admin Digimon Story: Time Stranger feels like a season of the monster-taming anime made playable. I don’t just mean in the sense that it shows humans and digital monsters banding together to save their respective worlds of reality and a digital simulacra, but that it ebbs and flows from mundane slice-of-life to devastating melodrama. Sadly, those contrasts in tone are often matched by contrasts in quality, with the game’s exceptional moments often sandwiched between less compelling ones. Time Stranger oscillates between what feels like slow-burning filler and an angsty, tragic disaster story that centers the digital monsters you meet, train, and befriend over the course of your journey. For almost 30 years now, I’ve consistently admired Digimon’s desire to make sure that the digital monsters are just as much people as the humans who tame them. That same inclination is woven into the mechanics of what, without it, could easily have been a rote turn-based RPG. Like a good friendship, Time Stranger is an investment you have to be willing to make, enduring its awkward early moments to get to the raw and sappy center. It’s worth it.
Like most Digimon stories, Time Stranger is fairly separate from any of the previous games, though its lore and mythology will be familiar to anyone who’s been on this ride for a while. You are an agent of an organization called ADAMAS, which investigates strange digital anomalies in the human world, only for one mission to end up with far more dire consequences than you or your superiors could have anticipated. As Digimon begin to spill out into the human world, a giant, humanoid machine descends upon Japan. The ensuing conflict creates a cataclysmic explosion that wipes out everyone in its path…except for you, who miraculously survives but is thrown eight years in the past. The world is headed toward apocalyptic ruin, unless you can stop the disaster set to happen in eight years.
As the name implies, Time Stranger is a time travel story, and its timeline-hopping is one of the biggest contributors to its sometimes uneven pacing, with long stretches feeling oddly disconnected from what you were just doing, until they’re very suddenly not. Time Stranger wades into well-worn “fix the past to save the future” tropes until it takes some surprising left turns that reveal it to be a far more elaborate story than it initially appears. The script often betrays the story with awkward, unnatural, and overexpository dialogue, but the emotional heartbeat is still pulsating underneath that stilted delivery. The main trio consists of your agent and a pair of stragglers ADAMAS suspects may be at the center of the incoming apocalypse: the faun-like Digimon Aegiomon and his tamer, Inori.
For much of Time Stranger, the player is a voyeur to their growing partnership, but as the party’s time-traveling antics gradually become more complicated and everyone is more invested in their success, those bonds may end up endangering everyone. Aegiomon’s childlike gusto and need to save those he cares about are the unchecked and unrestrained catalysts for so much of Time Stranger, to the point where he, rather than the agent, is arguably the main character. But I still found my role in the whole story compelling, as it was my duty as an agent that was constantly at odds with the pair’s loyalty to one another. Time Stranger knows the power of friendship conquers all, but it is also such a powerful, untamable force that it threatens to unravel the same ties that strengthen it. Everyone in this game is looking for somewhere to belong, and they’re willing to take it from even the most imperfect of places.
Digimon has always tried to make the monsters themselves feel more like characters than just a cute or cool face for stats and numbers, and Time Stranger extends this to your own party who, along with fighting your battles for you, have distinct personalities that are influenced by your decisions. You can talk to them as they follow you around in the overworld and have brief back-and-forths that are both very specific to the monster in question and lean into one of the designated dispositions they can have that determine their stats and dialogue. Talking with the cat-like Digimon Gatomon about the powerful Holy Ring she wears around her tail, or the werewolf Digimon WereGarurumon about his sick, ripped jeans, are small interactions in the grand scheme of things, but they do a lot to make the specific monsters you’re journeying alongside feel like more than just disposable, interchangeable units in an RPG party. Time Stranger has so many delightful touches that make your party feel like part of the world, whether that’s in these chats or when it lets you ride on your Growlmon’s shoulders to get around faster.
