1 review liked by Triet_Nguyen


Hacker's memory is an overall improvement over base game Cybersleuth; keeps the things that made me like cybersleuth, improves on parts of it, but still has some of its issues.

The story I think is overall better, mostly held up by how much I actually liked the Hudie gang and the sense of being a real close knit team is the forefront of the story and I throughly enjoyed it. It lacks a lot of the real Oh Shit Lets Fucking Gooooo moments of CS but is better paced overall (still has the weirdness of doing tonal unfitting but necessary to progress the plot sidequest, but it never gets as bad as cybersleuth), and some plot threads feel a little underbaked, but it all works out in the end, and it's a lot of fun.

The gameplay systems of CS are mostly the same in HM, but the encounter feel a lot more fleshed out. Bosses in this game have a greater sense of identity and strategy to fighting them, and a lot less fights that are just higher stat 'mons. This is for better and worst; for better it's satisfying to fight a boss with creative rules, for worst you get things like Matadormon which made me wanna pull my hair at how annoying it was. It also introduced me to a brand new issue that I didnt discover when I played through CS cuz I played that game on normal; difficulty.
The game has two difficulties, Normal and hard. Normal is too easy imo, you can kinda breeze through most of it. Hard on the other hand is pretty tough, and will force you to respect the battle system more, but the game becomes really annoying. Bosses are giant brick houses of health, even when buffed attacks that aren't either 3x bonuses or a def/int penetrating attack (or poison if it works on the boss lol) feels like it does nothing. It puts a bit of a dampen on party building; 'mons that don't have the aforementioned penetration or just some really useful utility skills dont feel worth having, they'll do pathetic damage and you'll probably just use their turns to apply items rather than use them, it feels bad.
I personally say just go with normal, but you will learn to appreciate the system more if you go hard at the cost of needing to do more 2-3x platinum sukemon grinding and some really tedious boss fights. Pick your poison.

I also think the game comes into its own artistically in HM. While it's obviously limited being a vita game/vita port (i played this on PC complete edition but but I cant separate the pc port games on backloggd) they realyl went further in this game with more weird enviroments, fights with cool backdrops or camera angles, more creative inengine cutscenes with 'mons doing cool things, it looks great for what it is.

I highly recommend this and cybersleuth (they both come together anyways). I put an easy 90 hours into it, and if you're a bigger collect them all head you'll go nuts in this game. It's rough, but games with a lot of soul are often rough. It's also one of those games that seems like it's constnatly going on sale, and this game is well worth whatever sale bucks you get it on.
And above all, you'll get it and then play through a pokemon game and feel like you've been getting played for like 20+ years

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