Lucas White Believes Digimon: Time Stranger’s Instant Success Was A Bright Spot in Dark Times | Winter Spectacular 2025
2025’s been a rough year for people like me who want to review video games for a living. I’ve been fortunate enough to brute force it, but at a cost. Grinding, hustling, keeping up, looking ahead, staying on at all times… it’s a lot. Worst of all, at least in terms of how I consume and think about media, has been losing the time to reflect and appreciate things, you know, letting stuff simmer. It’s go, go, go all the time, and the year has whizzed by in a flash. I don’t know how I managed to do things like write a top 25 list or vote in the IGAs when everything feels like a blur, but I made it happen. Brute force. But somewhere in the eye of the storm that is my self-destructive, chosen career path, something did manage to stand out and lift my spirits.
Digimon: Time Stranger, a game I’ve been waiting for, more accurately hoping for, over a literal decade, finally came out. And that sucker hit. Great reviews, tons of hype from The Gamers, and massive numbers on Steam – this stuff hit my social feed like a tidal wave. I reviewed it myself, of course, and I loved it, even if it didn’t end up being what I expected. But Time Stranger being good, or my own personal enjoyment of it, aren’t what matters here. That’s great, of course, especially when I think about other games that historically took years to come out and landed far less gracefully. Duke Nukem Forever, Shenmue 3, and even Final Fantasy XV, which I thought was pretty rad. Just to name a few. It’s nice when a long wait doesn’t end with a messy outcome. But the real gift is what everyone else thought.
I’m used to being a weirdo. I’m a millennial in my mid-30s; I lived through being bullied for being into things that are cool now. That is what it is, and “fandom” being a thing now is its own can of problematic worms. But even in my own friend groups, I was always an outlier. I didn’t like to play Halo; I never spent a dime on World of Warcraft; I binge-watched Mobile Suit Gundam while my friends raved about Fullmetal Alchemist. Even now in this games media space, while I’ve made great friends I cherish and carved a niche for myself, it feels isolating at times because I don’t show up for the Personas or Octopaths or Clair Obscurs with the same energy as my peers.
“Lucas is the SaGa sicko” is great when my time comes to show up on a podcast, and those moments are wonderful, but then it’s back to my quiet, little corner afterwards. On bad brain days, that sucks. On good days, I remember I have more to show for it than it feels like. For example, I got a piece about Mary Skelter to show up on Critical Distance; that’s crazy! It can be tough to be an RPG guy without always fitting in with, you know, the “RPG Guys,” if that makes sense. Especially at times when you want to talk about something you’re into, and the response is barely shy of silence.
Case in point: Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth was a weird, janky RPG that showed up on the PS Vita in 2015. It ran poorly, had a bunch of copy/paste dungeons, was full of what many people refer to as “anime bullshit,” so on and so forth. But that game has the secret sauce if you give it a chance. It pulses with a chaotic energy that the more generic RPGs of its vintage, with twice the budget, struggle to muster. It wears its heart on its sleeve, and it’s a paradise of interlocking, grinding progression systems that dispense dopamine like a soda fountain.
Sure, the localization is a mess, and you spend most of the game time running errands, but Cyber Sleuth still managed to capture my mind with the things it does well, and hasn’t let go to this day. I’ve yelled about it at every opportunity since I first played it, and almost never felt like I was taken seriously. I felt like Usopp in One Piece running around his town screaming about pirates, except I was never lying. Just being the local weirdo yelling about my silly Digimon game.
I wasn’t completely alone; people in the space, like Ken Shepard and Mike Williams, also put Cyber Sleuth over with their own flavour of doing so over the years. But it was still like yelling into a void. Even when Time Stranger was finally announced, the vibe was still very much, “Oh, a new Digimon game. Okay.” But something changed around SGF, when people finally got their hands on it for the first time. People like my pal Will Borger, a certified RPG hater, were suddenly very interested in it. A timely sale, putting Cyber Sleuth at the cost of a cup of coffee (along with extra yelling from Ken and myself) got a bunch of people finally trying it out all at once. It was like a party!
The party didn’t last super long. I got fired from a strong gig I had for very stupid reasons, not long after SGF, amplifying everything I talked about in the opening graf by… too much. Time Stranger itself could have only come out at a worse time if it dropped a month later, but I had a good time despite everything. Rushing through it, wringing a Take from my brain on a deadline, treating it as a piece of Invoice Math, the works. Not the healthiest way to enjoy something I’ve wanted for ten years, but it’s the path I’m on. Whatever. But when that embargo lifted, and the reviews came out, and everyone was yelling about it, and those Steam numbers proved that people actually showed up this time… that felt good. That was validation. That was seeing the part of me that feels like an outcast on those bad days getting to sit at the table for a spell.
I likely won’t clearly remember much else about video games in 2025, but I won’t soon forget when Digimon Story: Time Stranger came out and actually made an impact. All the bad stuff – the job trauma, the insecurities, the stress, whatever else that probably sucked at the time – it all melted away. I wasn’t even upset when my voice was kind of drowned out by others, because it meant the underdog had broken containment. I can look back and appreciate how something that felt damned to obscurity, something I really thought was special and worth fighting for in this space, got a second chance and nailed the landing, and was rewarded with real success.
I’ll close this out with an appropriate quote from Mr. Shepard: “We have been in the trenches, my friend. But we won.”