Cyber Sleuth, the last game in the Story subseries, took place primarily in a sleek cyberspace that centered most of the human characters and made the Digimon themselves feel like programs above all else. Though its story delved into some of the series’ best mythology and had a really novel noir premise, it often felt like my favorite little guys were just mechanical extensions of my character, rather than living, breathing people on their own. Time Stranger splits its time between real-world Tokyo and the Digital World of Illiad, which is full of bustling villages and beautiful vistas. Walking through Central Town, seeing Digimon in their own society and living out little mini-stories that span the game’s long timeline does a lot to make the Digital World feel like a real place that I can touch and exist in alongside my Digimon friends. When I first set foot in this world, I met young, scrappy Digimon who would become older, world-weary warriors when I jumped forward in time. Your time-hopping in Time Stranger changes the world in big and small ways, and seeing those mini-narratives pay off each time you move through the timeline is almost as rewarding as watching your own Digimon digivolve over the course of your adventure.
Those digivolution mechanics are still one of the most enthralling parts of Time Stranger, as they were in Cyber Sleuth and other games. Digimon don’t have set, linear evolutions, and one of the most challenging and captivating parts of raising these critters is training them to achieve a desired evolutionary result. From the outset, you have access to most of the Digimon in Time Stranger’s roster because you can create several of the early-stage creatures before you leave the first dungeon. Within an hour of play, I had my three favorites ready to go, and they accompanied me throughout the entirety of Time Stranger’s 40-hour runtime. This is possible because if you have the patience and forethought to move through the evolutionary chart, you can turn just about any Digimon into any other in the game. The entire roster is interconnected in a web of evolution and devolution that you can move through at will as long as your stats match up. Evolving and devolving will help you reach more powerful forms, as every change, whether it’s up or down the evolutionary line, will increase your level cap and help you break through the ceilings that prevent you from reaching your favorite, most powerful monsters. Again, Time Stranger is an investment that rewards patience, and once you understand how to game its systems, it becomes a much more malleable and experimental monster tamer than most of its contemporaries.
Time Stranger makes these potentially overwhelming systems more accessible thanks to a swath of quality-of-life changes that let you adapt, train, and create Digimon more easily than ever. A lot of the management has been moved to the pause menu, sparing you the need to head back to the Digimon equivalent of Persona’s Velvet Room every time you want to digivolve a monster or swap your party around. Digimon who are in your storage still gain experience when they’re not in battle, so the grind has become pretty much a non-factor. If you find you’ve got a bunch of Digimon you don’t want, you can transfer their data into your main party to level them up quickly, and all of this is conveniently at your fingertips rather than being a separate detour you have to take when you’re in the middle of doing something else. More than most monster tamers, Time Stranger gives you the tools to write your party’s story right out the gate, and if you’re anything like me and have a neurotic attachment to your favorites, you know how much of a difference it makes to have your mains with you as early on the journey as possible.
That’s all sentimentality, though. What does having your favorites early on actually mean in the long run in this turn-based battle system? At a glance, Time Stranger’s fights aren’t anything special or game-changing for the genre. It has some of Digimon’s bespoke dressings like the Data, Vaccine, and Virus attributes that give every monster an inherent rock-paper-scissors-style strength and weakness, but otherwise leans into the standard elemental and physical/magical attack split which can feel pretty unremarkable. Time Stranger’s new flourishes come in the form of randomized timing-based abilities and reactions that don’t quite reach Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 levels of challenge and impact, but can activate passive abilities tied to each Digimon’s personality. So a Friendly Digimon might throw a buff on their team if you hit the surprise QTE, whereas a Courageous one might land an extra attack before their turn ends. This, on top of the dialogue you can exchange with your Digimon in the overworld, incentivizes you to nudge your party to different personality archetypes, both to round out the party dynamic and to best complement the strategies you’ve built along the way. In most of the random battles, this doesn’t amount to much, but in Time Stranger’s many, many boss fights, they’re a boon that can help turn a scrap around.
