Review Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth

Remember how I promised to make a review for Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth for the PS Vita when I choose it as my game of the month February? It’s been a long time in the making, I must admit. For the longest time I had trouble gathering my thoughts about the game. I was trying to find my way around in the digital world and it just wouldn’t translate into words.

In hindsight it’s mainly the story that has me hooked. Most of my battles are fought in auto-battle, I have hardly had a battle that gave me trouble. I like the look of some of my Digimon though, they look so detailed and fierce. I like the option of digi-evolving, making collecting them all so much easier.

So finally, I have put my thoughts to paper. In conclusion I can say I really, really like the game. I won’t have to convince fans to the Digimon franchise, but this noob that’s still very partial to Pokémon is loving the game. So much, that even writing about it made me put down Bravely Second and pick up Digimon again!

My in depth review was published first on GameRaven.com.
I’ll put it up here too, have fun reading!

Very new to this monster collecting game

If you’d asked me whether I was a Pokémon fan or a Digimon fan a couple of months ago I wouldn’t even have hesitated, it was Pokémon for me, all the way. I knew all about Pokémon, not from watching the television show myself, but by catching bits and pieces of it while my daughter watched the series. Digimon wasn’t a series that my daughter watched, maybe not girly enough for her at the time. The monsters looked more dinosaur-like, more menacing and in many cases less cutesy which would have been enough for her to flip over to another channel. When I played Pokémon Platinum years later and met the little monsters for the first time, it wasn’t weird to me. Before I knew it I was able to use Poké-speak like a pro. Digimon though, was very alien to me.

Gotta trust your gaming friends!

Over the years there have been several games for Digimon, all kinds varying from RPG to card games and MMORPG. The fans were eagerly awaiting the release of the new generation of Digimon games. In February 2016 their patience was rewarded: Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth was released for the PS 4 and PS Vita in America and Europe. I had seen it announced, but I didn’t think much of it at the time. That is, until some of my gaming friends bought it and thoroughly enjoyed it! I have a high regard for their gaming opinions and I felt I couldn’t go wrong although I knew hardly anyting about Digimon monsters. In hindsight I was right in trusting them!

Visiting EDEN for the first time

Starting the game, you’re thrown into the thick of it immediately. My character YvoCaro (you can choose to play as a boy or a girl) logged into EDEN, a chat room where she was set to meet some other online friends, a teenage boy Arata and girl Nokia. They are in wonder about EDEN, a mecca for shopping but also a haven for hacker groups. The trio meet and befriend a couple of Digimon, when at last they encounter one terrifying creature that scares them so much they flee.

My character YvoCaro was attacked in mid-logout, she returned to the real world, but her body was digital now. A cyber detective named Kyoko rescued her from a frightened crowd that was swirling around her wondering what the heck was going on, and recruited YvoCaro as her apprentice. After all, for her cyber sleuth cases it was a bonus to be able to use a digital human hybrid that can connect into network devices to solve cases! This was the beginning of a fruitful collaboration, as hackers are taking over portions of the real world where the data devouring Eaters were posing a real threat.

Your cyber sleuth faces serious problems

This little sleuth was pretty much clueless in the beginning, as the game doesn’t go easy on newcomers. Everything was explained at the beginning of the game of course, but there is a lot to take in and so much to do. Even without the assignments as a detective and the main story you can have fun just collecting and tweaking your Digimon.

The story is a bit dark, much more emotional then what I was used to in Pokémon games. If you’ve read my other reviews you’ll know that I like a good involved story, so this game suited me just fine. What was difficult for me was that without any prior knowledge about Digimon I was groping around: there seemed to be so many different story-lines, and I didn’t really see where they tied together. It’s not until later in the game, about 9 chapters in (of the 20 chapters in total), that I began to see the light and saw the different story-lines coming together in a devious plot. By then, I was hooked.

Aside from the main story missions, you fill up your time with smaller fetch and bring missions. Though I understand they have their purpose of teaching you to get around, and collecting Digimon, it made me feel impatient to move on with the story.

Options to making a good team

Choosing a Digimon to start with presented me with a problem. I honestly had no idea what was a good starter, so I ended up choosing the cutest one, Terriermon. Had no idea by the way that even this cutesy bunny would turn into a frightful fighting machine! I found the capturing and storing system for the digital monsters to be quite different from what I was used to.

