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[Fbh]

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Borrowed this from a friend who told me to give it a try when I mentioned I would be passing on Pokemon Sword/Shield for the moment because of how underwhelming it was shaping up to be . I've never been the biggest Digimon fan but I did enjoy the first 3 season growing up and I remember liking them a lot better than the Pokémon Anime, so why not.

Just finished Cyber Sleuth and while it definitely has some issues, I was quite surprised by how much I enjoyed it. Despite the obvious Pokemon comparison, it reminded me more of SMT and Persona with the "real world" setting, 3 on 3 fights, constantly changing team and higher story focus.

The whole concept of not just evolving but also devolving your digimon, as well as the non linear evolution path was rather well implemented IMO and ensured that (at least in my plathrough) your party was constantly changing and you never stayed with any particular party configuration for too long (at least until later on). Also, giving every single Digimon at least one unique move was fun and made me try out a bunch of different ones just to watch the animations.

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I also liked the fact they actually had difficulty settings and while the implementation is on the basic side (a basic buff to enemies), it definitely made it feel more challenging and forced me to change my team or rethink my strategy in several spots (boss battles), which was a nice change of pace compared to the Pokemon games which are still stuck at the ultra easy mode.


The story was rather bland and there wasn't much of a main plot during the first half, not to mention that in true Persona style conversations do tend to be longer than they should be. The localization is also terrible with lots of weird sentences and some phrases which I'd almost describe as nonsensical, even the typesetting sucks. Still, the second half is much more enjoyable and has a faster pacing which was nice, and I overall found it more enjoyable than your average pokemon plot, with a more interesting conflict as well as a better cast of characters and, even though it's not as good as a Persona plot...at least they didn't stretch it out to 100 freaking hours like P5.
You can definitely feel this was made on a tight budget with a rather limited selection of small areas to explore and a lot of dungeons using the same "cyberspace" textures though it never really got in the way of my enjoyment and it did at least feel like what budget they had was spent on the right place (the digimon themselves look pretty good and at least there's voice acting for the story).


I'm probably not playing through hackers memory though. From my understanding it's more of parallel story and there's a lot of recycled content, and after Cyber Sleuth I think I've had my fill of this particular game. But I'd be totally down for a potential sequel some day, hopefully with a slightly higher budget (anyone know how well this sold).




Pokemon rant:
Also would you look at that!, You can start battles quickly without like 4 lines of unnecessary dialog every single time. And would you look at that you can make simple, easy to read visual cues for all buffs and debuffs without the need for an added dialog box to let me know my attack got up or that it was a critic hit every single time. And would you look at that, you can tell me how much xp and money I got in a single screen and you can end battles quickly without like 5 unnecessary dialog boxes every single time

 

[Saber]

"Despite the obvious Pokemon comparison"

By saying that you only offend what Digimon strides to be. Just remember that are things that pokemon just straigth copied(like Megas).

Anyway, about the rest of your post yeah I can see your point and agree to some point. One thing that Digimon aways made right which differs from Pokemon demented thing is that Digimon naturally has a evolutionary and de-evolutionary tree. That means that even if you can't archieve your desired evolution(something stupidly easy in Pokemon), you can simply digivolve to another one, retain them in your team to help in the game and then de-digivolve back what they were. Also, not all Digimons are easy to make. Be at doing quests or having hard-ass stats, this is no task for filfhy casuals who calls every game they find hard a "Souls" game. The signature move alongside signature animations for each Digimon is the best part of this game.

As for the difficult levels, yeah hits quite a challenge. But the good aspect that most of people tend to ignore is 2 things: You can change the difficulty level whenever you like(stopped at a boss? No problema) and that bosses are usually different from common digimons(for instance, a Boss Cyclonemon is way stronger than a wild Cyclonemon).

Both me and my brother beat the game on hard about 3 times already(and we have totally different digimons). This game is a piece of work, despite it's clearly faults.

