Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth – Dungeons ‘n Digis

This post was written by Dark_Sage. He is Dark_Sage.

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There’s a good reason the title is terrible, honey, you just haven’t thought of it yet.

 

Gameplay/Story

Digimon_Story_Cyber_Sleuth

Cyber Sleuth is a typical dungeon crawler. Or to put it in idiot terms, “It’s like Persona, but with worse pokemons”.

Prepare yourself for a brain-rotting battle system with bosses that would test you on your knowledge of the mechanics in a better game, but here are simply gatekeepers for a masochistic level grind.

Learn a lesson? Fuck that, I won, didn't I?
“Learn a lesson on type match-ups? Fuck that, I won, didn’t I?”

You’re given a collection of quests to complete as a means to advance to the next chapter (of 20), but it’s never clear which are the sidequests and which are the main quests, nor is it obvious how difficult each quest is supposed to be.

For example, a few hours into the game, there is a quest given to you by one of the starter-type digimon. If you select it, you’re placed in a level filled with the RPG equivalent of finding yourself caught in a zone where all the enemies are randomly 10-15 levels above you.

Of course, if your team can survive the battles, this becomes incredibly exploitable. And within a couple hours, you’ll find yourself sweeping the game with literal piles of shit thanks to the game’s poorly coded leveling system.

You may think I'm joking, but this is the party you will be forced to use for the vast majority of the game.
You may think I’m joking, but this is the party you will legitimately be forced to use for the vast majority of the game.

Playing efficiently necessitates the use of a specific team (PlatNumes/PlatSukas), as if you end up trying to play for fun, with a team you actually like…

I've got a bunny, a fox, and a bat-rat. Think we could make this work?
I’ve got a bunny, a fox, and a bat-rat. Think we could make this work?

…all you’ll be doing is wasting handfuls of hours on what is a terribly dull combat system held up by poor mechanics and a forced grind.

Fucked either way, the gameplay is certainly not this game’s strong suit. Which is unfortunate, because the story sure as hell ain’t worth writing home about. …or writing about here for that matter. Read its product description if you really must know:

Set in the near future, the line between the real and digital worlds is blurred. Logging into cyberspace is part of everyday life. For one teenager, a harmless on-line chat spawns a chance encounter with a mysterious hacker. Little did this teen know, this brief meeting would lead to a Digi-monumental adventure. In Digimon Story Cyber Sleuth, scan, raise, and train your faithful Digimon companions to battle by your side against a group of hackers. Do you have what it takes to crack this Digi-case?

Helpful, huh? That’s really about all there is to it, though.

 

 

Translation

Say what? (Bobobo)
Say what? (Bobobo.)

To put this in terms everyone here should understand, the translation reads like it was done by what must have been the only person in history to fail a Commie translation test.

Translation mistakes (the game is often explicitly wrong about its mechanics, necessitating the use of a fan-written guide) and poor English are about as common as the constant rejections the TL must have received from society to turn them into the kind of sense-deprived maniac that would come up with the following dialogue:

Digimon_Story_Cyber_Sleuth_Questionable_Localization

Digimon_Story_Cyber_Sleuth_Engrish

The issues manage to seep themselves into the story, as even if you choose a female avatar at the start of the game, all the dialogue will treat you as male.

As a form of tumblr appeasement, the translation’s even gender fluid with the NPCs.

Sometimes the bad translation makes scenes unintentionally funny, but more often than not it’ll force you to try and back-translate what was said so it’ll make a lick of sense.

Digimon_Story_Cyber_Sleuth_Chuunibyou
If you didn’t know what chuunibyou was before, this game sure as hell won’t change that.

Continuing with the theme of utter incompetence is the state of the dialogue choices in Cyber Sleuth. Half the time you can sorta make out what the TL was going for if you squint hard enough. The other half…?

Digimon_Story_Cyber_Sleuth_Dialogue_Options
Not exactly an even split.

Anime fans may have low standards, but they’re not low enough to tolerate this kinda shit in a $60 game. Learn to QC, Bandai. I don’t need you blaming the inevitable poor sales on a “non-existent market” when the issue is with your incompetent localization team.

