Digimon: Time Stranger: My Thoughts
Date: 2026-03-02
I didn’t finish it, which I’m kinda surprised by, to be honest. That’s maybe a strange thing to say, but this game has had me feeling kinda strange about games in general and my relationship to them–or playing them perhaps?
I’ve had an absolute blast playing this–it’s for all intents and purposes my first genuine exposure to Digimon in any real sense. I watched some scattered episodes of the anime that series that was brought over along with the first Pokemon wave, because I was the exact demographic for it. And as kids are wont to do, I quickly established sort of like, my belonging to TEAM POKEMON and so I never really engaged with any other Digimon stuff all the way up until basically now–despite not having remotely cared about TEAM POKEMON v. TEAM DIGIMON since I was like 11 years old.
But as a consequence of Digimon being completely off my radar, I have essentially no choice but to engage with it through the lens of the enormous other -mon ending franchise that I am a super-fan of. I’m sure True Digimon Heads detest people coming in from Pokemon and having Pokemon-like expectations and a Pokemon-like understanding of the world, and so I’m just gonna apologize for being a Pokemon-centric worldview into a completely different monsters universe.
But wowzers it really is just like, totally different huh? I now know some sense of how people who aren’t Pokemon-heads feel when they pick up the newest iteration. The entire time playing I was like “wow this guy turns into WHAT?” or “whoah what a cool freaky little fella” and just being utterly lost about the logic of who follows what. And also I had no sense of like, which of these Digimon were new to this game? Which ones are the old favorites? Who’s the Pikachu of Digimon? And on top of that I had no sense for how all of the different-from-Pokemon combat mechanics worked. Luckily, the game does a good job explaining it but wowzers, I genuinely didn’t expect it to be SO different from Pokemon, and that’s totally on me.
I will say the biggest thing I absolutely did not pick up on for a while was you’re like, kinda meant to Digivolve and De-Digivolve to raise the Trust level which also raises the level cap? I absolutely didn’t get that at all until I had to look up why some level caps were lower than others. It feels like systems stacked on systems and I felt really lost at times.
And finally, the last bit of like, Pokemon-as-the-elephant-in-the-room I’ll speak to is that it’s fascinating how different the relationship with one’s Digimon feel compared to the relationship with one’s Pokemon. On the whole, I think I can say that my Digimon felt like partners and peers, while Pokemon feel like very very dear pets. I’m not saying I don’t consider my dog or cats like, friends or partners or whatever, but they’re wholly different from like, a human friend. And Digimon have the like, energy and feeling of a sidekick rather than a pet. And these are just value-neutral observations; I don’t have feelings one way or another about preference, it’s just something I noticed myself feeling.
Because of this game, I started watching Digimon Beatbreak and I gotta say, that anime is so good I can’t put it down! I cannot recommend it enough and it makes me sad that a couple of my favorite guys from that aren’t in this! What a missed opportunity for some bRaNd SyNeRgY
So why didn’t I finish it? Why did I play for about 17 hours across fifty days? I don’t know, really. What I alluded to at the top of this game making me think about my relationship with games as a whole really comes down to how I think about what it means to me that I liked the game but I didn’t really like playing it. How do I reconcile that? It’s hard to imagine saying I like a movie but not watching it?
After a certain point I just felt like I didn’t want to keep playing it, but I still feel fondly for it.
And I don’t know what to do with that.
