What have I been doing all this time, that was so important, that I’ve been ignoring Digimon? Here’s a series that hits a lot of the same beats as its creature collecting peers, and was borne from similar toy-forward origins, but offers seemingly much more mature storylines and significantly more reciprocal relationships between its human and monster characters. Also, some of the monsters are basically humans? What’s up with that? I’m interested in that.
Anyway, it turns out that during this time of My Own Ignorance, I was also missing some genuinely decent Digimon video games. I dabbled in the Digimon World titles way back on the PS1, but that was mainly thanks to a newfound obsession with Final Fantasy, access to pirated PS1 games, and having finished all the Final Fantasies. But here we are with Digimon Story: Time Stranger, a brand-new entry in the ongoing Story subseries of Digimon games. Like the two Cyber Sleuth games before it (and a few other games I could name), this is a creature collecting RPG with turn-based battles where you’ll need to carefully construct a killer team of eclectic beasties to fight with, and I was recently lucky enough to sample a short few hours of the upcoming game.
Time Stranger’s story puts us in the shoes of one of two potential player characters, a seemingly green member of a secret organisation called ADAMAS. This group is tasked with investigating paranormal occurrences, but it’s quickly revealed that a lot of the phenomena taking place in the game’s startlingly accurate depiction of Tokyo (video game Shinjuku has never felt so right) is because of – you guessed it – Digimon.
And so it’s here, in the burgeoning hour or so of the game, that I learned the ropes alongside one Dan Yuki, exploring a mysteriously-walled section of the city that housed dark secrets and monsters of the digital variety. Fans of this series, or at least this particular strand of anime-arse RPG should feel right at home from the stylish OP to the immediate whiplash of running through boxy hallways full of enemy encounters and scattered loot. Despite having never played a Digimon Story before, I slid right in with ease.
Battles should ring familiar to anyone who’s picked up a turn-based JRPG at one stage or another, more so if you’ve dabbled in a Shin Megami Tensei title or two. Your chosen team of Digimon will be, hopefully, equipped with move types that fare well against the opposing Digmons’ own, giving you big damage gains and other advantageous bonuses. The beautiful thing is, like the Personas of the world, fights are slick, snappy and satisfying. Your party can be swapped in and out with no turn penalty, weaknesses or affinities you discover are signposted in every subsequent fight with that enemy, and you can speed up the entire process up to 5x speed with a flick of the right stick.
Best of all, if you’re set up for success against a particular enemy group and you encounter them on the field, a simple button press will send your leader Digimon out to smack them down in one swipe, without having to enter battle at all. I love when games do this.
Overall, this was the opening section of the game and thus pretty pedestrian in terms of the scope of Digimon development and strategy. I quite admire the rapid clip at which you acquire new Digimon though. Essentially, the more you encounter a particular digital monster the more they become ‘scanned’ and, at 100%, able to be cloned for your own use. Break that 100% barrier, anywhere up to double, and you’ll get an even stronger version of the same thing. I amassed a veritable horde in just the first area, so it doesn’t seem like it’ll be much of a grind at all.
By the time I reached the first ‘boss’ fight against MetalGreymon, I was primed with an army of Digimon at my disposal, having learned to ‘Digivolve’ them through meeting specific benchmarks and also being granted the use of Cross Arts. These are game-changing moves that involve your player avatar and are earned through smart battling.Some result in buffs, others big attacks, but notably some of them seem to see your Digivice turned into a gun. I didn’t know you were allowed to do that.
One big scuffle later and it was time to fast-forward quite a ways into the game for the purposes of my preview. Dropped unceremoniously into a much more advanced save file, I found myself in the Digital World itself, in a watery, reef-like area known as The Abyss. I’m not going to pretend I had any idea of what was going on at this point – something about helping a Shellmon care for a fallen Divermon that belonged to an enemy faction, naturally playing into the backdrop of what I gather is a civil war in the world of Digimon. It’s all very anime, and much more ‘mature’ in theme than a lot of what you’d get from, say, a mainline Pokémon game. But I suppose Digimon folks already know this to be true.
This later area of the game spiced things up with a few more gameplay intricacies, like the ability to further augment your Digimons’ suite of elemental abilities by attaching new skills, or even sending them to a farm (non-sinister) to passively grow their stats over time. Previewing a dense RPG in this way just doesn’t make sense, so I’ll cop to the fact that I didn’t do a whole lot here aside from get lost in a very visually pleasing coral-adorned environment.
The short of it all is, a couple of hours just isn’t enough to fully grasp what Digimon Story: Time Stranger is doing, especially coming into this whole thing with fresh eyes. But the crucial bit is this – I am fucking with it. I plan on downloading the other Digimon Story games ahead of an upcoming trip to Tokyo, where I will binge them at every given opportunity, in the hopes that they are anywhere near as intriguing and moreish and this one is shaping up to be.
Digimon Story: Time Stranger releases on October 2, 2025 for PS5, Xbox Series X|S and PC.
Previewed on PS5 at an event hosted by Bandai Namco Entertainment Australia
Click here for more information on WellPlayed’s preview policy and ethics
