While Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth - Hacker’s Memory is a sequel to the first Cyber Sleuth, the story takes place concurrently with the events of that game. It follows another protagonist, Keisuke, who is trying to track down the hacker that stole his EDEN account. EDEN is like a virtual world that’s crucial for everyday life now and your EDEN account is effectively your identity. Keisuke joins a hacker group known as Hudie and finds out about digital monsters, or Digimon for short.
The Digimon collection aspect is the biggest and most addictive feature of the game. There are heaps of Digimon to choose from. “Capturing” a Digimon is as simple as encountering them enough times so that you can 100% scan them (usually takes 5-20 encounters). There are multiple digivolving paths to each Digimon, which is differentiated by their different stat requirements. You can freely de-digivolve too, which is useful in playing around with the skills that you want your Digimon to learn and inherit. Digivolving and de-digivolving resets their levels to 1 but it’s not as bad as it sounds since later on, completing one battle with them in your reserve will shoot them up 20-40 levels in one hit.
The game has a turn based battle system which is fairly generic as these systems go. You have an active party of three, followed by eight reserve slots. Each turn, your Digimon can attack or use a skill, use items or swap Digimon with one from your reserve slots. Each turn, there is a chance that the subsequent turn’s Digimon will join in for a more powerful attack.
There are two attribute systems that combine together. The first is that all Digimon is categorized as Vaccine, Virus or Data, and each one is strong against one while weak against another. The second attribute are elemental such as fire, water, light, dark etc. When combined with the distinction of each attack being physical and magical, and it can be fairly varied when determining the attack multiplier that gets applied based on the strengths and weaknesses of a Digimon’s type.
The game takes place mostly in EDEN, the digital virtual world. Unfortunately, the dungeons are very generic and if you’ve played the first game, everything feels very similar if not identical. The environments are blue floating platforms and the game has random encounters. Thankfully, the encounter rate is very low so you’ll be able to walk a decent distance before getting into battle if you don’t like them breaking the flow of the game. Later on, you’ll get abilities to remove encounters altogether. The environments of the real world look great too. Just like the dungeons though, the camera angle is fixed and there’s no way to move the camera yourself at all.
The first game’s story wasn’t that great and so having this game as a side story, with the same events from another perspective while adding its own thing, isn’t ideal either. It is boring and even ten hours in, you don’t feel that the story is picking up at all (it never does). Furthermore, you probably need to have remembered the original in order to understand several things. This translates to the game progression. There are very mundane events and sidequests. It doesn’t help with the limited objective markers at times. There is a lot of filler content and quests even in the main storyline, so that it’s quite dry before you even hit the halfway point.
There is a big design flaw in how you have to constantly go into a menu to access the dungeons and story quests. It just adds unnecessary steps and animation. It’s even worse when you accept a story quest, kicks you out of the menu, only for you to enter it again to access the required dungeon.
The game restricts you from grinding up a powerful party by artificially giving you a limit on how many Digimon you can carry based on a points weighting system. Weaker Digimon like Rookies have a lower weighting compared to stronger ones like Ultimates. It’s quite annoying when you’re juggling your party early on. There are some annoying difficulty spikes where you have to fight an enemy that has a ton of HP, high defenses and no weaknesses. It’s completely at odds with the normal encounters. This goes for bosses as well, it’s just really inconsistent.
This was a flaw in the first game and it’s a flaw here. In the second half of the game, the bosses become huge HP sinks, which makes the battles drag on and on. You then have to rely heavily on penetrating attacks and weaknesses. There are some battles in which the enemies constantly heal, which is always annoying and frustrating.
The ending is also a bit disappointing and falls flat like the rest of the boring dragged out story. You simply don’t care much by that point and the final boss isn’t that great either. It just feels under-cooked, especially compared to the first game, which already wasn’t amazing either. There is a post-game dungeon but disappointingly, it takes the lazy route and reuses the same dungeons in the story. It takes around 30-40 hours to finish the story, so it’s a long game.
Overall, Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth - Hacker’s Memory can be a fun game, if only for the digivolving aspect. Being allowed the freedom to digivolve up and down the chain, with so many possibilities, can be very addictive. Add in the min and maxing of your Digimon’s stats, and recognizing the Digimons from the anime, and it’s great. Unfortunately, the story is terrible with horrendous pacing filled with mundane and pointless filler, dragging the whole game down. It also suffers from extreme reuse of the same things from the first game.
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