Digimon Story Time Stranger Switch 2 Review

Digimon Story Time Stranger Switch 2 Review
Version Reviewed: Nintendo Switch 2

I might potentially offend an entire fanbase here, but I have had zero experience with the Digimon franchise. I haven’t watched the show, played any of the games, and, until now, I always thought an Agumon was the king from The Odyssey. But that’s all changed, as Bandai Namco gave me the opportunity to check out Digimon Story Time Stranger, the latest entry in the popular video game adaptations that have managed to fly under my radar for quite some time… until it dropped on the Nintendo Switch 2, that is. What’s It Like? Choose your team, put on your stylish scarf, and get ready for a time-bending adventure as we review Digimon Story Time Stranger for Nintendo Switch 2.

Digimon Story Time Stranger puts you in the boots of an ADAMAS Agent investigating digital anomalies in Tokyo. The narrative wastes no time setting up a cataclysmic event where half of Tokyo is wiped out by Godzilla-sized Digimon… a far cry from the cute and cuddly setup I was expecting. Your character is caught in a time rift and sent eight years into the past, where you’ll have to figure out what happened and, more importantly, how to prevent it. Along the way, you’ll be joined by the peppy Inori Misono, the daughter of a mysterious private detective, as well as Aegiomon, a Digimon in the form of a young child who joins you in seeking the truth behind the War of the Titans.

Now, I feel I’ve probably already said too much, but the story will take you across time, through the Digital World of Iliad, and between past and present-day Tokyo, with plenty of twists and turns along the way. For the sake of not spoiling the game, I won’t say much more. What I will say is that, as someone coming into Digimon Story Time Stranger with absolutely no prior knowledge of the franchise, I was pleasantly surprised by just how quickly the story had me wanting to know what was going to happen next. Despite being overwhelmed to start with, the story starts to hit its stride about 4 hours in, and I feel like Digimon Story Time Stranger is a little bit of a slow burn, with the opening title screen not even hitting until about 2 hours into the game.

Digimon Story Time Stranger plays out as a JRPG with monster-battling elements. While it does feel familiar in terms of turn-based battling and a rock-paper-scissors battle system, Digimon is actually wildly different in its approach and execution. Digimon aren’t captured like in Pokémon; instead, they are synthesised after defeating a certain amount of the same Digimon. You can then evolve them depending on your Agent Level, as well as devolve them to go down a completely different evolutionary path. Now, as you can imagine, this adds a lot of strategy to the different types, physical, magical, and special Digimoves that you can use outside of battles. If I’m being honest, for the first three or so hours, I was so completely overwhelmed with everything that I was pretty much smashing my way through things with little thought as to what type countered what, and fumbled my way through.

Now, this fumbling and bumbling approach only took me so far, and when facing huge bosses, I realised I needed to get my act together and vary my party, synthesise new Digimon, and work things out. Thankfully, the game does make this easier by showing weaknesses and resistances while fighting bosses, as well as showing potential Digimon evolutions and stats if you’ve come across that particular ‘Mon before. Agent Rank also plays an important role here, working almost like a skill tree that you can distribute points into. These start out with smaller buffs and bonuses, like 10% extra health for specific personalities of Digimon. But as the game progresses, these points also accumulate into your Agent Rank, which opens up more Digivolutions to choose from, resulting in your party growing stronger.

You can also go to “The Inbetween” and use the DigiFarm, which I really underused in the first half of the game. You can place Digimon on a virtual globe, use items to train their stats and abilities, and it allows you to manage your complete roster of Digimon, rather than those in your active party. There’s a lot to focus on here, and that’s just the Digimon side of things. The worlds in which you navigate offer a bit of exploration to find these useful items while staying fairly linear for those who want to progress the story. There are just over 40 main missions here, with most taking about an hour to complete for an average playthrough, and it feels like Digimon Story Time Stranger is almost built for handheld, bite-sized play.

While exploring, you can tap a button to attempt to autobattle Digimon, which can sometimes skip encounters or weaken them significantly for a quick battle. I did find some of the mission structure rather tedious at times, particularly in the human world, where a lot of action took place in the underground filled with dull corridors. There are elements here of finally reaching your objective, being turned away to do something else, then returning to said objective to complete it, and I did find, for me at least, that the pacing tended to drag on a little at times when the story had pulled me in to see what was next. That said, despite the somewhat tedious nature of some quests, I feel the strength of Digimon Story Time Stranger lies in the fact that you can follow the main story only, focusing on your party of Digimon, or you can go all in and take your time collecting and raising ‘Mon, fine-tuning stats and personalities, and getting the most out of them. So for me, as someone new to the world of Digimon, I found it refreshing that, sure, there’s plenty of depth, but I was able to just dip my toes in and experience the story for the most part.

All of this is brought to life with an almost cel-shaded graphics engine that reminded me a lot of Tales of Arise. It looks great in motion and creates a convincing, almost cartoon-like world to play around in. While the characters have their own charm, it’s the wide variety of over 450 Digimon that steal the show. Starting off with small, cute and cuddly creatures that evolve into battle monsters, dragons, and even war-style blimps, there’s a lot of variety in the world of Digimon. I really enjoyed how the icons are the original style of the Digimon toys, in a pixel-art style that will take Digimon fans back to the late ’90s. They even incorporate it into the collectible card game, which is a nice diversion from the main and side missions. There does appear to be an aggressive brightness that washes out some details, though, and it’s almost bloom-like in nature, and I couldn’t seem to find a way to change it.

Performance-wise, gamers can choose a 30fps Visual Mode, which looks sharper, or a Performance Mode at 60fps, which lowers the resolution to keep things running silky smooth. Load times are surprisingly quick, and there was rarely any downtime during my playthrough. I did find the menu and selection confirmation noise to be particularly grating, though this is a personal bugbear that probably won’t bother other players.

For my ADAMAS agents looking into accessibility, there are no options to speak of, so, as always, I recommend further research into finding out if Digimon Story Time Stranger suits your accessibility needs. Thankfully, there’s a free demomon on the eShop that lets you try before you buy, with your save data able to carry over to the full game.

At just under $100 AUD, Digimon Story Time Stranger is a fully fledged JRPG that will last you about 30 to 40 hours, depending on your playstyle. It takes its time setting things up, which may put off some players, but for patient gamers (or Digimon fans), the latter half of the game makes it all worthwhile. Coming into Digimon Story Time Stranger as someone with absolutely no experience with Digimon, I was pleasantly surprised by just how much I ended up enjoying my time with it. The opening hours can be overwhelming, and the story takes its time getting going, but once everything starts to come together, there’s a surprisingly deep JRPG here that rewards you for digging a little deeper. For Digimon fans, I imagine there’s a lot here to love, but perhaps the biggest surprise for me is that I don’t think you need to be one to enjoy Digimon Story Time Stranger. It took some time to win me over, but by the end, I was more than happy that I gave this strange little world a chance.

So, What’s it Like? Digimon Story Time Stranger is like Pokémon crossed with Tales of Arise.

In the Interest of full disclosure, a review copy was provided by the publisher, but this doesn’t influence my score.

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