Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth

Cyber Sleuth's human characters and story make it special

Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth plays it safe in a lot of ways, but for many of you out there, that's going to be perfectly fine. Just don't expect it to convert you if you're sworn off the formula.

To many I imagine Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth is just a colorful but simplistic role-playing game with a slow-to-start story and repetitive dungeon environments. To me it's the chance to spend hours capturing Poyomon, Digivolving it to Tokomon, reaching max level and then De-digivolving it back to Poyomon, reaching max level and Digivolving to Tokomon, then Patomon, and finally increasing Patomon's stats so it can Digivolve to Angewoman. If that sounds exciting to you, then boof!

Easily one of the most addictive RPGs on the PS4, Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth features an enjoyable story and a great setting for a fantastic monster raising system. Although many of its components aren't perfect and proceedings do drag at times, the process of building and perfecting a team of powerful digimon is just too rewarding to walk away from. The phrase "digimon are the champions" has never been more fitting.

An easy recommendation for those who watched the anime back in the day and those who have kept up with the series.

A fun place to spend 60 hours or so.

There's a decent JRPG here, if just incredibly dull. Digimon fans will find plenty to enjoy, whereas casual observers of the series will probably be better off by picking something better.

Establishing a solid foundation for which to build a successful franchise on, Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth does for Digimon what Pokémon Red/Blue did for Pokémon. It isn't perfect; its story and script could use some fine-tuning, and the world needs to be more interesting, but overall, this is a solid first step.

Cyber Sleuth and Hacker's Memory are fantastic games. I'd argue that as far as Digimon video games go, they're the absolute best we've got thus far (though I guess we'll have to see if Time Stranger takes its throne!) It's one of my favorite games of all time. The playthrough I did before writing this was my 8th one, and it likely won't be my last. There are some issues with story pacing as a result of it making you stop to do side quests, but that's nothing new, as previous games in the Digimon Story issue did the same. It improves upon previous entries in significant ways, having a much more engaging story and being significantly less of a grind. It shows its limitations a bit, the result of being a decade old handheld title, but I don't think that hurts the overall experience much. I'd absolutely suggest anyone who likes Digimon pick this up, and even say that it could be worth a play for someone who just likes monster collectors and JRPGs in general.

"Keep your friends close."