Digimon Story Time Stranger is truly one of the best JRPGS of this season and it´s definitely the best one of the franchise, improving on everything good its predecesor Cyber Sleuth did. I´m having a blast playing this game!

It has everything, a great story that gets you invested to continue progressing through the game. Cool, charming and awesome characters and Digimon. A battle system that seems easy to use but it definitely takes skill to master. A "breeding" system that has layers on how to optimize and yet its very good and simple to understand and incredible cutscenes that will keep you watching and a fantastic voice acting for ALL Digimon, signature moves and actions, all these things are just the base on what you can expect from this game.

Starting with the Digimon, in my opinion, the most important thing of the game. Having THAT MUCH Digimon to use, to discover, to learn to love and to use in battle is the greatest gift for someone that has been an active fan for years and years. The models of the digimon are STUNNING, the voice acting TOP NOTCH and the animations and cut scenes that every individual Digimon has, its truly a piece of art. While playing I´ve come to love even more the Digimon that I already liked (Lobomon and its evolutionary line are here!!!), and I´ve also learned to get more attached to other Digimon that I´ve never thought before (Raremon and All variants of Ogremon have just gained a piece of my appreciation).

I do feel a bit sad however that not all well digimon are included in the game, I do specially feel sad that not all Frontier Digimon are in the game, and I also wish that more Digimon from Data Squad and X cross where included. Also, missing every Digimon from Appli Monsters, Ghost Stories and even from the new Digimon series Beatbreak feels not right, but, I do keep my hopes up that they get included somehow as part of the planned DLCs of the game.

The dificulty of the game is also something incredible, even playing at the normal dificulty, there are some Boss battles that will take your money worth, trust me that you´ll lose a couple of fights and you´ll probably feel the necessity to adjust your strategy, which if you ask me, is great! More reasons to adjust and repeat! I can´t wait to complete the story for the first time and do it all over again in Plus mode, which will make everything even more challenging!

I definitely enjoy my time every day that I login to play a couple of hours, I can even say that the story is longer than I expected, which makes me happy knowing that even at +50 hours, there is still more game to play.

Will all good said, there are definitely some things that can be improved or that feel bad in some way. My biggest concern is that if you love grinding as much as I do, if you don´t have the DLCs for EXP dungeons, it becomes a very slow task, since you´ll need to repeat areas a lot to spawn Digimon to repeat a lot of times, and since they are intended as obstacles rather than XP farms, it becomes teddious to repeat, specially if you are constantly evolving and deevoling. Another concern that I have is that, at times, the Story progresses in ways that prevent you to get items and side quests if you miss your queue. For example, you can lose some important items to digievolve if you do the prelude too quickly without exploring or without knowing what items to get. You´ll need to wait quite some time until you reach a point in the story were you can get the items/complete the side quests you missed.

Some details about monetization are also not appealing, specially having already DLCs at the moment of launch, things that could be on the base game like the XP, Gold or Material dungeons DL. For the music DLC I can understand, even for the customes, as they don´t affect the experience of the game at all, but, due to the game being all about grinding to best yourself and the bosses that you fight, the dungeons DLC do feel like a necessity, I just wish that they were part of the base game.

All in all, this game is truly the best one in the Digimon franchise, it definitely has a lot more positives than negatives. As someone that has been a fan of digimon for the past +20 years, that have watched every show, played every game, and has made of Digimon something meaningfull and constant in my life, this game does archieve what I´ve always wanted from a Digimon game, even with its flaws, this is truly the pinacle of the Digimon game franchise, I can´t wait to see what comes in the future, and I remain hopefull that this is a good step stone for all future Digimon games.

This game is awesome!