Every time you meet a new Digimon it is scanned, and uploaded to the DigiLab. Allowing you to ‘create’ it once it’s more than a 100%. You can then add it to your own team if your memory limits allow this. At the DigiLab you can also Digivolve your Digimon into new monsters without the need for constant leveling up. This was refreshing to me: no need to battle over and over again to get stronger monsters. A good combination of Digivolve would do the trick too.

Fighting is turn based, and you can have up to three Digimon on your team, along with reserve members that also get their share of experience points. Your fighters take turns using either their basic attack moves or their various skills that are unlocked as they get higher in level. The damage they do, and the damage they suffer, depends on their type (Vaccine, Virus, Data and free) and on their elemental types, like fire, water and wind. This had me baffled for a bit, there’s so much to tweak here! I’m pretty sure I’m not exactly building the most perfect team, but I seem to get along rather nicely in the game. Plus it’s so cool to see the Digimon in my party loping along beside me!

So much to do at the DigiLab

The DigiLab is a the digital hub for your Digimon. There’s the DigiBank, where you can organize your party, digivolve or even de-digivolve them and DigiConvert your scanned new Digimon.

Here you will find the DigiFarm where the critters you don’t immediately need can level up. You can feed them as they frolic around, and give them a command: they can train, which enhances their abilities. You can have them develop, which means creating items for you or you can have them investigate, discovering new cases for you and items. That will keep them busy!

At the DigiLab you can let your fighting party recover from their efforts, there’s a terminal where you can buy things like symbols and other items to increase EXP points for your critters, or give them other stat changes.

From here you can visit the mirror dungeon, a digital space with various kinds of Digimon. So if you’re low on scan percentage to get new Digimon, you can visit these spaces or digital networks. A nice way to fill up your field guide.

And finally, you can access the Colosseum where you can access Network Battles. To be honest, I didn’t explore this, I felt too unsure about what my team could do to give this a try. But if you enjoy battling, this is the place to be!

The visuals are bright and colorful

The visuals are bright, colorful and crisp. There’s a marked difference between the digital dungeons and the real world surrounding. The dungeons feel somewhat sterile and can get repetitive, but then maybe that’s just what digital dungeons should look like. The real world surroundings are much more detailed and beautiful: for instance, in Broadway, where the detective office is, you can even see little maps of the shopping mall on the walls to show you where you are.

The way the girls are depicted in the game is a bit strange to me, with detective Kyoko in an outfit no one would wear to work. But I guess that’s just typical of some Japanese oriented games. The soundtrack is good with some catchy tunes. Bandai Namco decided to keep the original Japanese voices, where I would have liked English spoken text instead.

No regrets for buying this game!

Looking back I can safely say that Digimon has found another fan in me. I didn’t regret for one moment that I downloaded the game on a whim, and I will be on the lookout for any new Digimon game that’s released. I know I don’t have to convince any longtime fans, but for those of you who, like me, are new to the Digimon world: this is a good adventure RPG that will give you a good story, good gameplay, the fun of finding more than 250 Digimon and assembling your best team.

 

17 comments

    1. If it’s a tough battle, I do switch over. But I have yet to find how the mons effect each other. In Pokemon I knew which would be best against which!

  1. Eek, I wouldn’t dare use auto-battle in this game. It consumes so much MP when most of the time the digimon could be killed in one or two hits. Especially since I spend a long time in each new section so I can get the 200% digi-convert data of all the digimon in the area. I’d have to spend a fortune restoring that MP.

    But to each his own. If it works for you, that’s great. I wouldn’t recommend it on the longer dungeons though, since you have to save items for the boss and the warp points to Mirei’s place don’t always come at a convenient time.

    1. Alright, so maybe I’m going at it all wrong judging by all of your reactions, lol. But when I like have to go into Kowloon in the lower levels, it’s so boring to have to fight the same enemies again and again.

      1. If you still want to get through the easy battles quickly without using MP, the best way to do it is to have a digimon of each type in your active party: vaccine, virus and data. Yes, each digimon has an elemental sub-type that adds to the effectiveness of the attacks, but in my experience the primary types is enough. With a balanced party like that, you should be killing lower leveled digimons in one hit if you use its effective type against it, two at most.

  2. I’m mostly anti-auto-battle in most games. It’s fun for me to experiment with different moves against various enemies. Maybe I’m just weird though. Oh, and saving on the MP usage is a nice side-effect.

  3. Nice review! Cyber Sleuth has a great story and characters. It doesn’t feel very Digimon-like from what I’ve seen so far. I love it for being different though. And having been a fan of Digimon since I was younger, I love seeing all the creatures!

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