Back when I was still a kid, less than ten years of age, I remember watching the Digimon cartoons on TV and wanting to one day have my own Digimon. Even though a game will still not satisfy the wish to actually have my own monster, it will certainly calm it down and let me lose myself in the world of Digimon, fight alongside them and watch them in awe as they stand there, mighty creatures made of binary and awesomeness.
In Digimon Story Cybersleuth, the story begins with your character being part of an online group who regularly meets up to pass time away in the company of each other. One day though, a mysterious user logs in their chatroom, inviting them for a meet up. Among the three who accept this meet is your character, who you get to control right after the episode. It is from there that you get to slowly create your own story with the Digimon, a story which takes a sudden lift off when your character is spat out of the digital world, but instead of taking back the physical form of old, your character is now just a mass of data, a mystery to the world. It is from then that, with the help of a detective who proclaims herself to be the best around in these kinds of phenomena, you start to uncover the mystery of what is happening with the hackers and Digimon.
As always when it comes to JRPGs, combat takes centre stage in the game. The fighting instances of the game take place in the traditional turn-based combat system, with one move allowed per character. In the beginning, or at least as it proved to be on hard mode, a lot of items were consumed and battles were quite tough for your low levelled Digimon. While this could just have been a simple design decision from the developers, it can also be taken as a signal to not be afraid to go all out with your items, like in many other JRPGs. I have probably played 20 hours of Final Fantasy X without ever wanting to use a single item, except for the Phoenix Down, which obviously is the essential consumable in Final Fantasy titles. After two battles I realized that I consumed 3 out of a possible 4 items, which while not really good for progression, makes you think about item choices and purchases.
Talking about these battles and hard mode, I also want to put forward the fact that the random battles may have been too much at the beginning of the game, resulting in probably having the game over screen show to me for a good ten times before I managed to make any solid progression. While difficulty is certainly not an issue, we are talking here of frustration, since also the game does not revert to a save point automatically but taken back to the menu and then load again and all that.
It would not be Digimon if Agumon was not featured, and thank god he is! He makes quite an early appearance when he is frolicking with Nokia (no they were not using cell phones, Nokia is a girl in the game) alongside Gabumon, probably two of the most loved Digimon of all time. And with good reason thanks to their badass digi-evolutions. Evolutions of which there will be a lot in the game, all of which recreated so well it almost feels as if you are still watching the anime back then. The battle animations are quite solid as well, and while not perfectly recreating the anime, they certainly do their work to put us further into Digi-world and less in our world.
When taking apart the graphics and the sound of the game, one can say that it is quite a joy to play, thanks to an array of vivid colours which never feel boring, coupled with a good soundtrack which accompanies the game well. Dialogue though is certainly a thing I would have done better, since your characterβs speech is generally displayed as a ?! and it is up to the other characters to tell us what the main one said, thanks to them asking back every single piece of information we may have told them. It is a weird design decision, one which disengages players from paying attention to the conversations between characters, but if one is able to look above that, the story in itself is quite fun and interesting.
Digimon Story CyberSleuth is the second Digimon game I have played, after Digimon World 4 on the PlayStation 2, and obviously the former game trumps the latter one. Cybersleuth presents a solid story, with the Digimon setting and battles making it all the more interesting for fans of the series, while newcomers can also have a good time since ultimately this is a game and not an actual part of the series.
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