 

 

Preorder-exclusive Digimen

Digimon_Story_Cyber_Sleuth_Preorder_DLC

While I had this game on pre-order from the get-go (Suzuhito Yasuda‘s art on anything makes it day 1), Bandai apparently thought more consumers needed to jump on the pre-order wagon, so they lazily locked a handful of Digimon to the stipulation that you promise your money to them regardless of how shit the product ends up being (a good call on someone at Bandai’s part, I guess).

If the game’s non-existent marketing didn’t clue you in to this, or even the game’s existence, you’re forever fucked, as they are not planning to release the black digi-lines anywhere else.

If you want this cool cat at your party, you gotta book him way in advance.
If you want this cool cat at your party, you gotta book him way in advance.

And the game’s pretty heartless about this, reminding you that you’ll never have a complete pokedex without something you’re not even allowed to buy anymore.

#18 alongside
#18 alongside about 10 others will be forever grayed-out to you if you didn’t pre-order.

While the game is also available on the Vita, and technically supports save file transfer between the two versions, if you only pre-ordered for one of the systems, you can’t transfer your save files between them as it will throw up an error. Competency!

Considering this is from the company that locked Boruto and Sarada to pre-orders as well, I guess we shouldn't be surprised by this shit show.
Considering this is from the company that locked Boruto and Sarada to pre-orders as well, I guess we shouldn’t be surprised by this shit show.

Oh, and if you ordered from Best Buy, hope you didn’t use Luck as your dump stat, cuz they didn’t even have enough DLC codes to go around for all the pre-orders.

Oops.
Oops.

 

 

Characters

Oh_Me-chan

As I mentioned before, the only reason I bought this game, and apparently the only reason to buy this game, is Yasuda’s character designs. Luckily, Bandai didn’t waste them, even though they turned each character into a one-line gimmick.

 

Nice bod, sultry personality, but her food's poison so she's still single.
Kyoko Kuremi: Nice bod, sultry personality, but her food’s poison so she’s still single.

 

Arata Sanada: Standoffish at first, but top-tier fuck meat once you get to know him.
Arata Sanada: Standoffish at first, but top-tier fuck meat once you get to know him.

 

Yuuko Kamishiro: Quiet and small, but she likes to eat food which makes her relatable, even to bulimics.
Yuuko Kamishiro: Quiet and small, but she likes to eat food, which makes her super relatable, even to bulimics.

 

Nokia Shiramine:
Nokia Shiramine: Her voice will make you want to get off with broken glass… and I mean that in, like, the best way possible.

 

MC-kun/chan (right, duh): Mostly just stands around making stupid fucking faces because that's about all the room a self-insert character is allowed these days. Still best girl/boy tho.
MC-kun/chan (->): Mostly just stands around making stupid fucking faces. Still best chara tho.

 

I would willingly watch a show where these guys just trope about, doing fuck-all but running out the episode’s run time. Here, they provide the only incentive to complete the mind-numbing quests, which often still isn’t enough of a carrot for anyone with self-respect or better things to do.

 

 

These Digimon Ain’t Champions

Did I have fun playing this game? No, not really. Hell, I didn’t have the motivation to finish it once I realized I had spent over 20 hours grinding my soul into dust.

Which sucks, cuz this scene woulda been awesome.
Which sucks, cuz this scene woulda been awesome.

The title feels like it might be worth it at a $15-$20 price range, or at $30 MSRP if we’re being generous. But at $60 for a half-finished hack job? Not recommended unless you hate your money.

 

Oh, and here’s some poorly drawn Cyber Sleuth porn. Didn’t think I’d forget Valentine’s Day, did ya? (NSFW, obvs.)

