[h1]Intro[/h1]
Digimon Story Cyber Sleuth Complete Edition is two games in one package, including Cyber Sleuth, and the sequel Hacker’s Memory that happens concurrently with Cyber Sleuth, with many same characters making appearances. Cyber Sleuth took me 72 hours to finish, including some level grinding, and though Hacker’s Memory is technically two chapters shorter, I ended up spending more time because I did more level farming. Taken together, the whole package can easily take over a hundred hours to finish, which considering the cheap price at discount, you could say there’s lots of game for the money.
[h1]Structure and Raising[/h1]
Both as monster collecting RPGs featuring turn-base combat, Cyber Sleuth (and Hacker’s Memory) have noticeable differences from the more popular Pokémon series. For starters, rather than traveling places to places in Pokémon, Cyber Sleuth (and Hacker’s Memory) is entirely story driven, taking places within multiple scenes and dungeons with very based map design.
Secondly, raising a Pokémon is a very straightforward process that mostly just requires reaching level threshold. Raising a Digimon is more complicated because given enough steps, one Digimon can evolve into any Digimon. Therefore, planning an evolution route is quite essential. As you have to meet various requirements to evolve, some evolution routes are easier than others, and you may also go out of the route to pick up useful skills that a Digimon doesn’t acquire naturally. Not to mention there are some cumbersome steps you have to do to meet certain evolution requirements and optimize your Digimon stats, like devolution and evolution repeatedly many times.
[h1]Combat[/h1]
Lastly, the turn-based combat is vastly different. Since you always send three Digimon into combat and many encounters have special mechanics in play, combat is more in-depth and requires more strategic thinking. You have to build a team that supplement each other’s type, attribute, and role, harvest synergy from different passives, special moves and skills, and make strategy according to situations. There’s also online PvP matchmaking for additional challenges, but unfortunately, I couldn't make it work. Anyway, if you already like Pokémon games but think they are too simple, this game may scratch your itch, offering a more involved raising and combat experience.
[h3](That’s enough reading if you are just looking for buying advice.)[/h3]
I think combat is very fun and engaging, and many encounters serve as callbacks to some classic episodes of the anime. And as someone who grew up watching the Digimon anime, it is pretty cool to fight alongside some of my favorite Digimon. However, in the late game and post-game, enemies have very high physical and magical defenses, therefore normal attacks deal dismal damage. What’s worse, enemies are usually immune to debuffs and status effects, while also having special moves and mechanics that make battles increasingly difficult the longer they last. As a result, the game heavily favors Digimon with penetrating attacks (ignore defense), turning a combat system with diverse strategy into more of a DPS check. In a game that puts emphasis on team building and strategy variety, this feels like somewhat defeating the purpose of having such a combat design in the first place.
[h1]Other Small Things[/h1]
Being the most successful Digimon game before Time Stranger, this game offers a lot beyond combat and Digimon raising. A big part of appeal is the Digimon themselves - their designs are cool, creative, colorful, and sometimes downright crazy. The music is low-key wonderful, although the Digilab theme can get quite tiring hearing it so many times. And the story (both Cyber Sleuth and Hacker’s Memory) is highly entertaining. It is mostly kid-friendly, as you would expect from Digimon franchise, but from time to time, the game suddenly drops some unexpectedly "not-family-friendly" lines out of nowhere, making me almost spit out my drink, but admittedly, this also makes some very funny moments.
[h1]Story[/h1]
The story clearly isn’t meant to be taken seriously - you beat a dude in a Digimon battle, and somehow that is enough to make him decide to stop doing bad things. That kind of cheesy storytelling is part of the charm, but the plot surrounding [spoiler]Arata’s betrayal and return[/spoiler] in Cyber Sleuth is exceptionally unconvincing and poorly justified. More importantly, this whole plot is just utterly pointless, only wasting the appearance of [spoiler]Gallantmon, who just shows up, does nothing, and disappears.[/spoiler]
Fortunately, the rest of Cyber Sleuth’s story is fairly solid, andHacker’s Memory has an even better story. Both stories feel quite slow around chapters 8 and 9, but thankfully, they both pick up the pace afterward and become much more exciting.
[h1]Graphics[/h1]
Originally released in 2015 and 2017, the complete edition was ported to PC in 2019. Therefore, the graphics look dated, and some areas look particularly rough on my 2K monitor, but it is perfect for Steam Deck, since the small screen makes some of those visual shortcomings far less noticeable, but you have to set the game to run on fullscreen on other device in advance so that it can work perfectly on Steam Deck.
[h1]Menu and UI[/h1]
Unfortunately, the cumbersome UI and menu design is beyond saving. The game constantly makes you move between separate menus that is logically connected and should be put in the same layer, for example, going to one menu to move Digimon, then back out and enter the same looking menu to evolve or devolve. This kind of repetition design appears on multiple frequently used menus, and it is frustrating because with so much back-and-forth, it is surprisingly easy to make mistakes and lose track of what you were trying to accomplish in the first place.
There are a lot of things to keep track of - devolution/evolution routes, skill acquisition, stat distribution, and so on, these all vary from one Digimon to another, and the poorly visualized menu makes it quite overwhelming at times - the Digilab management menu displays long lists of Digimon names across multiple identical-looking pages. I often found my brain went completely blank looking at the menu, lost among long lists of names as I tried to find the individual Digimon I wanted to manage, while struggling to remember what had planned for it. I eventually had to write down the plans and steps just to keep track of everything.
[h1]The Grinding and Complexity[/h1]
Lastly, there is the problem of grinding. ABI determines a Digimon’s max level and bonus stats and can only be increased through repeated devolution and evolution, both of which reset level to 1. This means a lot of EXP grinding is required, and unless you get the three Platinum Numemon and nine tactician USBs setup, which I doubt you can get until late game, level farming can be quite a chore.
Some Digimon cannot meet the stat requirements for their next evolution stage through normal leveling, while others require extensive grinding to reach a very high level for enough stats. This is where the bonus stats come into play, but making use of them is complicated. Ideally, you set the Digimon’s personality to match the stats you want, and equip Digifarm with the corresponding gear. Then, you place the Digimon in Digifarm with a leader whose personality corresponds to desired stats, and wait for stats to accumulate over real time. You may also need to get restraint chips to remove stats you don’t need, since the amount of bonus stats you can allocate is finite.
All in all, raising a Digimon is lengthy, grindy, complicated process that takes brainpower (to plan). I can see this being a major turn-off for some people and I doubt everyone can find this not boring or time-wasting. Personally, Even as a Digimon fan, I don't like the grinding and the complexity, but overall I quite enjoyed the game.
