This article was originally published in Italian on Thegamesmachine.it in 2016.
Arriving in the West after much tribulation from a fanbase starved for years of new games centered on Bandai Namco’s digital creatures and tirelessly engaged in online campaigns to demand their return, Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth finally makes its debut in our market—though it shines with no merit beyond the name it bears. I say this because, in fact, it’s probably the worst title ever made based on the creatures known in Italy through the eponymous animated adaptation, which aired for years on RAI’s programming. After all, the rule that simply swapping out digital monsters with any variation of the “collect them all” formula guarantees a good product is far from true. Part of the blame lies with a well-worn gameplay loop that is indistinguishable from any other turn-based RPG set against the backdrop of a bland pseudo-futuristic world where reality and cyberspace intertwine with varying degrees of success. Adding to the disappointment is Suzuhito Yasuda’s character design: visually appealing, but perhaps too similar to that of the Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor series, a thematically adjacent production to Cyber Sleuth. Coincidence? We at The Games Machine think not.
First things first: in this new Digimon installment, there’s a lot of reading—a ton, really—practically the equivalent of a fifty-episode script for a Japanese animated series targeted at teenagers. That’s not inherently a problem. The interactions between characters work quite well and even include surprising references to LGBTQ+ content, discreet sexual innuendos, and deep dives into Japanese folklore and pop culture. However, what I didn’t appreciate is the game’s reluctance to deviate from the tired cliché of virtuous hacker protagonists versus a shady tech conglomerate embroiled in dubious dealings, complete with comatose individuals and all the generic amenities you’d expect from an urban fantasy tale with sci-fi elements.
The real issue is that these dynamics, expressed through excessively verbose dialogues, are effectively the game’s main appeal. Little attention is given to the creatures that lend their name to the adventure or the bonds between them and the protagonists. Not that I expected to see polygonal and shader-rendered recreations of scenarios from the early Toei animated series, but I didn’t anticipate encountering such an obvious mishmash of more or less blatant rip-offs from the Shin Megami Tensei series. As a Digimon game, Cyber Sleuth couldn’t omit the futuristic internet world called Eden, where people navigate using 3D avatars that replicate their appearances. Yet, even here, no effort was made to differentiate the two parallel realities. Walking through an internet forum and browsing the storefronts of Akihabara feels indistinguishably the same—an incredibly disappointing choice, especially when considering how the opening sequence portrays the chatroom that sets the story in motion, where the protagonists’ identities are masked by anthropomorphic avatars. These avatars, however, are never revisited or referenced again. This lack of care permeates the entire production, from the few available dungeons—which are all identical, bland, devoid of creativity or complexity, and plagued by monotonous backtracking in secondary quests—to the mechanics of raising and customizing recruitable creatures.
As I mentioned earlier, it’s pointless to expect a Pokémon clone or something similar, as Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth borrows heavily and unabashedly from Atlus’ recent productions. While games like Persona and Shin Megami Tensei demand meticulous effort in fusing demons to customize and empower them, Media.Vision and Bandai Namco’s title offers a much more accessible growth system. Here, the Digivolution of creatures is always reversible (and it’s advisable to revert them to their base state to boost certain stats, though the game doesn’t make this explicit), and grinding—earning experience in battles—is quick, thanks to an almost nonexistent challenge level.
I spent the first twenty hours of the game reading character skits and mindlessly pressing the action button during battles. The so-called “complex weakness system,” which considers not just the elemental attributes of monsters but also their digital nature, never posed a real challenge. What’s more, I managed to face supposed “bosses” by letting the auto-battle AI take over. In such an unbalanced game, sudden difficulty spikes do appear—primarily toward the end of the adventure—but when most of your time is spent yawning and playing one-handed, a couple of challenging boss fights aren’t enough to save the experience. The additional difficulty mode (exclusive to Western versions) does manage—at least partially—to address this issue.
There are several half-baked mechanics in the background, such as hacking abilities that adjust the frequency of random encounters or solve very simple environmental puzzles, or the islands where scanned (and thus “captured”) Digimon can be sent to train. Skills are unlocked depending on the types of creatures in battles and are supposed to influence team composition. Unfortunately, Digimon can be swapped out at almost any time, making this mechanic superficial and unnecessary. The islands, meanwhile, mimic browser/mobile games that require waiting for tasks to be completed, amounting to passive farming while you play digital detective on various missions. There’s also the option to engage in online battles, potentially against Japanese players who have had the game for a year now, but I never managed to find anyone online.
It’s hard to imagine this being the sole redemption opportunity for a title that, otherwise, had me pressing the action button for over forty hours in its story mode. The overall technical profile is rather barebones but supported by solid artistic direction and a vibrant color palette that helps mask the game’s shortcomings. Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth is better appreciated on the gorgeous PS Vita screen; on larger TVs, the low-budget nature becomes painfully evident, with barely adequate polygonal structures and embarrassingly poor environmental texture details. The PS4 version is simply a 1080p, 60fps port of the handheld edition. That said, the 3D modeling of the Digimon themselves is quite well done, with impressive cel-shading. It’s bittersweet to think how much this game could have benefited from richer and more polished animations, especially for the Digimon featured in the animated series and their unique combat abilities.
After such a long wait, Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth feels like a half-hearted blow. It would have taken very little for this JRPG from the creators of Wild Arms to revive the forgotten world of Bandai’s digital monsters. Yet, the virtually nonexistent gameplay balance and a general lack of care prevent me from feeling excitement, even in the presence of beloved characters from my childhood. A game that drowns in familiar tropes and a lack of originality, with a negligible challenge level and an endless parade of predictable Japanese animation clichés. To celebrate the fifteenth anniversary of Toei Animation’s series, it would have been far more interesting to see Digimon Adventure—a Japanese PSP exclusive faithfully retelling the story of the first season—translated and properly ported to PS4.
