I am pretty fond of the Digimon Story games, though I started playing them when they were still called “World” in the US. Digimon World Dusk was a favorite of mine as a kid that I replayed probably at least 3 or 4 different times, so I was already very used to the Story gameplay by the time a close friend recommended I get Cyber Sleuth last year. If you’re not used to the gameplay, it can be definitely an adjustment though; the complaints of tediousness in these games mostly do not feel as such to me, but given that both games combined will almost definitely clock you over 100 hours of game time, I can see why a lot of people would find elements of it monotonous over time. Thankfully this game has quality of life upgrades that Dusk did not, such as gradually gaining the ability to reduce and then remove random encounters entirely if you want. I am very biased to sprite work, and the DS games were gorgeous looking, but there is something to be said about how good the 3D models and attacks look in this game, I never really got to the point where I wished there was a skip button because the attacks still looked so cool even after seeing them for the thousandth time. There were some Digimon I was expecting to be in this game and very sad to learn weren’t, but 90% of the main staples are here and I even learned about some cool new ones through playing both games in this collection.

The thing that stands out to me even more than the gameplay was the ending to Part 2(Hackers Memory), which I do not exaggerate when I say feels like it has to be the saddest ending of any game I’ve played. The game overall is not particularly heart wrenching, but I cannot think of another game that not just kills off a major character, but rewrites the whole continuity of the in-game story so that they never existed in the first place and none of their loved ones even remember who they were. When the player character goes into what used to be her room but sees it became a regular old closet and starts breaking into tears, I felt that in my bones 100%. You’re almost mad at the writer’s team for making something so cruel but then you remember that the fact that they got you that invested in a game about weird collectible dinosaurs speaks to their accomplishment. It will always hold a special place in my heart for that reason, even if I probably will not go back to it every year like I do with something like Pokémon Emerald.