Spoiler for

DGCS_P01 DGCS_P02 DGCS_P03 DGCS_P04 DGCS_P05 DGCS_P06 DGCS_P07 DGCS_P08 DGCS_P09 DGCS_P10 DGCS_P11 DGCS_P12 DGCS_P13 DGCS_P14 DGCS_P15 DGCS_P16 DGCS_P17 DGCS_P18 DGCS_P19 DGCS_P20 DGCS_P21 DGCS_P22 DGCS_P23 DGCS_P24 DGCS_P25 DGCS_P26 DGCS_P27

Yeah, if you actually wanna get off I’d recommend just re-reading this post <3

27 thoughts on “Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth – Dungeons ‘n Digis”

      • yes the digimon story games series consists of Digimon story DS, Digimon Dawn/Dusk, Lost Evolution and Cyber Sluth, i never played lost evolution but the other 3 games were amazing games if u can get past the DS style graphics, and besides the story series there was Digimon world 1-4 1 being a tamagotchi style game 2 was weird i can even explain it, 3 was the best in my opinion it went with a very Digimon adventures sort of theme but in stead having allot of tamers in the digital world rather than just the chosen, and then there was 4 witch everyone supposedly hated i never had much experience with it other than on a gamecube emulator but it did seem bad, so yes there were at least 5 good Digimon games that i know of to date not including cyber sluth

        Reply
    • This guy has no idea what he is talking about hell he didn’t even finish the game how can u say all that without at least finishing the game this game is totally amazing, yea it has it’s faults for 1 it is a big grind however it is one of the best digimon games i’ve played, the story is amazing an very emotional at times, the characters are very lovable even Arata after he becomes a jerk, and the overall design of the game is great i mean digimon is in the same genera of series as Pokemon and if u look at this it is far better than the Pokemon games of late (and that’s saying something because they are pre good games) and if u turn up the difficulty to hard it is actually a challenge it is most certainly worth the price hell i’d even say it’s worth buying both versions of the game to take advantage of that cross save compatibility that barely any games these days have and all require both copies of the game to use

      Reply
      • also another thing that i think need to be point at is that it’s a port of the psvita, i’m a player how just like any system if there’s interesting games, either pc or console and i think it’s kinda important (though i’m on a ps4 and a laptop at the time i’m writing this comment)

        and yeah i enjoyed the game even though i’m not a big fan of rpgs

        Reply
  1. People buying videogames just have low standards. So this is just survival of the fittest. Which is a shame because it’s working and there’s nothing I can do about it but also buy the same games the idiots are buying.
    Though as far as any type of DLC goes: Amiibo are the worst.

    Reply
  2. Only came here for the awful translations and holy shit, that did not disappoint.
    What a gold mine.

    It’s really annoying to see low effort crap like this though, you know this will sell. Look at Trails in the Sky SC, which got a lot of love from the team working on it, that flopped hard, it’s also the best JRPG on PC.
    The gaming market and community are just garbage and don’t deserve any good things.

    Reply
    • That might have something to do with the first Trails being entirely inaccessible to anyone who didn’t feel like investing 20 hours into it before it “gets good”.

      Reply
        • Yeah, because it is $30 and hasn’t been on sale yet, people don’t want to pay full price for a psp game that came out in Japan five years ago. Once it hits $15 or so on Steam those numbers will go up drastically.

          We also don’t have any idea how much the actual psp version sold, but considering how unpopular the Vita is outside of Japan, almost certainly less than on Steam.

          Reply
        • According to employees of the company on their forums, which I’ve been combing since I read this, that’s not really a shocker. They always knew SC was going to be a slow burn as people made their way through one and then got to two.

          Apparently the release of two actually caused an upsurge in sales of one as well.

          Anyway, bottom line, they’re saying they’re not gonna really decide if they consider it a flop or not for months.

          Reply
  3. B-But they offer new exclusive content which is not available in the Japanese version ;_;
    Also, did you really spend your valentines day playin… I mean… torturing your soul?

    Reply
    • Let’s pretend I spent the day doing something productive instead, like eating Chipotle or practicing cursive with a razor blade and pubic hair.

      Reply
  4. >she didn’t bought Divinity 2 on the Switch
    >digimon porn isn’t even of the digimens
    I pirated this game and I still feel ripped off.

    Reply

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