Digimon: Cyber Sleuth took a week of my life

I haven’t updated in a while. Normally, this would be something I would quietly ignore as I started writing and updating on here again. But this time my reason for lack of updating wasn’t a matter of apathy nor a lack of ideas for things to write. No, of the past week and a half my entire waking life has been consumed by Digimon: Cyber Sleuth; quite possibly the worst game I’ve not been able to stop playing.

Cyber Sleuth is apparently the latest in a long line of Digimon games of the same vein, inventing a new, but familiar, world which clashes the real and digital world’s together. Cyber Sleuth has a lot of things going for it at first glance, the premise is pretty intriguing, taking place in a world where the internet has become a physical space people upload their consciousness into.

It falls down almost immediately though as any intrigue or creativity in the story is squashed down by overwriting and poor translation. It didn’t take me very long into the game to totally give up on the story and start franticly thumbing through the endless prattle. So if not the story, the gameplay right?

Honestly, I can’t say the gameplay the gameplay gripped me at all either. The turn based combat works in a number of Rock, Paper, Scissors triangles, meaning that as long as you have have your type advantages, you might as well let the game play itself. In fact, you can. There is an auto fight option during battles to allow the Digimon to fight for themselves, an option I took at every opportunity bar boss fights.

At this point you might be wondering what on earth was keeping me playing it. I’ll admit, that what was keeping me in was very thin, and it was purely the game’s collection aspect. If I have one good thin to say about the the game, it’s that a lot of care has gone into crating about 240 of the best looking Digimon models I have ever seen.

Somehow, Cyber Sleuth has managed to get its little fingers into my soul in the same way mobile based clicker games do, in that I just wanted to fill those progress bar and fill my Digimon Pokedex. It wasn’t until I started getting towards some of the bizarre requirements at the mega level that required more grinding than I was already doing that I finally managed to pull myself away.

My average session of Digimon Cyber Sleuth consisted of me powering through a few story missions, ignoring the story completely before finding a good spot to grind and then just sitting there and letting the game play itself, digivolving and de-digivolving trying to get as many combinations and arbitrary requirements as possible. These sessions could last up five hours before I realised what was going on.

If this game has done nothing else, it has reminded me how much I used to like Digimon and how much clout the franchise does still have with me. But not with this game. If you don’t mind the gratuitous fan service, endless repetitive dialogue and combat with no challenge though, maybe it’s worth it…

Long story short though, I’ll hopefully be back to writing now. Hopefully. Got a lot of TV shows to review.