I was always a bit more of an outlier on the playground back in the day, preferring tales of destined children contending with trauma alongside digital monsters than everyday pre-teens leaving home to collect pocket monsters. Years later, Digimon still has my heart in a way Pokemon never will. The one area of the two respective franchises where I’ve enjoyed Pokemon more than Digimon is the video games. But I continue to hold out hope, dreaming of a Digimon video game that can rival how much I enjoy Pokemon Platinum, Omega Ruby, Legends: Arceus, or Scarlet.

I’m still not sure if Digimon Story: Time Stranger is that game. The latest in the Digimon Story series, you play as a secret agent in Tokyo, Japan who witnesses a city-leveling disaster and then suddenly travels eight years into the past. With your knowledge of what’s to come, you have to investigate the mystery surrounding the coming disaster. Your actions twist the world and reshape history, plunging you and your allies through alternate timelines. Your investigation also leads into the Digital World, a parallel reality where Digimon live–you can befriend and train these digital monsters as partners to use while in conflict with Digimon that mean you harm.

As you might have surmised given the name, the Digimon Story series has regularly told their stories very well–the focus of the series has been to submerge the player in narrative-rich experiences. Gameplay has been the part of this series that can be very hit-or-miss, and I’m not sure Time Stranger bucks that trend.

I didn’t get to play too much of Time Stranger at Summer Game Fest–about 20 minutes in total. After exploring a hub-like area and seeing various Digimon (including a fun Digimon Adventure 02 easter egg of Veemon, Hawkmon, Armadillomon, and Wormmon hanging out together), I played through two fights: a quick bout against a bunch of smaller Digimon, and then the first few turns of a boss battle against Parrotmon. Time Stranger’s turn-based combat is built on a Rock, Paper, Scissors framework–certain digital monsters resist attacks of specific types, and are weak to other types.

Time Stranger uses the franchise’s long-used Data, Vaccine, Virus format, in which Virus corrupts Data, Data rewrites Vaccine, and Vaccine cures Virus. A Digimon of a specific type tends to mostly learn moves of that type, but stronger ones can learn from at least two different types to help cover for weaknesses.

It’s pretty straightforward to pick up. Whenever a new Digimon shows up, there’s some detective work needed on the player’s part to figure out whether you’re dealing with a Data, Vaccine, or Virus type, but simple experimentation with a variety of moves will reveal the result. It’s not very hard, especially with only three options.

The potential issue I see is that, to make this dynamic more challenging, Time Stranger seems to have opted for making opponents have very large health bars. After playing through one round of combat against Parrotmon, I had deduced its type and which of my Digimon were best suited to fighting it–I switched out my Virus team members who would take extra damage from Parrotmon’s Vaccine attacks, and directed my Data allies to leap into the fray. For the next three rounds, I pumped the same super-effective attacks into Parrotmon over and over. But even though my attacks were doing massive damage and Parrotmon’s attacks were reduced to negligible numbers, I was only knocking off a tiny chunk of the boss’s health bar each round. After the four rounds I played, Parrotmon still had over three-quarters of its health, and no new enemy had shown up, meaning the only thing left to do was keep clicking on my tried-and-true strategy for several more turns.

Had I kept playing, I imagine the initial thrill of strategically reacting to Parrotmon’s type and implementing a winning strategy would have dulled into tedium as I needed to keep chipping away at the giant parrot with the same moves over and over. There’s no way to know for sure that would have happened, as my hands-on time with the demo ended there, and I didn’t see what happened next, but that grind isn’t appealing. It tries to create difficulty by making a boss fight longer than a traditional fight, not by making it more complex and incentivizing you to think about what move to use next.

This has been an ongoing issue with Digimon games for years–I actually expressed similar complaints with Digimon Survive back in 2022, which made fights “more difficult” by making each subsequent encounter last longer and longer. It did include one of the two non-standard Digimon types, Free, but that all-resistant type just made certain fights last even longer. I would have much preferred Variable/Hybrid boss battles–Digimon that change their type mid-fight, forcing an opponent to adjust their strategy on the fly. With that, Survive might have been more than another Digimon game with a great story and okay gameplay.

Much in the way Survive immediately pulled me in with its likable characters and kept wowing me with its timey-whimey narrative, what I’ve seen so far of Time Stranger’s story is intriguing. Like past Digimon games, I think that’s where the game is going to excel. I loved exploring the hub area in the early part of the demo and seeing Digimon use their traditionally violent powers for everyday tasks, like Zudomon wielding its lightning-generating hammer to build tools as a blacksmith. The culture of the Digital World has never been a huge part of any of the games or anime, so having a hub that delves into that sounds exciting.

I left the demo of Time Stranger once again wishing for a Digimon game that would just be a visual novel. That said, I feel like I haven’t had a chance to give Time Stranger’s combat a fair shake–I only played one minor fight and part of a single boss fight. I was told that the two fights I played will occur about midway through the story, so it stands to reason that they’re a fairly accurate representation of what combat will be like throughout Time Stranger. But it was a demo, and other fights might be wildly different. Heck, if other fights at least see you face off against multiple Digimon of various types, I think the game could deliver a decently strategic gameplay experience. That’s just not what I saw at Summer Game Fest.

We don’t have long to wait and see what the final game will be like. Digimon Story: Time Stranger is set to launch for Xbox Series X|S, PS5, and PC on October 3.

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