PC Gamer: I don’t believe it, but this Digimon RPG really was the best game I saw at SGF…”it made me see the light”
PC Gamer: I don’t believe it, but this Digimon RPG really was the best game I saw at SGF…”it made me see the light”
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I’ve been hoping for a good Digimon game for years. The World series has been the only ones I’ve enjoyed so far and some Cybersleuth.
You have to appreciate Digimon for its dogged refusal to be trapped in any one version of itself. For good or for ill it is willing to drop everything to tell each new story or make each new game.
Every time it has a fresh chance to release a gem.
An excerpt from the full article:
> For quite some time now I have been hearing rumors; scattershot whispers, in hushed tones. The Digimon Story games, they’ve been saying, are good. Subtitles like Cyber Sleuth would crop up in lists and recommendations from good friends, but I would always brush them off a bit. It’s Digimon—surely nostalgia was the driving force of these rumors, I thought, and the RPGs behind them were only worth playing if you could identify MegaKabuterimon in a lineup.
> Still, the whispers had me curious, especially when I learned that Suzuhito Yasuda—an illustrator who designed the characters for one of my all-time favorites, Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor—also did character work for the Digimon Story games. I went into my hands-on appointment with Digimon Story: Time Stranger at Summer Game Fest 2025 with an open mind. And I walked out a believer.
> This will not be a shock to my insistent friends or others who try to spread the good word of Digimon. But the Digimon Story games? They’re good. To y’all, I offer a humble “you were right.”
But again, this is just an excerpt, the full article is a bit more in depth, though it’s not quite a super deep dive either.
To give some broader context, back around 2014-2015, the Digimon team at Bandai realized that the majority of the Digimon fanbase was, at this point, adults who grew up with Digimon rather then current kids who were getting hooked into the series for the first time, and decided to specifically make media targeting their adult fanbase
Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth was one of these first, major teen/adult targeted pieces of media, and it was a huge success for the franchise: It actually only got localized overseas due to a fan petition, but it sold so well it basically revived Digimon media getting localized period and became the best selling title in the series.
As a (originally) PS Vita title with a somewhat limited budget and scope, it wasn’t exactly a AAA top class JRPG, but it was compared still somewhat favorably to some of those best in class JRPG titles like Shin Megami Tensei, and had a more ambitious format, visuals and narrative compared to something like Pokemon. Both the article and my post here draws comparisons to SMT, and that’s not just because Yasuda did the art (Danganropa’s composer also did some of the music), but also because that’s probably the closest gameplay comparsion in a lot of ways, and because there’s a lot of shared stylistic and elements between CS and Atlus JRPG’s in tone, the UI, and other elements. This is not just Bandai borrowing from Atlus, but if you look at some of the motifs Atlus uses, or things like Sword Art Online, those in turn likely took influence from Mamoru Hosoda’s work on Summer Wars, and in turn, his work on the “Our War Game” Digimon film and the original Digimon Adventure anime.
Time Stranger is not strictly a narrative sequel to Cyber Sleuth, which had a quasi-sequel/side game titled “Hacker’s Memory”, but Time Stranger is clearly following up on CS/HM’s format, style, and tone very closesly, and is within the same “Digimon Story” subseries. It’s also looking to be a notable step up from CS/HM in terms of scope and budget, and if the developers have worked out some of CS’s kinks and improved on that foundation, this really could maybe go toe to toe with some of the other JRPG greats, potentially!
Sounds… … … awesome!!!
It’s been 25 years since I first learned about Digimon and I still don’t understand what it is.
ya but that price tag though, its a hard pass
I’m amazed Digimon still has relevance. I don’t remember it ever being popular at the time, it was a cheap knock-off of Pokémon. Was it really a big thing?
Man, I remember the online petition to get Cyber Sleuth released in the west. One of the few times an online petition actually worked.
Cybersleuth is fucking awesome, but I wish the 100% isn’t that painful..
Missed an npc which is required to get the achievement, and had to redo all the game again because of it (Mind you all this isn’t a short game).
Other than that, it’s a very enjoyable game..
I wish I’d kept up with Digimon as a kid. I saw the movie and had multiple action figures, and a PS1 game I tried sooo hard to play but barely understood. At some point I just drifted away from it. This game looks really cool but I have no idea if I’m the target audience anymore.
The first digimon world was actually so good, almost felt like ahead of is time.