#replaying pokemon swsh now that it's been awhile since they came out. i was really disappointed with them the first time

[eri-blogs-life]

Digimon Story Cyber Sleuth

This has definitely been one of the games that I played this year.

So I have... a lot of thoughts about Digimon Story Cyber Sleuth and I wanna talk about. These thoughts might not be super contiguous or all track logically, but honestly, that’s just kind of the same as the experience that I had playing Digimon Story Cyber Sleuth (I’ll just say CS for short going forward). CS is a good game, and I enjoyed my time with it a lot, but it also is a bit baffling at times and so it’s like... I like it, I had a good time with it mostly, but there are bits that made me just feel confusion as to whether I could actually call this a good game. 

So... I’m gonna try organizing my thoughts here based on the game’s title to start, cause that seems like a fun way to start out with this writeup of my thoughts.

The Digimon

So, I’ve attempted to play through this game 3 times now. The first time, I picked up the version on PS4 second-hand from gamestop and made it maybe 4 chapters into the 20-chapter story before a better big game captured my attention. The second time, I bought the Complete Edition when it came out on Switch and attempted another playthrough. I think that time I made it 6 chapters in, but issues with the game’s difficulty and my bigger interest in other games that were out at the same time made me fall off of it. Lately, I’ve been on a kick of playing through really big JRPGs on the Switch, and I figured this was the time to really push my way through. But to do that, I had to find the fun. Because my previous times, I didn’t find it to be a ton of fun - the story was meh, the experience was extremely linear, the difficulty had weird spikes and valleys all around, and it just didn’t seem that fun. But I was recently watching a retrospective on the digimon franchise (shout out to Billiam on youtube for that if you’re interested), and while watching I came to the realization that the fun of digimon has always been different than in pokemon (the comparison to pokemon is, unfortunately, always inevitable when talking about digimon - the two were so closely intertwined in popular culture in america in the late 90s / early 00′s that it’s hard to deny there’s something to connect them)

Pokemon’s about catching them all. Digimon’s about raising a partner. Digimon started as a tamogatchi brand marketed towards boys, with cool monsters you could fight with each other. The fun of digimon has always been seeing your partner(s) grow and become new forms. And that’s where I finally found the fun in Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth.

The fun is in bonding. I found out in my second playthrough how to nickname digimon, and that became my go-to when I would get a new digimon on my team in this playthrough. Every digimon had a nickname. Early on I had a team consisting of Willis, Stinky, Specty, Babby, Evil Babby, Big Bird, Tomato, Axey, and Beedril. Over time, I got to watch these fools grow - Willis from a Terriermon into a Gallantmon CM, Stinky from a Guilmon into a Diaboromon, Specty got fused with someone called Shellby and went from Specty the Patamon to Shellspecty the Cherrymon, Babby fused with Big Bird and the two ended up as an Aeroveedramon, and so on. 

The fun of the game was in watching as these monsters I’d bonded with became stronger and changed into new and different forms. And that was the fun of the game for most of the early game for me, and continued throughout the game, mostly.

Ultimately, the game has some weird difficulty spikes at times, especially in some of the sidequests, which feel nearly impossible. I ended up focusing heavily on trying to find all my digimon final forms that had penetrating moves (moves which ignore the enemy’s defense or intelligence when calculating damage), because a lot of the game’s main story bosses are heavily focused on having high defense, and relatively low HP. So, that meant that I couldn’t just use all my favorite digimon. Some just didn’t have what it takes to hold up against certain fights, and I had to move them away from forms I really liked to try to find them stronger forms so I could complete the sidequests. It was still entertaining to play, and did have me continuing to see my digimon grow over time and we bonded, but it also felt a bit lackluster that some favorite mega-level forms just didn’t have what it took to deal with some of the late-game sidequests (at least in hard difficulty, which I played through on - thankfully you can change the difficulty during a playthrough, so I could have dropped it to try to do the sidequests, but I didn’t opt to do that. I just still haven’t beat all the sidequests, instead focusing on the main quest). 

the game doesn’t have a lot of animated cutscenes but those it does have come out strong

The Story

CS’s story is... fine. I think it’s probably a decently good story that’s just told confusingly. And I think there’s a couple reasons for that, but one of the biggest is that the translation is not the best. It’s passable, but it doesn’t always feel like things were translated in a holistic way to the whole game, rather it feels like each line was translated on its own, which leads to things feeling like they don’t all track together naturally at times, and a bunch of mistakes like the Eaters being referred to as Bakemon (a digimon name), because in Japanese they’re referred to sometimes as bakemono, which is just the Japanese word for a monster.

