to any given boss fight for my party was to let my casters smack them around. That’s a bit of a fib, although it does accurately describe most of my first playthrough. There are a pair of skills called Attack Reflect and Magic Reflect. On use, they create a shield around the user for one full round that reflects 100% of the physical or magic damage dealt back to the attacker. The fastest and easiest strategy is to bring a party of four caster/support characters, one of whom has the personality skill Great Embrace, which lets the Digimon in question overheal all of their targets up to double their HP. Heal through everything, DPS for free during the charge stage, and drop the Reflects before predictable attacks so the boss kills themselves. Revive if necessary. I had to stop myself from using this strategy in an effort to actually play the game, in the same way I thought it best to stop planning Digivolutions or using the DigiFarm after I trained up to LadyDevimon fairly early and realized I had somehow broken the difficulty curve. Even the circumstance by which I found this speaks to Time Stranger’s wasted potential. I was primarily using casters during my first playthrough (because all the pretty, cute, and/or girl-coded Digimon are casters) and brought this as a back-up strategy against a boss I thought would be annoying, without having tested it. There’s never a need to use your Digimons’ full movelists, so, yeah, you can just load the party up with extra crap whenever you feel like it. I’d like to say that any of this is less true on the game’s three higher difficulties (Hard, Mega, and Mega+), but if anything, I find the use of such cheesy strategies to be even more reasonable there. These are “damage sponge” difficulty increases, where the enemy stats get bigger and bigger with no mechanical or behavioral changes, save some extra dungeon fodder on Mega and Mega+.
These are the major points of Digimon Story: Time Stranger, but there are a dozen quibbles that slowly eat away at your enjoyment over the course of the game, too. The DigiFarm not only has its own menu tree but is also in a separate realm that can only be traveled to from specific, fixed points, after which you talk to an NPC. Digimon in the DigiFarm do not appear in your menus and cannot be inspected without going to this realm and talking to this NPC. There are only two shops which sell Training Sets — which raise stats in the DigiFarm — and they both have different items available in different timelines. You can only freely access all areas and timelines during and between the game’s last two missions. Quest information screens don’t always specify when or where a questgiver is, and sometimes name neither (you do need to go talk to the questgiver even though they can text you, which is how you get the missions in the first place). The only way to figure that out is to manually track the quest, look for the waypoint on the minimap, and narrow it down from there; keeping in mind that you can only track one quest at a time. You may think it smart to start lumping quests together by time/place, but they have an infuriating yet inconsistent tendency to take you to and fro as part of their cutscenes, including teleporting you elsewhere after the quest has completed. Or they might just leave you in the (proverbial) middle of nowhere, who knows! And to go a couple sentences further on them, there is an absolute dearth of interesting or otherwise worthwhile side quests. The bulk are nothing but fast travelling back and forth between two locations and advancing through dialogue until a mini-boss appears. There are three separate “scavenger hunts” that involve revisiting previous locations and looking around for someone to press “interact” on, the grandest of which requires revisiting all areas in both timelines. That’s, like, 50 loading screens to press 13 buttons. And do nothing else. The overworld’s main interactable element is DigiAttacking, which is how you get your “sneak attacks” to start a standard battle with an extra round and damage on the opponents. It’s also sporadically used for “puzzles” involving objects like breakable walls, overgrown tree branches, and switches hanging from the ceiling, despite the fact that the camera can’t move more than about 45 degrees upwards. Every interactable in the game, from the DigiAttacks to opening a door or extinguishing a fire, takes at least twice as long as it feels it should.
So… more like ‘waste of Time’ Stranger, am I right???