Digimon Story Cyber Sleuth and Hacker’s Memory Review.

The Digimon Story sub-series is a spin-off of the Digimon World games that focus more on following a story like a more traditional JRPG instead of just raising Digimon in the digital world. Digimon Story Cyber Sleuth and Digimon Story Cyber Sleuth: Hacker’s Memory, which will be called Cyber Sleuth and Hacker’s Memory from this point on, are the fifth and sixth games in the Digimon Story sub-series. 

The games were initially released on PS4 and PSVita, but were later ported to Nintendo Switch and PC. This review will be based on the PSVita version.

Story

The story of both games happens at the same place and time. In Cyber Sleuth you take the role of the “Cyber Sleuth” who will solve the “big picture” problems. While in Hacker’s Memory you take on the role of the “Hacker” who takes on a more behind the scenes role in the overall story and really just exists to flesh out the Cyber Sleuth world.

The story of the games takes place in Tokyo where an internet cyberspace called “Eden” is all the rage. However, unbeknownst to anyone this cyberspace has somehow become connected to the digital world which causes digimon to start appearing in Eden. Along with the digimon, mysterious entities that later become known as "Eaters" have also appeared with an Eden. Throughout both games you will discover the mysteries of why the digital world is connected to Eden and why the eaters have mysteriously appeared. 

Gameplay

The easiest way to describe the gameplay in these games is to call them digimon based Shin Megami Tensei/Persona games. You explore the different areas in the games, experience the linear story through visual novel like cut-scenes, and you fight traditional turn-based jrpg battles with your digimon of choice. The game even has a Velvet Room equivalent where you can make, raise, and evolve digimon. 

While none of the similarities to the Shin Megami Tensei/Persona games are a bad thing, it is hard not to notice just how similar these games are to the Shin Megami Tensei/Persona games.

The gameplay loop of the games is very simple, you take on missions for different clients, some of which are side-stories and some which will move the main story along. 

While doing these missions you will fight in digimon battles, in these battles you will take three of your digimon and fight other digimon in turn-based combat. The battle system is the standard turn based system you see is a ton of jrpgs. From a battle menu you will command your digimon to do a normal attack, special attack, or use an item. Most mission just lead to a battle followed by a story cut-scenes and after the mission is over you pick another mission and repeat until the end of the game.

While doing missions is a main part of these games, the other main part is raising digimon. Like in any monster catching game you must capture the digimon before you can raise them and in this game in order to capture digimon all you have to do is battle them. 

At the start of each battle a percentage bar will appear around the digimon you are fighting. It will slowly start to fill up with the data of digimon with each encounter. Once that bar reaches 100% you can go to the Digimon Lab to convert the data into a digimon. 

Once you have a digimon you can level it up in battle or in the digimon farm and once it reaches a high enough level you can digivolve it into a stronger digimon.
There is also training system in the digimon farm that helps you make your digimon stats stronger. 

Visuals/Performance

For games that were originally made to be cross-play and cross-save compatible between the PS4 and PSVita the games look pretty good. Every version of the games besides the PSVita version runs at 720 60fps or 1080 60fps. 

Performance wise only the vita version has any notable loading times and even those are only one or two seconds long. As with any game released nowadays, the games may crash for any number of unseen reasons, but in my time with each game they only crashed like twice throughout my entire play-through of both games.

Time to beat/Achievements

It took me about 100 hours to 100% each game separately for a total of around 200 hours to beat both games. If you only want to beat the story, you could get through both games in about 50 to 60 hours each.

When it comes to achievements, there are some very tedious challenges that the game wants you to do if you want all of them, like unlocking a majority of the digimon in each game and finding all the digimon medals, but besides those the achievements pretty much come to you as you play.

One thing to note, after you beat the story in Cyber Sleuth you can transfer everything you have done when it comes to unlocked digimon and digimon medals over to Hacker’s Memory.

Conclusion

Overall both games are great fun if you are in the mood for good and competent jrpgs. While the games don’t do anything that is innovative for the jrpg genre, they are great digimon games and must plays for digimon fans.