Even on the normal difficulty, Time Stranger’s biggest fights can often feel like drawn-out wars of attrition rather than encounters that require much strategy or have you cleverly outsmarting a system. I gave myself self-imposed challenges to amp up the difficulty, such as only using my three-person team of the Guilmon, Gabumon, and Salamon lines, despite having six slots available in my party. Doing so meant I didn’t have a spread of all three attributes for most of the mid-game, which required me to get creative when handling certain Digimon without weaknesses I could readily exploit. The attribute system is usually a key starting point in determining your best match-ups, but elemental affinities can also bridge the gap if you’re lacking in a Data Digimon to rough up the opposing Vaccine. Even so, the biggest challenge of Time Stranger’s battles isn’t usually strategic; it’s in the HP walls the game calls boss fights, which can take ages to whittle down.
The bosses in this game hit hard, and they take hits like tanks. The difficulty spike on some of these battles can be so stark that it almost makes you think Time Stranger’s battles are more complex than they actually are, because even with some of the new mechanics shaking things up like the Cross Arts that let you charge up a high-impact support ability of your choosing over the course of a battle, these fights are mostly a game of numbers going up and down. But that’s the trap a lot of turn-based RPGs tend to fall into, especially ones that can’t guarantee you’ll have specific characters or archetypes in your party. Clair Obscur is a recent example of a turn-based RPG creating interesting challenges and puzzles to solve within its fights, but that was because it knew the party you would have and how their various kits would synergize with one another. Time Stranger gives you a lot of freedom to make your own strategies, but the end result of its challenges is mostly the same. Occasionally, a boss will throw you for a loop by reflecting certain attacks or using spells that alter its attributes, so you have to pivot to creating openings for a different Digimon to exploit its new weakness, but the answer to this doesn’t change; only the Digimon who delivers it does. When Time Stranger offers you a challenging fight, it is a tug of war decided by who can hit harder and heal faster, and while I gave myself a few restrictions that required me to get creative, the average battle is probably going to be a cakewalk for anyone with turn-based battle experience.
Perhaps Time Stranger’s biggest detriment, however, is in how its otherwise experimental and rewarding progression system is undermined by the game’s time-traveling story. You can unlock new evolution levels by raising your Agent Rank, which you do by completing quests. Time Stranger has different questlines available to you depending on where you are in the timeline, and for the majority of the game, you can’t jump between the past and present at will. This means if you don’t do a ton of sidequests in the beginning of the game, you’ll be leaving Agent Rank points on the table, and may not be able to get the most powerful versions of your team until much, much later in the game. Time Stranger does warn you that you won’t be able to complete side quests until later before you make this jump, but it does not prepare you for the dozens of hours between then and the next time you’ll be able to cross those off your list. Broadly, I liked this system when I felt like it was giving me a sense of how far along their evolutionary lines your team should be, as every tier of transformation is gated by a designated level you would, in theory, naturally reach as you progressed through the game. But when I reached the endgame and still hadn’t encountered enough sidequests to reach my party’s final forms, I was annoyed at the game’s inability to communicate to me that the dozen or so quests I left behind wouldn’t be finished until around 30 hours later.
Digimon Story: Time Stranger
-
Back-of-the-box quote:
“I get by with a little help from my friends.”
-
Developer:
Media.Vision
-
Type of game:
Turn-based monster-taming RPG.
-
Liked:
Rewarding evolution mechanics, great story and characters, the Digital World feels more alive than ever.
-
Disliked
Awkward, unnatural dialogue, battle system is still pretty unremarkable, the side quest gating is diabolical
-
Platforms:
PS5 (played on), PC, Xbox Series X/S
-
Release date:
October 3, 2025
-
Played
~40 hours
Because these fights are mostly paint-by-numbers, the true satisfaction in Time Stranger comes from raising your favorite Digimon from a tiny baby into an often fearsome beast of a Mega form, and even with its frustrations, it’s more than enough to make up for a pretty bog-standard battle system. It is both the monster-taming genre’s gift and its curse that you’re forming personal connections with your team, often at the expense of a more complex battle system. The trade-off works in Time Stranger’s favor, though, as it delivers the kind of human-Digimon human and Digimon connections you show up for. It also makes excellent use of the series’ mythology and, like other recent games in the series, it demonstrates a welcome willingness to age up along with its audience. Time Stranger sometimes awkwardly fumbles its way to the point it’s trying to make, but every time it shows its hand, it proves it’s willing to punch above its weight.
