One of Digimon’s biggest strengths has always been its ability to lean into nostalgia, and that’s no different in Digimon Story: Time Stranger, the seventh entry in the franchise’s role-playing-focused gaming series. Like past Digimon Story games, Time Stranger puts a big emphasis on narrative, but this time around, it was the creature collecting and turn-based battles that made me want to keep playing long after my three-hour preview session ended.
Instead of children and teens, Time Stranger’s protagonist is an adult secret agent investigating Digimon-related phenomena. I started my playthrough right from the beginning of the story, where we see the effects of the Digital World on real-world Earth. You can choose whether the protagonist is male or female, and the other one becomes a character in the story: your partner who communicates with you through a pocket-sized hologram. The intro sets the stage for the clash between two worlds with regular citizens talking about news of unexplained disasters and protestors even accusing authorities of withholding secrets.
But that’s all just a backdrop for the meat of what I got to play. The Digimon Story sub-series gets its name from its narrative-driven core which is, typically, complemented by turn-based gameplay. “Battle balance” is one of the main areas that producer Ryosuke Hara focused on, similar to what he did when working on Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot. At 36 years old, he was part of the target audience for the series when Digimon Adventure launched in 1999.