Digimon’s kitchen sink approach to monster designs and mechanics combine to create a Digiworld so much more fun than logging on IRL.
Life would be so much better if our digital world was more like the one in Digimon Story Time Stranger. Unlike real life, where logging on can feel like walking straight through the gates of hell, my first trip to the land of ones and zeros in Time Stranger is the happiest a game’s made me all year. Beautifully paying off several slow burn hours spent exploring the hyper-modern cleanliness of Tokyo and its grungy concrete sewers, the so-called Digiworld is a joyous explosion of life, color, and personality. And it owes every ounce of that joy to its oddball citizens.
Everywhere you look in Central Town, the digital city a large chunk of Time Stranger centers on—every nook and cranny and rooftop and window, inside every trashcan and on every discarded box, floating through the sky and crawling up power lines—are Digimon of every size and shape you could imagine. There’s the squishy Tanemon rushing in and out of a baby-sized door in the wall. Gekomon serenading a crowd. Literal Satan, Devimon, trying to relax with a cold one at the bar.
It’s a place packed dense with nothing but great little guys, weirdo friends just waiting to be made, and its bustling energy perfectly captures what separates Time Stranger from its monster-catching contemporaries, like the Nintendo Switch’s Pokémon Legends: Z-A.
There are no balls to chuck at wild Digimon’s heads, no dance of weakening your enemy without knocking them out, no pushing on the down button as hard as you can because some kid on the playground said that makes it easier to catch the bird you want. No, appropriate for creatures born from data, it’s all about the numbers here.
Beating any Digimon—say, the adorable Patamon in Time Stranger automatically raises its analysis percentage. Whoop enough Patamon to raise that number to 100 (or 200 for a stat boost) and you’re free to summon one of your very own, at which point Patamon’s percentage resets and starts again. Rinse and repeat for every single Digimon you encounter; no chance or guesswork required.
