I’m halfway through my 3-hour demo playing Digimon Story Time Stranger when I finally muster the courage to de-evolve one of my most powerful monsters. Why? So I can build them back up from level 1 to be even stronger — and grow them along a different evolutionary path. For casual players, this may sound excessive. For hardcore role-playing game fans keen on building their fighters to the peak of performance, these expansive possibilities are exactly what they’ve been waiting for.

Digimon Story Time Stranger, from publisher Bandai Namco due out Oct. 3, is the next game to explore the Digimon franchise. While Digimon’s digital world and quirky monster design have always given it a unique flavor, it’s always been in the shadow of Nintendo’s cultural colossus Pokemon, which reigns supreme in the monster-collecting RPG subgenre.

But Digimon Story Time Stranger introduces enough ways to alter and grow its monsters that it could step out on its own as a robust alternative to Pokemon. There’s a complex battle system for calculating weaknesses, myriad items to equip that give different attacks and a host of ways to build stats. All of that combines for a rich depth of combat with quality-of-life considerations that remove some tedium from the level-up grind.

Digimon Story Time Stranger’s plot feels like anime

Players will have plenty of time to dig into those complexities when playing through Digimon Story Time Stranger, which is set in modern-day Japan. Players take on the role of an agent of ADAMAS, an organization exploring anomalies, which generally means the appearances of digital lifeforms wandering into our world — the eponymous Digimon. 

In my demo, I played through the first hour of the game in which my agent fought enemy monsters while exploring a walled-off section of the Shinjuku district of Tokyo. In the chaos of meeting a mysterious girl and being saved from a giant rampaging Digimon, my agent got sucked into the digital realm. That’s where you’ll find the game’s main conflict: a war between more benign monsters living in harmony and a bellicose faction of Digimon called the Titans. 

In the full game, players will have to tour the digital realm and quell conflicts between the two sides in around a dozen areas, all while growing a fighting team. I got a tease of the machinations happening in the background as a cutscene revealed a few posh children (who may be more powerful than they appear) speaking about the war, suggesting they could be manipulating the greater conflict from afar. 

Based on what I saw, the game’s story feels like an anime plot, and likely lasts dozens of hours. I didn’t play enough to speculate on where it’ll go, aside from leaning on familiar tropes like building friendships and turning enemies to allies, but I dug deeply into the gameplay enough to seriously recommend Pokemon players give Digimon Story Time Stranger a solid look.

Digimon Story Time Stranger’s deep systems should appeal to Pokemon diehards

While I’m more of a casual Pokemon fan, I know the fanbase has a core population of players who strive to breed, raise and train their monsters to their absolute limits of stats and power. They’re the fans I’m talking to when I say that Digimon Story Time Stranger has the complexity to give Pokemon a run for its money among the hardcore monster-training demographic.

First, there’s the turn-based combat. Digimon have a series of moves keyed to 11 elemental types — fire, water, earth, dark, light and so on. Use the right attack and it’ll get a damage boost, perhaps to 200%. Each Digimon also has a digital identity, mainly split along three types: data, which are weak to viruses, which are weak to vaccines, which are weak to data, in a rock-paper-scissors sort of cycle. If you combine these with the right attack from the right kind of Digimon type, you can boost damage up to 300% — and beyond. 

Thankfully, the game has several ways it eases the rougher parts of this complexity. You can use items or switch Digimon without using a turn. Your agent character also has powerful Cross Arts with varying effects like dealing damage or boosting your monsters’ defense and attack. When you’re out of battles, you can just stand still for a moment to recover your Digimon team’s health and special attack energy, with no need to waste items. And you can even ride some  Digimon to travel faster.

But growing your Digimon is a whole other level of complexity that gives hardcore players a lot of options. First and foremost are the evolutions («digivolutions» in the game’s parlance): When your Digimon satisfies certain requirements, like having high enough stats, you can transform them into a more powerful monster. While Digimon’s eclectic creature design means you could be evolving, say, a fluffy mammal into a battle tank, there’s no denying how much more effective that stronger monster will be.

You can also go the other way, de-evolving them back to their base form in order to transform them during a second evolution that may learn different attacks or have other advantages. With four tiers of forms and multiple options at each, there’s a lot of ways to transition the same monster up and down the evolutionary tree.

You’ll want to stick with the same monsters, too. The more they fight for you, the stronger their bond will be, allowing them to keep stat bonuses even when evolving or de-evolving. This is complicated by the way you get Digimon in the first place: Defeat enough of the same monster in the field and you’ll be able to generate one of your own. But you may want to hold off, as defeating twice as many means you’ll be able to produce one with an even higher level cap (from 20 to 25, say) and more maximum stats. You may be torn between a monster you caught earlier and one you can generate later that’s more powerful.

Complicating this even further are personalities, affecting which stats grow faster when leveling up. These can be viewed on a 4×4 grid on a Digimon’s status screen, and certain items can shift their personality.

The consequence of de-evolving your favorite monsters is that they’ll drop to level one, keeping only the stats bonuses from your bond with them. But you can stow them in a Digifarm to have them passively level up as you go about your adventures, returning them to fighting potency over time.

These are just the basics of Digimon Story Time Stranger that I got to see in a few hours of playtime, and while the game’s differences from Pokemon may be a bit jarring to fans of that franchise, its depth should be tantalizing to the monster trainers out there. Since the next Digimon comes out Oct. 3, that gives folks two weeks to try it out before the upcoming Pokemon Legends: Z-A is released on Oct. 16.

Digimon Story Time Stranger will be released on Oct. 3 for PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S.