Recent reviews by missing

If you enjoy Gameplay... Time Stranger isn't remarkable. There's a surprising amount of depth to the stat growth systems presented to you, but outside of a handful of in-story boss fights and sidequest challenges, the combat loop is largely focused on you and your opponents hitting each other again and again until either of you die.

Grinding is a core part of the gameplay loop and the game features many quality-of-life systems to make it easier on the player. If you enjoy making numbers bigger, you'll have a good time with this game.

For strategy enjoyers, engaging with the Personality mechanic unlocks various passive Personality Skills (one for each Digimon), some of which can drastically alter your gameplay style in ways like giving your healing abilities Overheal, or a chance to trigger an automatic counter that nullifies incoming damage first.

Sidequests are short affairs that largely involve running back and forth between several areas you've already been to and almost always culminate in a combat encounter. They're given intermittently as the plot progresses and you're allowed to take your time to complete them. Save for very specific instances, sidequests do not affect the main story and mostly exist to help you level up your Agent Rank, which affects the max stage of Digimon you're allowed to Digivolve to.

There is a card-collecting rock-paper-scissors minigame you can do with random NPCs scattered around the world, but as of writing this review outcomes are RNG and have little to no strategy involved. Engaging with the card game is required for 100%.

If you enjoy Narratives and Writing... Time Stranger is a mixed bag. The nature of time travel stories is that they're inherently confusing, and while the game tries to explain what's happening and why, it's very easy to get overwhelmed with new and conflicting information. The time travelling itself is fairly straightforward but explanations and motivations surrounding it can get convoluted.

Story pacing begins to drag drastically around the half-way mark, continuing towards the end.
If you think you're almost at the end, no you're not.

Characters outside of the main cast are mostly flat. Dialogue is often generic and individual character motivations largely amount to "the Digimon are bad guys" and "the Digimon are good guys" with some moments of nuance to break it up. That being said, I found that there were standout moments of interesting and thoughtful writing that made paying attention worth it.

If you care at all about Digimon lore, there's some of that sprinkled in there too but the story itself is meant to be taken as standalone.

If you enjoy Digimon... Oh my god, yeah, get the game. Time Stranger oozes with love for the franchise, from the unique animations each Digimon has to the elaborate, lived-in spaces they inhabit. While the game doesn't have every single Digimon in it, the roster is staggeringly large and each design is crisp and detailed in a way they've never really been before.

You can ride many of them in the overworld as a fun replacement to your built-in sprint, but as a warning to a specific type of fan, a lot of the humanoid Digimon aren't Digi-ride compatible.

I'm not sure why people keep comparing this to Final Fantasy Tactics when a lot of the core systems from that game are missing in this one. It's an interesting tactics game in its own right and I think the comparison will hurt the game in the long run, especially if people buy it under the assumption it'll play the same way.

PROS:
• A lot of unique monsters with their own unique abilities adds a neat layer of strategy and a collectible element to boot.
• The pixel art is really good. Even the idle animations of each monster and npc lend a lot of character to the designs.
• Combos are FUN. Chaining attacks into other attacks is immensely satisfying, and there are times where I didn't take note of my own unit placement only to be pleasantly surprised when multiple attacks start coming out.

CONS:

• Bad UI design. It's atrociously low res. I thought this was only going to be an issue with the demo but it seems to have carried over into the release build. I play on a 1920 x 1080 display and so many of the UI elements are clearly low res rasters that it becomes very distracting. The in-game pixel art scales very well but everything else becomes a blurry mess. Feels like a flash game from the early 2010s sometimes. A lot of information is obfuscated and the bad UI problems mentioned before make it a slog to go through menus. A lot of info can be compacted into a much cleaner layout (the summon monster loadout menu is a particularly bad example of this).

• Lack of choice. Again, this is where the comparison to other tactics games hurts this one, as it lacks many of the customization features that have become hallmarks of the genre. There's no job / class system and summonable monsters can't be named or learn new abilities. Equipment is boiled down to a single passive item slot. Spell choice is limited and new spells seem to only be found randomly by killing enemies. You can't manually place your units before the start of the battle, leading to moments where one of your summoned monsters might die instantly from bad placement.

• Unsatisfying growth. The traits bar only offers tiny incremental bonuses, and since there aren't any unlockable skills or abilities hidden behind the point system leveling up feels generally unsatisfying. I don't know what a 0.6% increase in reaction ability means, and I certainly can't feel it.