But in the story styled digimon games you are at the mercy of an absurdly high encounter rate thats neccesary to obtain new digimon and progress in the evolution tree,labyryntian dungeons that are hard to make heads or tails,a “dramatic story” thats just an elaborate backdrop for fech quest,and that is dropped,or that at least drops every character besides you at around the halfway point.
That sounds like a bad MMO,and to be honest most digimon RPGs before sleuth were kinda like that,but lost evolution was the first step in an attemt to fix the fact that you might as well be playing one of the digimon MMOs.(Please don’t do that.)
Story
Its an RPG so you migth think that the story is the main attraction,thats never been the case in any digimon game before Cyber sleuth,and if it was they failed,the story is mostly an excuse to get fom point A to B.
Said story begins with a bunch of kids in a festival that end up in the landing spot of what they think is a UFO,where they fight the generic bad guys that are named after numbers.After the figth they end up abducted and lost in the digital world,with two of them missing,your mission is to find them before something bad happens to them.
The story shows a small promise of something good when after settling in,the erasers appear and start killing digimon by erasing them forever,they also attack the evolution tree in an attempt to make certain digimon go extinct.This is the peak moment of the story and from there it just losses focus and ends up as something that happens after 4 hours of gameplay,where you only get an inconsecuential drop of it.
This problem isn’t really that bad in the first continent,where everything works as a mediocre but fun and addicting game,the story progresses just fine and its just generic but aceptable enougth.Its in the second continent were both the gameplay and the story drag the pace to a geological pace,if the story was still mediocre I might be willing to tolerate it,but at this point it turns into generic gym leader stuff,it is at least more entretaining than what it sounds because the mood is complete doom and failure in every town,but that and a nice suprise in one of them isnt enougth.
this game also has references to the older story games on the DS,not like that really matters when the other DS games are even worse gameplay wise,so you probably wont finish those either.
Gameplay
This game tries every trick in order to recuce grinding compared to the previous games,gone are the different types of EXP that were required to evolve into certain forms,you can only have an ABI stat of up to 255,compared to the previous games 999,you also dont need more than like 10 ABI,and thats only for the strongest ultra level digimon,the level requirements are a bit laxer too so you dont need to degenerate as often,and items that give EXP are plentifull.
All of this makes the game much easier and way less of a pain in the ass to play,but the absurd encounter rate alongside the fact that 90% of the time running away takes more time than just figthing means that you will be grinding no matter what,wich makes the game way too easy,this also makes the next problem worse.
The evolution tree is a fundamentaly flawed and badly implemented gameplay mechanic,its the reason why the grinding is easier but because the game was designed to be a grindfest like the other ones it really doesn’t reduce anything,it only forces you to degenerate when you could have been able to evolve normally.Its also a huge waste of time because it requires grinding,the same thing its supposed to stop,but its even worse because its item grinding,which doesn’t make it clear when it will end,requires knoledge of what drops what,and its also obscured unnecesarely by not telling you what plate you obtained.
This is all capped of by a wonderfull minigame thats the worst of its kind in any monster catcher of the DS,its frustratingly hard,extremely unnecesary because it also thankfully lacks a failure by timeout(with some rare exceptions)which means that most of the time you just wait 60-120 seconds doing nothing,and after that you have to place the plate manually.
I get that adding friccion to something makes getting that thing more special,but you could at least get rid off the cleaning minigame?
All of this text and i havent talked about the infamous prespective dungeons that make these games unplayable to most people,if you isolate them I actually kinda like them,the problem is the confusing and labyryntian horrors mixed with the hellish encounter rate,the end result is the burning desire to choke your DS.
The only interesting battles besides the postgame are a bunch of dark chests with superbosses,they are very fun to beat,everything else besides two earlygame jumpscares are trivial.
Presentation
The game is pretty outside of battles,the perspective gives it a unique and characteristic look,most sprites look good besides some complex desings,battles are a different story,some sprites look really good like wargreymon and ghoulmon,some others look off like the erasers,the animations are very simple too,but in general the graphics look good,or are at least decent.
Music is composed of repetitive loops that are passable enought the frist time but will eventually add to that purgatory astethic this game has
The tiles look good but again,just like the music,and thanks to the labyryntian desing of the dungeons,you will get bored of seeing them,it doesnt help that the second continent(and even some of the fist continent levels) repeats the same themes for levels that the first one had,adding to the absolute boredom that is the second half of the game.
In conclusion
Im tired of playing this game,it drains me like a cold,I didnt even bother taking my own screenshots because I don’t want to open it again.
Thats it,goodbye.
