Digimon, celebrating it’s 15th anniversary, was always a franchise that was prevalent throughout my childhood. While I was more involved with it’s contemporaries, I was always fond of Digimon’s art-style, monsters and characters. As time went on, Digimon seemed to fade away as it’s contemporaries grew with me, and eventually led me to forget the franchise completely.
That all changed with Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth. Digimon Story accomplished what many other games have failed to do: make me care about it’s universe. I ended up watching old episodes of the Digimon anime, researching characters and the various Digimon (and their Digivolutions) until I was totally immersed in the world of Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth.
Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth is a “reboot” of sorts for the series. While containing all of the fan favorite Digimon from Agumon to Gabumon, the game never relies on the player to be familiar with these characters. Players will follow the footsteps of his/her character into the Digital World of Eden, a virtual world created for people to socialize. Naturally, Eden is filled with hackers; ranging from the amateur hackers the player becomes, to a nefarious hacker group stealing peoples data. After escaping a rogue software program attacking the player and his/her friends, the player gains the ability to shift between the real world and Eden through any piece of technology.
This is where “Cyber Sleuthing” comes in. After escaping the attack, players join a detective agency to solve various mysteries both in the real world, as well as in the digital one. While certainly this is a barebones description of the story at-hand, it gets far more interesting as players slowly chip away at the larger overarching mystery.
The gameplay for Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth is probably my favorite part of the game. From collecting and battling Digimon, to solving cases for the detective agency, there is a lot to play through.
“Digivolving” your Digimon to become more powerful is a really great feature as it increases the level cap that a Digimon can reach, improves their stat lines and changes their physical appearance. What I liked most about “Digivolving” was “DeDigivolving”. “DeDigivolving” is where players can revert a Digimon to a previous form if they weren’t content with how a specific Digimon looked. But be careful! “Digivolving” and “DeDigivolving” reset your Digimon’s level back to 1.
In your time outside of battling, players can opt to send the Digimon they aren’t using to Digimon “Islands”. On these “Islands”, players can choose multiple activities for their Digimon to complete. Players can choose to train their Digimon slowly over a set amount of time, research new items to use in the game, or for the Digimon to search for new cases for the player to solve. What I found best was to simply set my Digimon to train for two hours, while I played through the story. Eventually, Digimon on my island would be high enough level to take out in the field, or to “Digivolve” into a higher form.
Speaking of cases, players are able to return to the detective agency and grab cases to solve. Each case that I solved were relatively easy and yielded decent rewards, but they never really felt compelling to return to. If anything, I felt that if cases weren’t tied directly into the main story of the game, they were bland and eventually felt repetitive. In an RPG, it’s understandable that every side quest can’t be as compelling as the main story, but it would still have been nice to have some more dynamic cases thrown in there.
I only seemed to have two problems with Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth: the repetitiveness of combat and the dialogue/localization of the game. Eventually, I felt as if my Digimon had become powerful enough to wreck house in any battle I went into. I never truly felt a challenge (playing on hard mode certainly helped this issue a bit), and eventually random battles started to feel like a chore. If there was just a bit more variation or unexpectedness in battles, it would really make the combat more exciting.
My second, and probably biggest, issue is the localization of the game. Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth is probably 75% Japanese, 25% English. All of the spoken dialogue, both from humans and Digimon are in Japanese, while English subtitles provide much of the story. While more often than not I am fine with listening to the Japanese dialogue, it’s the actual english translations that bother me. Many times I am unable to follow where the story is going, because I cannot really comprehend what the subtitles are trying to say. That’s not to say that the entire game is incomprehensible, but some translations are better than others.
Onto the summary!
