This review only covers Cyber Sleuth. I may come back to this edition to play Hacker's Memory eventually but for now I'm not in the mood.
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This is an interesting game, I'd say. Really, it's a bloated and fairly lame low-budget visual novel wrapped around a simple monster-collection JRPG skeleton, and it just sorta... works. It doesn't work to the point of becoming anything particularly great, but going through the gameplay loop and skipping most of the dialogue made for a pretty fun time as a background task while I was doing other things. Honestly, that's all I needed.
The low budget and originally handheld nature of this game show at every turn. With a weak translation, an embarrassingly limited soundtrack for a 40+ hour game (done by one Masafumi Takada, neat!) and an even more limited graphical style and UI, it's a wonder that this game got a PC port at all. I don't mind that fact since I would rather play it on PC than its other platforms, but it's just funny to me how cheap the game feels.
Despite that, I think there's something almost cute about how quaint this game is. It's not exactly a relic of the far-off past as games from the early 2000s and earlier tend to be, and it's not a meme game like a lot of mid 2010s ones were. Instead, it's a very 2014-2015 feeling game that very much captures the general vibe of "anime game from around then anime was transitioning into the mainstream in the West and was well cemented as a staple in Japan proper". It's pretty neat for that, and I believe it's actually pretty fitting for as late-90s as old Digimon already felt. I do very much enjoy when I can find games that are truly time capsules of ages that I can imagine, even ones that I didn't immerse myself into or exist in. Games that are truly products of their times in ways that feel informative and fun to make fun of rather than lacking or offensive are a rarer breed than I'd hope. There really is something cute about this full-on major Digimon game having the vibes of an obscure Japanese visual novel in its presentation and style.
I like to talk about the writing of just about any game that has a significant amount of it, so I'll give a quick little briefing here. The writing in this game is a classic case of having the more important focus characters be uninteresting compared to side characters and ones you're not supposed to take seriously. Rina and Nokia were easily the highlights of the cast, and it's a shame neither of them quite got the spotlight they deserved. Nokia came close, but wasn't quite pushed enough. If anything I'd have liked for her to just be the protagonist as the one you play as is a cardboard cutout. Beyond the actual cast, the plot itself is pretty much stereotypical uninteresting anime plot complete with gigantic text dumps about random pseudoscientific mumbo jumbo or technobabble of any kind. It gets old fast, and once I realized the game was pretty much devoid of having interesting turns or meaningful character interactions, I zoned out and skipped text whenever it didn't pertain directly to either humor or the next task of the main story.
That's enough of that, though. I also like to talk about mechanics at least briefly, so... this game's a very mixed bag in that department. The actual creature collecting and upgrading mechanics are surprisingly pretty deep, but none are explained meaningfully to the player to the point where even in the endgame I was wondering about a number of features and stats that are important to getting digivolutions going. The battle system is a bit of a joke most of the time because of how dull it is, but it's obviously more there to serve the purpose of showing off the results of your hard work and training than to be an actual challenge to think through and overcome at length. The main part of things is definitely the collection, though, as I found myself almost addicted to digivolving as many mons as I could to get my favorites all together in my team. If there's one thing the game does well, it's giving the player just enough experience points and new scans to hook them into going for a grind session or two.
I wasn't expecting to write this much about this game, but I guess since I spent 40-45 hours in it I had quite a lot on my mind. The short of it is that it's a low-budget game with a lot of low-quality aspects to match, but the actual gameplay is just addictive and pleasant enough to make it plenty of fun all the same. It's just also the kind of game where you'd want to mash B/A through all the text possible. I think more than anything else this game makes me wish for a Digimon title with a relatively high budget on a home console or PC - one that's much more hands-off in the story department unless it's something much more well baked. If we got something like that with high poly Digimon models and an art style led by anyone other than Suzuhito "Anti-Gravity Chests" Yasuda, I think we'd have a really awesome title on our hands. Digimon is always full of potential, and I'd love to see it shine through one day in a video game.
