BANDAI NAMCO Entertainment Digimon Story Cyber Sleuth: Complete Edition

I’m writing this review after clocking in over 250+ hours across both games, and I have to say that my experience was quite enjoyable! Here are my thoughts:

Pros:
– Both games feature a really nice, engaging story with interesting characters. (Hacker’s Memory especially.)
– While not all 1300+ Digimon are featured in these games, the cast still has a large amount of variety and its easy to tell they put effort and care into animating each one. (Every digimon has a signature move that is especially snazzy.) They also went the extra mile to have your team of Digimon follow you around in the overworld, which is a nice touch.
– The games run well and have a consistent frame rate, I also never noticed any graphical issues or slowdown. Load times are usually pretty fast.
– Features an absolutely wonderful soundtrack composed by Masafumi Takada of Dangan Ronpa fame.
– Having the ability to instantly start random encounters and the Auto-Battle function are great QoL features that make the grinding you have to do (it IS a JRPG after all) significantly less time consuming.
– Challenging, but not frustrating. I played both games on the normal difficulty, and I feel the difficulty ramped up pretty naturally over the course of the game, with a few exceptions in the post-game content. (Lucemon-I’m looking at you!)
– Has a satisfying visual style and great character design. I particular love the look of both game’s protagonists.
– Has a much deeper and more complex evolution system then most games of its type-while most evolutions are straightforward, others can require some planning ahead of time to get what you want, which-in my opinion-makes it much more satisfying.

Cons-
– A pretty iffy localization. Probably my biggest problem with this game, while it is fine 90% of the time, there are some occasions where the translated text isn’t formatted correctly or uses a shoddy translation (the improper usage of “Bakemon” in a certain storyline confused me for a long time). The most egregious of these issues is the fact that the dialogue for the male protagonist of Cyber Sleuth was copied over almost exactly to the female protagonist- which can cause some very awkward moments where characters refer to you as male when playing a female character. Hacker’s Memory was more polished in this regard.
– No English dub for the dialogue. This is not a big deal for me-the Japanese cast did great work and is full of many talented voice actors, but I know many people who would consider this a con. (You can also toggle off the voices entirely if you wish.)
– These games both feature strong language and tackle some pretty dark subject matter, while this is a pro for me, It can be off putting for some people, and I wouldn’t recommend it to kids younger than 13.
– Has a bit of a learning curve. The game does give you a pretty succinct tutorial at the beginning of the game regarding combat, but a few of the deeper mechanics aren’t explained as clearly. This game doesn’t hold your hand as much as its other contemporaries-and some googling might be required.
– Can be a bit grindy at times. While the aforementioned features I talked about above do make grinding easier, if you want to get all of the Digimon you have to be prepared to spend quite a bit of time doing it-either out in the world or in the mirror dungeon feature. The way the game handles raising Digimon and evolution kind of necessitates this, but I can see it putting certain people off.
– Many dungeon designs can feel a bit same-y in terms of looks, this is mostly an issue towards the beginning of Cyber Sleuth, and It was a bit tiring going back to Kowloon so many times. This issue lessens after a few chapters.

All-in-all, I think that both of these games are great and I heartily recommend them to both Digimon fans and newcomers alike. I really hope to see more entries in this series in the future.

It has been a rather long time since I really have played a Digimon game. My last one was Digimon World 3 on the PlayStation 1, which was probably over 15 years ago. With that said I looked forward to this coming out for the Switch. I’ve wanted these games for a while but never had a PS4 to play them, but to have them come together as a two pack it felt like a steal. So far it has been really worth it. I have only played through one of the games on the cartridge and took a lengthy time to complete, and I expect the second one to as well. So far it has felt worth the price tag for these games being how old they are.

My only complaint with this game is that the gameplay can be a bit repetitive at times. However, if you enjoy Pokemon’s battle system you will most likely have no issue with this. It is very much like a JRPG game were you have a team to fight another team, and depending on your teams types they will have strengths and weaknesses against the opponent. Eventually I would find a lot of fights would become too easy with having 11 Digimon on a team while most opponents would only have 1 to 3.

From a technical standpoint this game has been rather solid. I found no issues with any bugs or glitches, and for the most part it ran smoothly for a port onto the Switch. Early on in some cut scenes there would be a stutter or two but nothing that would prevent the game from being an enjoyable experience. I will only note that I have just started the second game on the cartridge so I have yet to experience anything with the other half as of yet.

El modo de juego es divertido y la historia muy interesante, si eres fan de Digimon no puede faltar en tu colección.

Apesar de faltar variedade aos cenários, como em outros vários jogos da franquia, da remoção de alguns digimons da versão japonesa e da pouca quantidade de digimons, ainda assim, é um jogo divertido, roda bem fluído no switch!

This is a great game. Came in quick and in perfect condition. A bit of a heads up for anyone looking to play this for the first time, there is a LOT of story, not a lot of action.