Growing up, I had heard of Digimon. I never truly got into it though. I could see how they were different from Pokemon and I can respect that they largely filled different roles. Digimon were just an evolution of the Tamagotchi craze that hit the US when I was a child. I do remember watching the show for a bit but it never had the long lasting influence on me like Pokemon did.
That said, this was a decent adventure but with a few flaws. To start off, the story is okay. It is a pretty standard fair and there are some "twists" but they are often foreshadowed to the point that it is obvious to anybody paying attention. Although, the story is hampered by weird translation and dialogue issues. It feels like the game was translated in the 90's but it came out in 2016. It isn't so bad that you can't tell what is going on but it definitely is funky enough to leave the player scratching their head in a couple scenes.
I was pleasantly surprised by the soundtrack too. Starting it up, I was greeted with what sounded like a very familiar theme. As I went through the game, several tracks sounded very similar to other games I had previously played but I couldn't put my finger on which. I had to look up the composer for this game and sure enough, it is by the same person that made the excellent OST for the Danganronpa games. Nothing really stands out but the music was good enough for me to make a note of it while playing.
The meat of the game revolves around two things: the main story plot and the various "cases" you get while being a Cyber Sleuth. It isn't just part of the title, it is what you are doing in the game. It helps drive the narrative but there were a couple of times where I did get lost. Even the two hint systems were confused as to what I was supposed to do, I ended up just wandering around trying to find an NPC with an ! over their head to progress. A little annoying because the game vaguely told me where to go but the translation kind of messed it up to where it didn't make much sense. There is lots of side stuff to do as well but they are mostly fetch or kill quests. I did a few but didn't need to do them to make progress.
The meat of the game is really the Digimon collecting and battling. You can have a total of 11 monsters in your party at a time, with three in battle. The key to winning is learning the weakness triangle and exploiting it. Going up against a boss with a Vaccine type? Switch your party to three Data types and largely go unchallenged. This doesn't work for the whole game as about midway through, you start fighting things that just have too high stats and you slog through slow fights trading blows. Even if you have a really good team, some enemies are boosted to be annoying.
Collecting Digimon is easy. You can either get a new one from fighting more and more of them in battle and just making one yourself. The problem with this is that new Digimon have abyssmal ABI stats. The ABI stat is only needed to make the best Digimon through digivolution. If you don't meet the ABI requirement, you can't make some of the best monsters. It lead to times where I was simply leveling my monsters up and down just to raise that number high enough to get them to a form I wanted. It felt a little unnecessary as there were other stats that would prevent digivolutions if you hadn't taken care of them or raised them appropriately. Although annoying, I still ended up with a solid enough team to beat the game.
If you are a huge Digimon fan, definitely pick up this game. You will surely see a lot of your favorites running around and it is a pretty decent adventure. If you are looking for a super deep story or gameplay, you won't find it but there is some strategy in some of the fights and near infinite party setups as most monsters are viable in their final forms. Just don't go into this expecting the best game ever.
