Digimon Story Cyber Sleuth: Complete Edition combines Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth and its sequel Hacker’s Memory in a re-release on the Nintendo Switch and on PC. Cyber Sleuth was first released in North America in February 2016, and Hacker’s Memory saw a worldwide release in January 2018 after releasing in Japan the previous month. In simple terms of monetary value, this is a good deal; two full-length JRPGs for the price of one. This is ultimately the best thing Cyber Sleuth: Complete Edition has going for it; while it is by no means a bad title, none of its individual features add up to anything much more exciting than the sheer amount of content it provides.
Digimon Story Cyber Sleuth: Complete Edition is in every way a JRPG, and it is difficult to avoid comparisons to more notable games in its genre. These comparisons only occasionally do Cyber Sleuth credit, but what it brings to the table isn’t insignificant. If you’ve played a JRPG before you know more or less what to expect from Cyber Sleuth’s combat; it is a turn-based affair where characters can attack, use skills or items, or guard to reduce damage from incoming attacks. Cyber Sleuth shakes things up a bit by introducing a combo system; if you have multiple Digimon taking their turns in a row, they have a chance of performing a combo, with subsequent Digimon adding attacks to the first Digimon’s, or boosting the effectiveness of the skill it’s performing. This is an exciting bonus for the player but it does little to add a strategic element; the combo chance goes up the longer a battle goes on, but most battles are too short for it to see significant growth. Additionally, while there are certain moves that can affect a Digimon’s placement in the turn order, it’s rather likely that the player’s Digimon will be clustered anyway, so there’s no real motive for players to attempt to affect turn order.
Combat is also very easy for a large portion of the early game. This is due in large part to the game’s Pokemon-esque attribute system. There is a triangle of Digimon types (Vaccine, Data, and Virus) which affect each other in a rock-paper-scissors system; if, for instance, a vaccine Digimon attacks a virus Digimon, the damage of its attack will be increased by 1.5. If the virus Digimon attempts to counterattack, its damage will be reduced by half. In addition to this, each Digimon also has an associated element which similarly influence effectiveness. This makes for a complex web of advantages and disadvantages that gets rather hard to track in the later game. In the early game, however, almost every Digimon you encounter is free of a type; damage advantages and disadvantages are rare. You out-level these early Digimon swifter than the game escalates in difficulty, leaving you with over-leveled Digimon that kill these puny random encounters in one or two hits, and enemy Digimon with no chance of using a type advantage to effectively retaliate and introduce any stakes.
If the player slogs through this early grind, they are rewarded with a battle system that gets decently engaging several hours in. The party management system (which is, of course, rather comparative to Pokemon’s) introduces more complexity to how the player engages with encounters. The amount of Digimon the player can have in their party is dependent on how much “memory” each Digimon takes up; weaker Digimon will only take up around 3 points, while more powerful ones can take up 6 or 8. The player starts the game with 20 points of memory and this can be upgraded as the game progresses. Only three of your Digimon can be active in battles at any given time. This introduces a layer of strategy in how you build your party, and forces you to make some interesting decisions. Do you load your party with a few of your strongest Digimon and attempt to brute-force your way through type disadvantages, or do you give yourself a wider variety of weaker Digimon so that you have an answer for every encounter? The game’s aggressive distribution of XP and relatively low level caps for Digimon ensures that you will be “Digi-volving” your Digimon quite frequently, which can open up many more options in how you build your party.
Digimon that don’t make the cut can be stored in your farm. Each island in the farm (you start with one and can unlock more as you play) can be outfitted with special items and assigned various missions; the Digimon on an island can either train to become stronger, work to build items for the player, or attempt to track down computer hackers that the player can then hunt down and confront. Digimon managing is, as one would expect, the shining star of Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth. Even when the battles get repetitive, it remains fun to sort out where each of your Digimon should go and how you can best use each one to your advantage. It’s even possible to engage with them as characters; Digimon in your farm can send you texts on your “Digiline” to tell you fun facts and ask you questions. Sometimes they will even present you with quizzes about Digimon types and in-game items. This is less fun than it might seem, as there are no apparent consequences for getting a question wrong; the Digimon will simply tell you the right answer, and, in some cases, almost immediately ask the same question again. Ultimately, as quaint as the Digiline function is, it’s repetitive, and adds little to the experience overall.
As this is a JRPG there are plenty of things to do outside of combat. Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth assigns your character a job as the assistant of a private investigator who specializes in investigating “cyber crimes” and who relies on the protagonist to navigate the virtual cyberspace of EDEN. In your role as an assistant investigator you can take cases from a board in your employer’s office. These cases function as brief side missions that grant you rewards and provide story beats that can range from somewhat confusing to genuinely amusing. The relationship between some of these cases and the main story is murky, and plot threads that are introduced by some side missions are shunted to the side in favor of main story content. Seeing your quest progression is also unnecessarily inconsistent; when you are on a case, you can check a tab in the pause menu to track its progress and see what to do next. When you are on a main story mission instead, however, you get no such hint. You’re expected to remember what you were most recently told by an NPC. This is rarely much of an issue, but it’s frustrating to see when the game clearly has a system for reminding you what your goal is and seems to simply choose not to use it.
In Hacker’s Memory, you play as a rookie hacker instead of an assistant to a private eye, but much of the gameplay remains largely identical. Instead of taking cases from the agency you pick up tasks that people have left on the forum of your hacker group’s website. They are mechanically identical, as is the combat, menu layout, and “DigiLab,” the space your character visits to manage your Digimon. The game even reuses some areas from the first game, same map and all. While Hacker’s Memory adds precious few changes to the experience, it’s as solid an RPG as the first game, and at the very worst it’s just more of the game to experience, which is hardly a bad thing.
Digimon Story Cyber Sleuth: Complete Edition is far from a bad game. If you enjoy JRPGs or you enjoy Digimon, there’s little reason not to pick it up. It does nothing with its mechanics or story that allows it to rise to the level of RPG greats like Persona 5 but what it does do is perfectly entertaining in its own right. If you’re a Digimon fan who missed the original release of one or both of these titles, you could do much worse than picking up a copy of Digimon Story Cyber Sleuth: Complete Edition.
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Digimon Story Cyber Sleuth: Complete Edition is available on Switch and PC. A Switch code was provided to Screen Rant for purposes of review.
