Digimon Story Time Stranger

Every market we collect.

Latest in each market: best JP #32, worst AU #100 · 12 markets collected

US · last 30 days

Matched by title — a reused name can pair the wrong games. * is a critic aggregate. Prices and positions are each store's United States storefront; Epic charts worldwide. Audience and Score too, except Steam's, which is worldwide.

Hours played at review time, across 1.3K reviews with recorded playtime.

positive critical· bar length = how often the theme comes up

I used to be a huge Pokemon fan (still am of the older games up to and including X & Y), starting with Blue & Red editions. I never liked Digimon because the design just doesn't speak to me. However, a friend really bugged me about giving this game a try and I have to say I was completely blown away. Digimon Story Time Stranger is everything Pokemon games should be at this point. While they are stuck with outdated, stagnant gameplay and horrendous graphics and world design, Digimon Story Time Stranger is a really beautiful game with engaging and at times challenging gameplay, especially if you give mega+ a shot. While I still don't personally enjoy how digimon look, that is completely subjective and down to taste and shouldn't deter anybody else from enjoying the game. I also absolutely and unreservedly recommend this game to anybody who used to enjoy the classic Pokemon games for their gameplay. DSTS updates the classic system with a bunch of really good quality of life improvements to make min/maxing and training less tedious without removing complexity. And even though the game is still fully turn based, it never feels slow or stagnant. You can speed up combat up to 5 times (I used this for trash mobs) and then slow down to enjoy in combat talk and brilliant attack animations for pivotal fights. If you back track to an early area and have spent a good amount of time grinding your digimon, you can essentially skip all combat with a sort of sneak attack that can - if you're powerful enough - kill enemies without entering turn based combat. You still get to farm the digimon you beat and don't lose out on experience or loot. Some of the level design, the way the game progresses from semi-open world to backtrackable open world and some of the puzzles also strongly reminded me of Final Fantasy X, which is one of my favorite 3 games of all time. If I had to name a negative, it would probably be one of the later levels, where you progress through the map by picking certain dialogue options. While the options are humerous at first, you have to go throug most of them two or three times and there is a total of 15 or 20 if you want to check every nook and cranny of the map. You also have to watch the full animation and dialogue window every time. It became less humerous and more tedious after about the fifth dialogue. But overall, that entire map probably takes up 20 minutes, including random combat encounters. So definitely not a huge negative.