One of Digimon’s biggest strengths has always been its ability to lean into nostalgia, and that’s no different in Digimon Story: Time Stranger, the seventh entry in the franchise’s role-playing-focused gaming series. Like past Digimon Story games, Time Stranger puts a big emphasis on narrative, but this time around, it was the creature collecting and turn-based battles that made me want to keep playing long after my three-hour preview session ended.
Instead of children and teens, Time Stranger’s protagonist is an adult secret agent investigating Digimon-related phenomena. I started my playthrough right from the beginning of the story, where we see the effects of the Digital World on real-world Earth. You can choose whether the protagonist is male or female, and the other one becomes a character in the story: your partner who communicates with you through a pocket-sized hologram. The intro sets the stage for the clash between two worlds with regular citizens talking about news of unexplained disasters and protestors even accusing authorities of withholding secrets.
But that’s all just a backdrop for the meat of what I got to play. The Digimon Story sub-series gets its name from its narrative-driven core which is, typically, complemented by turn-based gameplay. “Battle balance” is one of the main areas that producer Ryosuke Hara focused on, similar to what he did when working on Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot. At 36 years old, he was part of the target audience for the series when Digimon Adventure launched in 1999.
“So there’s a few things that we wanted to improve on from the past installments of Digimon’s Story, but one thing [in particular] was the battle balance,”he told me via a translator during my session. “I think in the past versions, people were relying on certain characters way more than their being balanced. So for this title, we wanted to really improve on the RPG battle aspect of the battles.”
Time Stranger starts with introducing us to its main “type triangle,” similar to the fire, water, grass triangle in Pokemon and axe, sword, and lance triangle in Fire Emblem. This works similarly to Digimon Story games before like Cybersleuth. While Digimon attacks could have secondary weaknesses behind elements, the main type behind a Digimon’s classification heavily affects its strengths and weaknesses. To demonstrate this, Time Stranger gives you one of each type to choose from for your first Digimon: Patamon (Data), Gomamon (Vaccine), or Deviveemon (Virus).
I went with Patamon, since his partner in Digimon Adventure was one of my favorite characters growing up. Patamon was able to take on most of the enemies I saw within the first 30 minutes or so, but from there, I needed to rely on other Digimon like Koromon to take advantage of type weaknesses. With around 450 Digimon in the game, many of the ones older fans will remember from the shows and games are represented.
In just the first two hours, I recognized almost every Digimon from the random digital monsters seen only a few times in Digimon Adventure to the popular mascot characters like Agumon. One of the biggest targets for Time Stranger are older fans who watched Digimon Adventure, but it’s a completely new story, so you don’t need to know anything about past shows and games to play it.
When asked about what made Digimon different from other monster-taming series, Hara pointed to its evolution system. “Digimon’s evolution system is not the same as other people’s,” he said. “If you were to take Agumon as an example, Agumon digivolves into multiple different forms. And then from there, again, multiple different forms. If we were to compare one player to another player, how they evolve their Digimon is going to be very different from another player.”
That ties into the best part of Time Stranger: collecting Digimon. Digivolutions don’t work like their Pokemon equivalent, where each Pokemon has set evolutions that don’t change and rarely branch. Bulbasaur will only become Ivysaur, and even though Pokemon like Gloom can evolve into Vileplume or Bellossom, most Pokemon follow a singular line of evolution. In Digimon, a “baby” Digimon like Koromon can digivolve into Agumon, Guilmon, Dracomon, and others. You don’t get to see which evolutions a Digimon has until they digivolve and you see how your treatment of the digital monster affected them.
You can capture multiple copies of a Digimon or de-digivolve the ones you have if you want to try and transform them into something else (I de-digivolved my Pagumon because I thought it was ugly). De-digivolving a Digimon poses its own challenges though. When my Pagumon turned back into its Kuramon baby form, I had to deal with it being level 1 again, so beware of that if you choose to de-digivolve on impulse.
Digimon also have one of 16 personalities now with their own “matrices,” where you can influence their stats and what skills they learn based on how you raise them. For example, increasing your Digimon’s Valor can boost HP and attack growth. Personality Skills can strengthen attacks, reduce the number of skill points that attacks use, and more.
Your Digimon also talk to you. Your core team has up to three Digimon at once, each of which follows you around and asks you questions as they level up like how to be a good friend, what they should call their next special move, and so on. It adds a layer of endearingness to the gameplay and also some functionality, since your answers can affect which way their stats grow. This can also affect how they digivolve, since some evolutions have requirements like a high enough HP or INT stat.
The story took a backseat to the enjoyable battles and creature collecting in my preview, but that makes sense since we didn’t get that far into the story or have a chance to bond with the characters. I could only hope that the characters hold up as well as the Digimon do, but even without that, I’d be compelled to play if only to explore the different ways I could raise my Digimon.
Time Stranger comes at a time where the Digimon series has been largely stagnant, mostly riding on the memories of Digimon Adventure rather than exploring new territory. However, the fact that it’s the first Digimon Story in a decade and introducing possibly the most comprehensive battle system the series has seen yet, I’m more excited to revisit the Digital World than I have been in years.
Digimon Story: Time Stranger launches on October 3, 2025. Pro tip: If you’re impatient, I’d recommend going back to Digimon Story: Cybersleuth (and its side story follow-up, Hacker’s Memory!) to see where the new game is coming from.
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