One question persisted above all else while slogging through Cyber Sleuth and Hacker's Memory.
Who is this game *for*?
It's not that concerned with catering to Digimon fans. Cyber Sleuth considers Digimon such an afterthought that is comes off as a game developed as an original property that was purchased by the Digimon IP and rebranded. Hacker's Memory is also not about Digimon - it involves them more, but both games are chiefly about cyberspace and the fantastical dangers of projecting oneself into an emerging online meeting space - one where people are mostly restrained into appearing as their actual physical bodies.
So if it's not for Digimon fans, who else is this for? Players who enjoy a mystery to solve, a sleuth story with crimes and intrigue? That's not what this is either. The storyline is tepid in CS and never approaches anything like a mystery story. Every plot point feels like the first thing a non-writer came up with, planted directly into the narrative with no cause or subtext. HM fares slightly better because it engages with more seriously written characters and a plot that focuses on the actual mechanics and lifestyle of hacking, but still pulls random beats and shrugs off anything resembling gravitas. Both games suffer from awful player direction, hints that can only be read in Japanese in the environment, nonsense sidequests, and underwhelming pacing that forces you to pause your attempts to help save the world to take on useless busywork.
More seriously, these games display a lacking, even rather concerning opinion on women and girls in general. The male characters push the plot, take action, and speak like an imaginary person might. The female characters, every one of them, are underdressed stereotypes that portray, instead of a person who has inner thoughts and ideas, a typical set of solvable stock traits for the male player to catalogue and understand. The tsundere, the dandere, the bakadere. Kyoko Kuremi introduces herself via her fully open shirt and has, instead of a personality, a running gag about not knowing how to make coffee, which bleeds into the sequel game and is never funny even a single time.
This attitude is pervasive and inescapable. Almost all female characters act and make decisions like a 5-year-old might, beholden not to their own internal logic, but to a balance of adhering to their assigned anime trope while constantly communicating romantic availability to the player character. Although you can choose a female avatar in CS, the game presumes you to be male to continue to cater to imaginary sexual exploits with teenagers. In HM, you can ask a girl with an 8-year-old digital avatar whether she finds you attractive.
To get the good points out of the way - the visuals of both games are well designed and nicely realised. The environments are pleasant, and the Digimon themselves are well rendered. The monster system is passable, all at once too complex in scope but too simple in practice. Whereas Pokemon allows you to improve your team through effort and natural gameplay, the Digimon games have long been beholden to the idea of storing your Digimon on a digital farm where they can run around and train themselves, in effect forcing you to improve their stats by not using them on your team, and storing them away if you want them to become effective, which is. Unintuitive and annoying, to say the very least.
But anything enjoyable about these two games has been overridden for me by its constant, unrelenting reminders that women are not really people. They are cutesy doe-eyed collectables that can be understood by type, and any way they interact with you - distant, shy, violent, confusing, standoffish - is merely a ploy to withhold their appreciation for you until such time as they finally relent. This game is not about Digimon. It's not about the storyline, which could've been jotted down in two seconds by someone who was busy modelling Kyoko's bra-less chest or Rie Kishibe's underwear. The plot itself is caused by and solved in defeating 'Eaters', a badly named mystery creature unique to this game, with no explanation as to what they are or who anyone should care about them.
The only unifying thing these games are about is that everything female - young girls, barely dressed women, and feminine Digimon you can own - exists to entertain you and be barely dressed in front of you. I wanted to enjoy a game where you could adventure with Digimon, where characters formed relationships with a Digimon of their own and had arcs and resolutions alongside an assigned partner - the formula that gave this series whatever popularity it enjoys. Instead of that, these games are a juvenile and obnoxious mess with zero interest in the existence of Digimon or any stories therein. To progress the game in HM, you have to rummage through a woman's underwear drawer. While the men enjoy regular, comfortable outfits suited for everyday life, most female characters can only dress themselves in flimsy sleepwear which looks completely absurd in any scene set in the faithfully rendered streets of Tokyo.
Having lost track of their narrative through the collapsing infrastructure of cyberspace, the end of both games involves time simply resetting itself - for some reason - into an alternate universe where nobody invented access to cyberspace, where humans and Digimon never meet, and therefore all problems are solved. It may be pretty bold to decide that the best reality is simply one where the events of the game never happened, but I can't help but agree, because I would've been better off not playing it as well.
If you badly want a Digimon themed experience, you might as well ignore this and try out Time Stranger on the offchance it does a better job of actually treating Digimon like an interesting part of their game.
