We were initially talking about who’d be best to review Digimon
Story: Cyber Sleuth, but because I played Digimon World on the Playstation 1, knew
a few Digimon and watched the original series when I was a youngster that was
much more than both of the other guys put together and I won, or did I? Whilst it downloaded to the PS4 I thought I’d have a quick
gander on the web to see a little bit about this game and understand what I
would be playing. The game is a JRPG which was originally released in Japan in March
2015 on the PS Vita and developed by Media.Vision who did a series that I enjoyed
on the PSX called Wild Arms so already I was optimistic. The story begins during an online chat with some friends and
a stranger jumps in and interrupts, offering you Digimon capture equipment and
inviting you to EDEN an area of cyberspace which people can physically enter.
After asking a lot of questions you find yourself with a URL which sends you to
dark area of the web only to be attacked by an "eater" which after
the encounter finds your body half-digitised allowing access between the net
and real world whenever you need, you get picked up by Kyoko Kuremi who
runs a detective agency and recruits you to her
cyber division to aid her investigations into other strange events that
are occurring. The online cyber world and the real world of Japan don’t
look overly amazing but when its a year old PSVita game, graphically it’s
not too bad, with the visuals actually being very crisp, bright and clear. But
never judge a game by its cover, especially this one.
The world feels full and has a feeling of being alive. The
online part of the game manages to portray the World Wide Web in such a
beautiful way. It isn't a completely open world but does give the
impression it is, especially when you find new URL's to discover or new
parts of Japan to explore the areas might not being massive but are still
very enjoyable. The battle system has a very standard JRPG feel to it with
the controls being pretty straight-forward, you can have up to 3 Digimon on the
screen fighting at one time with 8 as a backup, but every time you raise their
levels they take up more data, so the bigger and better they are the more storage
space they will take up, your Digi-Memory increases as you play through
allowing you to bring out better and more evolved ‘Mon to take on harder
enemies. I didn’t expect much from this title initially but I was surprised
to see the amount of depth in it with roughly 200 Digimon to find and Digivolve,
with a deep, immersing story
line with loads of side quests, you also have a Digifarm metagame that helps
level up the Digimon you're not using in your team or you can
look for new side quests to find new items, you can also re-do dungeons, play
online against other Digimon teams, as well as trying to collect all the 500 Digimon
character coins. All in all for the amount that this game has to
offer it’s well worth it, it’ll keep you going for
a substantial period of time and has a whole load of extras to do add
loads of replayability. There’s of course lots of appeal here to Digimon fans
young and old, If you enjoy J-RPG's or even just like something different that
is enjoyable, easy to get into with a good story that won’t tax your brain then
you could do worse than dive head first into the Digiverse and start Digivolving
your Patamon into Angemon.
Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth is out now on PlayStation Vita, & PlayStation 4