 

[Fbh]

"Despite the obvious Pokemon comparison"

By saying that you only offend what Digimon strides to be. Just remember that are things that pokemon just straigth copied(like Megas).

Anyway, about the rest of your post yeah I can see your point and agree to some point. One thing that Digimon aways made right which differs from Pokemon demented thing is that Digimon naturally has a evolutionary and de-evolutionary tree. That means that even if you can't archieve your desired evolution(something stupidly easy in Pokemon), you can simply digivolve to another one, retain them in your team to help in the game and then de-digivolve back what they were. Also, not all Digimons are easy to make. Be at doing quests or having hard-ass stats, this is no task for filfhy casuals who calls every game they find hard a "Souls" game. The signature move alongside signature animations for each Digimon is the best part of this game.

As for the difficult levels, yeah hits quite a challenge. But the good aspect that most of people tend to ignore is 2 things: You can change the difficulty level whenever you like(stopped at a boss? No problema) and that bosses are usually different from common digimons(for instance, a Boss Cyclonemon is way stronger than a wild Cyclonemon).

Both me and my brother beat the game on hard about 3 times already(and we have totally different digimons). This game is a piece of work, despite it's clearly faults.

Not saying Digimon is a copy or anything but it's always been compared a lot to Pokemon. They both came out at around the same time (at least in my country) and both had the whole Monster catching and evolving formula. And globally it's hard to deny that Pokemon is the much better known and more successful franchise.

Yeah the evolution and devolution system was great and I liked how some evolutions are harder to get. Some of them I spent most of the game working towards (specially those that need 100 ABI), but it made finally getting them rewarding and since you are still evolving to other forms and gaining skills the grind still feels rewarding.

Overall I liked the difficulty, Hard mode felt well balanced where it wasn't super hard but you needed a strong team and make some adjustments during some of the tougher encounters. The only one where I almost dropped down to medium was the final fight with Arata. That fucking AoE attack that he spams, does massive damage AND heals him felt OP as fuck

 

[SLoWMoTIoN]

Hacker's was the better game should have just played that man. (I played these games years ago)

 

[Fbh]

Hacker's was the better game should have just played that man. (I played these games years ago)

What made it better?

 

[SLoWMoTIoN]

What made it better?

Better story (minus the coward ending) and more digimons.

 

[Graciaus]

Not being able to skip cutscenes was annoying since the hard difficulty was unbalanced. Regular mobs are easy but sometimes the bosses are significantly stronger. I only played Cyber Sleuth for about 20 hours and got sidetracked. People say the story gets interesting but it never was that great from what I played. I enjoyed just collecting all the different Digimon but most of them I had no idea what they were. I've only seen the first few anime seasons when I was a kid.

I doubt I'll ever go back to complete my playthrough but maybe I'll start the other game someday.

 

[GymWolf]

Cyber slut in the title always make me chuckle.

 

[Fbh]

Better story (minus the coward ending) and more digimons.

I think they added the missing digimon to Cyber Sleuth in the complete edition.

Maybe I'll still play Hacker's Memory some day if the story is better. I went with Cyber Sleuth because I read it's sort of the "main" story while hackers memory is more of a parallel thing.

Not being able to skip cutscenes was annoying since the hard difficulty was unbalanced. Regular mobs are easy but sometimes the bosses are significantly stronger. I only played Cyber Sleuth for about 20 hours and got sidetracked. People say the story gets interesting but it never was that great from what I played. I enjoyed just collecting all the different Digimon but most of them I had no idea what they were. I've only seen the first few anime seasons when I was a kid.

I doubt I'll ever go back to complete my playthrough but maybe I'll start the other game someday.

Yeah no being able to skip cutscenes or fast forward conversations was annoying and definitely made some of the harder bosses more frustrating than they should have been.

The story gets ok later on but it's never anything mindblowing. It's just that the first half focuses a lot on smaller self contained stories while the second half is a lot more focused and has a faster pacing