===
This is an interesting game, I'd say. Really, it's a bloated and fairly lame low-budget visual novel wrapped around a simple monster-collection JRPG skeleton, and it just sorta... works. It doesn't work to the point of becoming anything particularly great, but going through the gameplay loop and skipping most of the dialogue made for a pretty fun time as a background task while I was doing other things. Honestly, that's all I needed.
The low budget and originally handheld nature of this game show at every turn. With a weak translation, an embarrassingly limited soundtrack for a 40+ hour game (done by one Masafumi Takada, neat!) and an even more limited graphical style and UI, it's a wonder that this game got a PC port at all. I don't mind that fact since I would rather play it on PC than its other platforms, but it's just funny to me how cheap the game feels.
Despite that, I think there's something almost cute about how quaint this game is. It's not exactly a relic of the far-off past as games from the early 2000s and earlier tend to be, and it's not a meme game like a lot of mid 2010s ones were. Instead, it's a very 2014-2015 feeling game that very much captures the general vibe of "anime game from around then anime was transitioning into the mainstream in the West and was well cemented as a staple in Japan proper". It's pretty neat for that, and I believe it's actually pretty fitting for as late-90s as old Digimon already felt. I do very much enjoy when I can find games that are truly time capsules of ages that I can imagine, even ones that I didn't immerse myself into or exist in. Games that are truly products of their times in ways that feel informative and fun to make fun of rather than lacking or offensive are a rarer breed than I'd hope. There really is something cute about this full-on major Digimon game having the vibes of an obscure Japanese visual novel in its presentation and style.
I like to talk about the writing of just about any game that has a significant amount of it, so I'll give a quick little briefing here. The writing in this game is a classic case of having the more important focus characters be uninteresting compared to side characters and ones you're not supposed to take seriously. Rina and Nokia were easily the highlights of the cast, and it's a shame neither of them quite got the spotlight they deserved. Nokia came close, but wasn't quite pushed enough. If anything I'd have liked for her to just be the protagonist as the one you play as is a cardboard cutout. Beyond the actual cast, the plot itself is pretty much stereotypical uninteresting anime plot complete with gigantic text dumps about random pseudoscientific mumbo jumbo or technobabble of any kind. It gets old fast, and once I realized the game was pretty much devoid of having interesting turns or meaningful character interactions, I zoned out and skipped text whenever it didn't pertain directly to either humor or the next task of the main story.
That's enough of that, though. I also like to talk about mechanics at least briefly, so... this game's a very mixed bag in that department. The actual creature collecting and upgrading mechanics are surprisingly pretty deep, but none are explained meaningfully to the player to the point where even in the endgame I was wondering about a number of features and stats that are important to getting digivolutions going. The battle system is a bit of a joke most of the time because of how dull it is, but it's obviously more there to serve the purpose of showing off the results of your hard work and training than to be an actual challenge to think through and overcome at length. The main part of things is definitely the collection, though, as I found myself almost addicted to digivolving as many mons as I could to get my favorites all together in my team. If there's one thing the game does well, it's giving the player just enough experience points and new scans to hook them into going for a grind session or two.
I wasn't expecting to write this much about this game, but I guess since I spent 40-45 hours in it I had quite a lot on my mind. The short of it is that it's a low-budget game with a lot of low-quality aspects to match, but the actual gameplay is just addictive and pleasant enough to make it plenty of fun all the same. It's just also the kind of game where you'd want to mash B/A through all the text possible. I think more than anything else this game makes me wish for a Digimon title with a relatively high budget on a home console or PC - one that's much more hands-off in the story department unless it's something much more well baked. If we got something like that with high poly Digimon models and an art style led by anyone other than Suzuhito "Anti-Gravity Chests" Yasuda, I think we'd have a really awesome title on our hands. Digimon is always full of potential, and I'd love to see it shine through one day in a video game.