If you think Digimon are a cheap Pokémon ripoff inspired by a virtual pet toy from the ’90s, you don’t know Digimon. From anime shows, webcomics, novels, an official trading card game, and now the buzzy new RPG out of Summer Game Fest, Digimon Story: Time Stranger, the Digimon franchise has expanded significantly since its introduction in 1997. Even so, its growth has always been followed by the shadow of Pokémon, with which everything Digimon-related is wrongly compared, scrutinized, and ignored.
Digimon Story: Time Stranger could change that. Or it should, even with Pokémon Legends: Z-A looming. Based on early gameplay and reveals, Bandai has at least aimed to produce a game for a wider audience that addresses past mistakes. From investing in making the world of Time Stranger feel alive with cities filled with digimon to giving a special attention when putting 450 creatures in the game by designing special animations for each of them, it’s also clear the company has never lost sight of how cool Digimon is.
Image: Bandai via Polygon
I can’t blame anyone for seeing Digimon as a Pokémon knockoff; the first season of the Digimon anime aired in Brazil in July 2000, six months after Pokémon debuted, and I know we weren’t the only country that experienced the juxtaposition. Both shows had creatures who befriend kids and become stronger as they fight. But Pokémon made creature-taming part of the global zeitgeist. But the idea behind both couldn’t be more different; the games specifically play around with the idea that the real world and the DigiWorld exist in different instances. In some cases, humans are transported to the world of digimon, in others the digital leaks into the real.
In 1999, Bandai released the first game based on the creatures: Digimon World, a RPG in which we play as Mameo, a kid who finds himself in File Island and needs to help save the place from. Instead of a simple journey to become the best Digimon master, which would make it a true Pokemon Red/Blue rip, Mameo needs to become an equal partner for the Digimon. Training your Digimon became a thrill — and a gamble. They would feel hungry or need to go to the bathroom, which was hilariously indicated by the icon of a poop showing above the creature’s head. And even after hours preparing them to digivolve, there was a huge chance of getting a Numemon instead of a Greymon. But learning more about each Digimon and finally unlocking the forms you wanted the most made this game the epitome of the Digimon experience.
Image: Bandai via Polygon
While the Digimon World and subsequent Digimon Story games are more traditional RPGs, the franchise expanded greatly into the 2000s; the fighting game Digimon Rumble Arena and Digimon Digital Card Battle, a game based on the first Digimon TCG, both arrived in 2001. A decade later, Move Games brought the critters into the MMO space with Digimon Masters, and more recently Hyde developed the first Digimon Survive, a mix of visual novel and grid-based battles. And I won’t even start listing the Digimon mobile games released exclusively in certain Asian countries.
Most Digimon games are centered around the idea of fighting using the creatures, your mission is not to capture them. Instead, Digimon heavily emphasizes the bond between humans and digimon, working like partners. And even when entertaining our desire to have all the creatures, Digimon games follow their own logic and rules.
As a concept, DigiWorlds tend to force the boundaries between human and nonhuman, machine and organic. You’ll find cities ruled by digimon who are dictators; shops owned and run by digimon. There are factions, like the Royal Knights, who have internal disputes stemming from conflicting moral views.
Image: Bandai via Polygon
There are gems littered throughout Digimon’s gaming legacy. I will always make room for Digimon World 3 on every list of best RPGs. The ever-lasting grind of the Bandai’s game would test your patience by forcing long sessions of battles against low-level enemies so you could finally see Renamon digivolve to Kyubimon. In the meantime, players were compelled to investigate every corner to figure out the next step of the plot and keep playing, leading us into a confusing narrative, filled with twists and turns you couldn’t expect. Eventually, the story converged into a climax of world-conflict scale taking you to space. The unsuspecting difficulty was the charm.
Two of Bandai’s most recent titles, Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth and Digimon Story: Hacker’s Memory, are among the franchise’s best. Although the latter is an improvement from the former, they both have updated the graphics in Digimon games and come with an intriguing narrative. While having a simple combat system and an engaging progressing system, Cyber Sleuth and Hacker’s Memory tell touching stories about childhood and accepting oneself amid a major crisis as the boundaries between the digital world and the real one fades.
Image: Bandai via Polygon
In Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth, unlocking powerful digivolutions requires going through a series of steps before you meet the minimum transformation requirements. You need to train them in farms and feed them special food to increase specific attributes. The process also involves de-digivolving a digimon to a previous form, leveling it up, and then digivolving it again to increase their stats and max level cap. It might seem like a lot of work — and it is! — but it is fun to watch your digimon getting stronger; learn all the possibilities you unlock by adjusting their stats; and recognize how the series remains true to its roots. Epic plot with emotional bits added to an intricate evolution system is peak RPG.
While the stories, battles, and digivolutions make these games great, they also have their issues. Many Digimon games take too many detours, too many hours to get where the storytellers want to go. Media.Vision, developer behind the last two Digimon Story games, has never quite nailed a good balance for combat, resulting in some unexpected and frustrating difficulty spikes. And yes, the whole process to digivolve a digimon is so long that I would leave Cyber Sleuth open while having my Switch in sleep mode so time would still run and my digimon would keep working while I was off.
All the mistakes and hits from these previous games cleared the way to Digimon Story: Time Stranger. It took eight years for the Media.Vision team and producer Ryosuke Hara to put this game together and the final product seems to be good enough to surprise people and be elected as one of the best games in 2025’s Summer Game Fest. The impression left by the demo and the conversation around it led many of who never touched other Digimon games to go after a copy of Cyber Sleuth or Hacker’s Memory. But the surprise was not unjustified.
According to Ryosuke Hara in an interview with RPG Site, there has been an effort to use these years of development to make the world setting for this game more “robust”. Time Stranger is bringing the Digital World: Iliad, a place no other game has fully explored, while giving us the chance to meet a legendary group of Digimon called Olympos XII. The game’s production value also is evident in beautiful visuals and attention to the systems we will interact with as shown in recent trailers released by Bandai. However, all this effort is being put upon what has been learned and developed throughout the years with the older games.
Time Stranger is the result of honoring one’s history while knowing when to change, and perhaps the perfect place to start exploring this great franchise and learning about what it has to offer. Like any franchise, Digimon has its flaws, just like there are great experiences to have playing them. But all of this will continue to be overlooked if people don’t stop to try fitting Digimon into the mold of Pokemon. It’s time we give the digital creatures room to show their own colors.