The other big issue I feel I have with the story of CS is that it feels like it’s all over the place, at least early on. Early on in the game, the story starts to set up a lot of different characters and plot threads that don’t seem to really connect with each other until much later in the game. That kind of story can be told well, but in this case, I just feel like the execution left a lot to be desired. For a long time, it felt like I was just playing through a bunch of different unrelated stories rather than a singular story. I’m not sure exactly what would be the right way to implement the idea to help keep the early game’s story interesting, but as it is, it felt a little lackluster.

However, that really only applies to the early game. And the late game, though in a bit of a different way. Around chapter 8 out of 20, the story starts popping off, and the individual stories concerning all the side characters start coming together to reveal the bigger picture of what’s been happening in Tokyo and Eden lately, and what issues that’s leading to in both the real and digital worlds. And from about chapter 8 through 19 or so, it feels really good and strong and there’s a clear singular direction that the story is taking, and every new piece of information seems to feed into the major plot in some way. 

And then as you get into the last chapter, things start to feel a little less narratively tied together again. See, yes, the mysteries were building into a singular situation that was threatening both the real and digital worlds, but the game feels like it lacks a narrative throughline, or even multiple narrative throughlines for each major character. It feels like there’s no moral being focused on here, rather, it feels like there’s just a series of events that happen because it would be cool to have them happen. And they were cool. But... to really make a story feel good to me, I feel like there needs to be some sense of a complete narrative moral, and I just didn’t feel that way from this game. The closest I could tell was one line from the ending,

“You will now be the master of your own future.”

But... that feels weak. It didn’t feel like being able to control their own future was much of a theme for any of the main characters, except maybe Arata. And even then, it was a pretty weak theme. (I suppose an argument could be made that the game’s very linear story means your character doesn’t have a lot of freedom from a gameplay perspective, so the gameplay supports you not having control over your future, but... that’s a pretty weak argument.)

So, the story is interesting, but it’s also pretty weak. 

fusion evolution is apparently gay as hell and i love it

The Cyber Sleuthing

There’s not really any actual sleuthing in this game. It’s really just a narrative device to give your character a reason to help out with a variety of random situations. You very rarely, if ever, have to actually solve mysteries/puzzles during your journey. So... not much actual sleuthing. But the greater mystery of the story does get really interesting in the mid game, so I’ll give it that. 

Other stuff

Here, I just wanna talk about some other miscellaneous thoughts I have about this game, and then kinda sum it all up. 

I loved Persona 5. It was a wonderful game, and such a powerful turn-based JRPG, that it’s influenced my perception of basically every JRPG I’ve played since. And it feels weird to do that. Like I feel like CS is a really decent game taken on its own, but when I’m comparing everything in some way to Persona 5, CS feels like it sucks. Like there are so many aspects where I can see ways to improve upon the game - the translation is lacking, there’s no english dub, combat is fairly smooth but Persona’s combat always feels like it’s a puzzle to be solved but CS’s combat feels like it’s just ‘have the right type digimon in play’, add more social elements to let me grow closer to Yuuko, Nokia, Arata, and other characters. 

There’s this narration near the end of the game to explain how things change after the big final boss battle, and it’s narrated by one of the in-game characters, Nokia. And it’s amazing, because Nokia’s character can be kinda... ditzy, I guess is the right word? So there are parts in that bit of narration where she’s just like “and, you know... stuff changed” or whatever. It’s both funny, and leaves things fairly up to the player to have their own interpretations for what happens with everyone after things are over. There’s some small scenes after that narration that show some of what the main cast has been up to since the events of the final battle, but nothing that gives too much of a clue as to what happened.

----

There is a running gag throughout the whole game about how your mentor character likes experimenting with coffee, making weird blends like adding red bean paste or seaweed to her coffee, and she loves pushing this on other people who often react in horror. But there’s also this really nice scene in the finale where it shows the main character, without Kyoko around, drinking mayo coffee, and I think it’s just cute as heck

There’s a canon nonbinary character in the game, who complains about being forced to choose between either a male or female avatar when logging into the online system, and I absolutely love that kinda shit <3

My favorite status effect is one called Dot, where it converts your digimon into a sprite form and prevents them from using special attacks. And I love when JRPGs add fun unique statuses like this, which make sense within the context of the world

In Summary

So, to tie it all together, here’s my final thoughts:

I enjoyed my time with Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth a ton. But I’m a fan of digimon and jrpgs. I think the game has its fair share of problems that mean I couldn’t really recommend it to just anyone, but if you like digimon and jrpgs, it’s worth picking up. And the complete edition comes with two games for the price of one, so all the better.