Digimon Story Time Stranger - Switch 2 Review

Long gone are the late 90s and the playground battlefield of Pokémon and Digimon, having gone different routes to the modern times. Appealing to a more mature audience comes along with Digimon Story Time Stranger. A new time-travelling adventure that sees you as an agent investigating anomalies that have been popping up throughout time and have to find a way to save the two worlds.

The Good

Digimon Story Time Stranger is one of the best games in the history of Digimon as a franchise, competing against Digimon World: Next Order. Stepping away from the highly used Royal Knights comes in the Olympus XII. Digimon who are representative of the gods of Olympus but are named after their Roman names. Like the stress-drinking Bacchusmon or Vulcanusmon, who loves to collect figures and create mech suits to fight with. 

Utilising a time travel plot really highlights the bonds that are made with the Digimon and how their lives are changed by the influence you had on them in the past. Blocking your path in the story and a constant nuisance is a faction of Digimon called the Titans. You know, like how the Titans in mythology went to war with the gods. 

There is a huge catalogue of Digimon available for you to use on your team, each with their own types and affinities. These types and affinities are core to how combat flows, with a rock, paper, scissors with vaccine, virus, and data types and free types separated from the trio. There are also elemental affinities like fire, water, metal, etc. that are stacked on damage multipliers and these can lead to some really high damage numbers. 

The highest multiplier I was able to achieve was 4.5x, as there was an added bonus from the attack targeting bird Digimon. There are so many layers to tackle and watch out for when going into battle, where a poor matchup could make even your strongest fighter feel weak, but conversely, a Digimon you wrote off pulled through and pulled some amazing numbers. 

My all-time favourite quality-of-life addition was the free HP/SP healing from just standing still for an amount of time depending on how much healing was required. There's also 5x battle speed, so if you're in the middle of a grind, this will hurry it along. Also following a lot of JRPGs of recent times, enemies are encountered in the overworld and can be struck for an extra turn of combat against them or even a free kill.

TL;DR

• Amazing Digimon game
• Combat feels in-depth
• Plenty of quality-of-life additions

The Bad

The Digi-Farm is a staple across the Digimon Story games and unfortunately in Time Stranger it is one of the most tedious features present. You can only access it through the in-between theatre; moving Digimon in and setting them up for training is a micromanaging nightmare, and you have to individually complete each Digimon’s training before collecting them. It's a helpful section of the game that can shore up lower stats to meet the requirements to digivolve while they also collect items and gain exp. However, having to remove Digimon from the farm just to digivolve them is another negative on this tedious feature.

You're going to need to utilise the Digi-Farm as well if you want to reach mega level Digimon, which you can't access on your first playthrough without completing a vast majority of the side quests. This is due to side quests giving anomaly points upon completion, which are used for agent upgrades and reaching certain ranks to unlock the different digivolution stages. This wouldn't be so much of an issue if the side quests were interesting. For the most part, they are just fetch quests with a battle or two involved. 

Having the side quests be so low effort doesn't help with the fact that the human characters are exceedingly boring. The agents are just people in suits; you could replace them with vague human silhouettes and you wouldn't really lose anything. Digimon has always told really interesting stories contrasting human experiences in the digital world; it's just a shame that the human world lacked the intrigue and depth of character.

TL;DR

• Digi-Farm is tedious
• Side quests are mandatory to mega evolve and are bland
• The humans are just boring

Final Score: 8/10

Ultimately, Digimon Story Time Stranger is a mega level Digimon title but a champion when it comes to JRPGs as a whole. That is to say that it's a genuinely solid game, but unless you're a fan of Digimon, there are better JRPGs out there for players to discover. A few shortcomings in what is otherwise a fantastic experience, but those shortcomings are baked into the foundations.

Thank you for checking out our Digimon Story Time Stranger Switch review, thank you to Bandai Namco for providing the review code and thank you to our Patreon Backers for their ongoing support:

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