Digimonstory: Cyber Sleuth – review

Greetings noble readers! It’s time to strap on our goggles, grab our crests, our Digivice and dive straight into the world of the most recent game of the Digimon franchise; Digimonstory: Cyber Sleuth. I can’t tell you all just how happy I am that another Digimon game made it across the pond, it has been a long long time since Digimon World: Dawn and Dusk came out for the Nintendo DS and while there are more recent games they never made it over here. Right, I suppose we should get on with the nitty gritty stuff before I slobber over this review sounding like a fangirl screaming KAWAI and referring to characters with all the suffixes in place…

Cyber Sleuth was released in Japan a full year before any other region, so online battling should be either dead, highly competitive or us westerners will be getting our backsides handed to us by the mightiest Digimon the games has to offer and , oh sweet Jesus, is there a lot of them. The game boasts a mighty two hundred and forty of our favourite digital critters for us to create, raise and save the real and digital world with, but I’m getting ahead of myself here. So, as I was saying: The game itself was released in Japan March 2015, along side the announcements for the 15th anniversary of the anime where the viewers return to see the original digi-destined of the first series grown up and reunited with their Digimon. North America and Europe had to wait until February, 2016 for the game to be released over the PSN for us. That being said, it’s amazing we ever got it, the Digimon franchise has been repeatedly kicked to death by Pokémon and only ever had a cult following. The game was developed by Media Vision and published by Bandai Namco Entertainment, Yup same people who give us Dark Souls hardcore gamers, be impressed. That being said, when it first came out in the EU there were reports on various sites about copies selling out fast and even those with the foresight to pre-order their copies were waiting an extra two weeks for the game itself. I personally forgot about Sleuth getting too excited about Adventure tri and only picked it up a couple of days ago. But enough rabbiting on, lets get on with some more of the facts.

How does it look? Pretty darn good if you ask me! While the Pokémon franchise has been developing their 3d models it seems sleuths been doing the same, the Digimon in this are gloriously recreated, breathing a new level of awe and life into the franchise, while it has some of the same feel as earlier games (namely the Digimon world games for the DS) you can’t argue with the level of detail the designers went into. Interesting titbit, character designs were done by Suzuhito Yasuda, better know for Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor and Durarara!!! Anyway, from the character design, I’d imagine it’s geared towards the teenage audience, ALL THE GLORIOUS FAN SERVICE. Ahem, sorry, but there’s cat maids and revealing outfits for a few main and side characters. Aside from that, the character design is what you would expect, stylised in the same way many games adapted from anime are, large eyes, strange body proportions, don’t get me wrong it’s a far way away from actual ecchi but some are definitely toeing that line tentatively.

Right, Game play next: there is a wealth of stuff to do with this game. It’s obviously an RPG ’cause they’re my jam, but offers multiplayer features, like online battles both ranked and casual. The story mode is lengthy, as is to be expected of any Digimon games, I’m forty hours into my first play through and there’s still a whole lot ahead of me, the game boasts a hefty 20 chapters of story, I won’t reveal any of it, as I’ve dropped spoilers far too often in my life, and if that pace is too fast for you there are more than enough side missions to keep the game going as well as some DLC, which will be purchased as soon as I’m finished with the main story line and the challenges that follow. The battle system is the same as other games, turn based, when a Digimon attacks, defends, changes or uses a skill, the order of active monster is related to the speed stat, same as in Pokémon but lacking priority moves. Sorry, I know I keep mentioning Pokémon in an article devoted to a Digimon game but it is very hard not to. There are also a few puzzles in the game designed to force a player to grind through monster battles to unlock their hacker skills, be it disabling a firewall, decoding encrypted data files or copy and pasting the correct colour key into the right lock as well as a few to make gameplay more rapid, like reducing or increasing the number of encounters, which was a nice spin on things.  What else…right yeah, non linear evolution. Perhaps, my favourite thing about Digimon games is the lack of defined family routes, Agumon does not just become Greymon but a whole host of different digimon, some obvious as some fans learned from their days of playing Digimon World on the PS1, some just honestly surprising. Obviously at the very start we get given our Digimon, the choices are broken down into each attribute: vaccine, virus and data, while I don’t necessarily enjoy the choices offered for each of these families, the non linear evolution will allow you to take your “partner” and change them into your ideal Digimon, that being said I got hold of a Bukamon and kicked my Palmon into the second active slot. Did I mention you have three active Digimon at any given time with a a handful of reserve Digimon, level and numbers dictated by the amount of memory you have, which is goo because blasting one partner up to mega too early would cripple the game. That being said, the normal mode of the game is laughably easy and hard mode is, well, hard. Seems there’s no middle ground to be had here.

There are a handful of Easter eggs in there too, have fun finding them, my personal favourite was: “a ball to stuff captured monsters into” there’s probably more in that section of dialogue but that’s the one that made me chuckle, like the writers just dropped the mic and walked off stage.

While you don’t capture digimon as a whole, like in Digimon battle online, an mmo by joymax (I think) when a digimon appears you get a percentage of it’s data (up to a maximum of 200%), from this you can recreate the digimon, the higher the percentage the higher the maximum level the digimon can reach and the higher ABI it has, I’m not terribly sure what ABI is, ive been referring to it as aptitude from the older DS games, the higher it is the higher the max level and a high ABI is required for some digivolutions. There’s a brief explanation flung in at the last moment just as I was about to send this article off….anyway back to the rest of these mad ramblings.

One thing that needs to be said, as with any game from Japan, the translation can be a pain, creatures at some point in the game called “Eaters” are inexplicably changed to Bakemon later in the game. While Bakemon is available as tamable digimon in game, I was confused as to why the charcters started calling these creatures after the digi…

Onto the features. Aside from the online battling the game offers a cross-save function, this is because while the game was released for the PS4, the game also runs on the PSvita (HUZZAH for legacy tech). Cross save essentially allows you to transfer saved game data from the hand held to the console and back again, meaning you never have to be too far away from your beloved Digimon for long. Oh and there is New Game +, basically, you’ve beaten the game but want to go through it again with out having to start fresh with those horrible horrible early choice Digimon, it also keeps your farm islands intact, scan data intact, etc etc. I’ll hopefully be abusing this function before long and on a harder difficulty setting, I hit normal in order to speed run this to write this article, did not work at all, still got nine chapters to go…but yeah….