Technologies

Digimon Story Time Stranger Preview: Can It Beat Pokemon at Its Own Game?

The next Digimon roleplaying game is shaping up to be its own blend of complex turn-based combat and monster growth.

I’m halfway through my three-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 roleplaying 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 and S.

Technologies

A Star Wars AR Game Got Me Playing With Virtual Action Figures Like I Was 6 Years Old

It’s not every day that an AR game has me reliving childhood, but the upcoming Star Wars: Beyond Victory is a nostalgic experience.

It took less than a minute after donning a Meta Quest 3 headset before I was reliving some of my best memories from childhood in augmented reality, sitting on the floor with my digital Star Wars action figures creating fantastical scenes from a galaxy far, far away.

Last week, I visited Meta’s Los Angeles offices a mile from the city’s sunny beaches to try out an upcoming game, Star Wars: Beyond Victory, due out October 7 only for the Meta Quest 3 and Meta Quest 3S headsets. The game is developed by Industrial Light and Magic, the special effects wizards that brought the Star Wars galaxy to life with starships and lasers, lightsabers and space battles.

Star Wars: Beyond Victory was first revealed at Star Wars Celebration earlier this year, where ILM teased the game’s central story mode. In it, players take on the role of an up-and-coming podracer guided by the legendary Sebulba, racing rival of Anakin Skywalker in Episode I: The Phantom Menace. In Meta’s offices, I donned a Meta Quest 3 headset and played an early section of the story, including a podrace.

While I was expecting immersive full-screen podracing much like in the Nintendo 64 classic game Episode 1: Racer, Star Wars: Beyond Victory is very different, leaning into the Meta Quest’s augmented reality capabilities to portray racing on, functionally, a digital game table hovering above the real world room I was in. ILM’s developers told me that given concerns over making players nauseous when racing in high-speed VR, they opted to make the game’s action play out on a table in AR that gamers can resize to their liking, while still controlling their racer from a bird’s eye view.

«The original podracing prototypes were based on slot car races because that was like thinking about racing cars in your room,» said David Palumbo, senior experience designer at ILM and for Star Wars: Beyond Victory. «Eventually we hit on that holo-table prototype, and that sort of shifted the way we thought about mixed reality gameplay in a really fun way.»

In my four-person race I finished a distant third, but there’s a delightful novelty in reaching out with my Meta Quest controllers and — this will be important later — digitally grabbing the gameplay board to move it around or resize it to my liking. It felt tactile and responsive, letting me place it in the perfect spot to survey the action as I stood up. The ILM developers described their different approaches: one placed it before them while they were sitting, while another got down on the ground to play, much like they did with toy cars as a kid.

«I also think it plays really well with the nostalgia of what we’re doing with action figures and playing with these little toys,» said Harvey Whitney, senior producer at ILM and for Star Wars: Beyond Victory. «I remember as a kid every Christmas either getting a slot car or RC car, and so now being able to do that with Star Wars toys and flying them around and driving around, it just works so well.»

I only spent around 20 minutes with the Adventure mode, so it’s impossible to comment on how the storyline or podracing gameplay will be in its full release, though it does have an interesting voice cast including Lewis MacLeod (returning to voice Sebulba as he did in The Phantom Menace) and Saturday Night Live’s Bobby Moynihan. Set in the period between the third and fourth Star Wars movies with the Galactic Empire in power but before the Rebel Alliance gets organized, Beyond Victory will tell a story about racing life on the fringes of the galaxy — an aspect of the franchise that’s surprisingly rarely explored given how important hot-rodding was to creator George Lucas and how much it influenced the original films.

Throughout Beyond Victory’s story mode, your podracing rookie will run into some characters from ILM’s previous AR game, Star Wars: Tales From The Galaxy’s Edge, along with a few iconic figures from the movies. But you won’t just be meeting them: many of the cast in the Adventure mode can be unlocked to play with in the Playset mode, which is where I spent most of my time in my preview assembling my own Star Wars scene, bringing my childhood play to the augmented reality future.

Star Wars: Beyond Victory is for reliving your childhood

Adventure mode plays through a story with cinematics and climactic races, while Arcade mode allows you to play quick podracing matches, including taking your story rivals’ speedsters for a spin. The aptly named Playset mode lets players make their own dioramas using the characters, scene elements and special effects from Adventure and Arcade.

I clicked on Playset mode from the game’s menu…and immediately felt like I’d popped open a toybox. I used my Meta Quest controllers to sort through an in-game menu and pluck out aliens, droids, vehicles and objects to populate my scene. While I couldn’t physically pick them up, using the grabber functionality on my controllers (which looked like a pair of robot claw arms) was very intuitive. I carefully hovered over specific parts of each character, tweaking limbs and joints to pose them just so.

Regrettably, I wasn’t allowed to take photos of my creation, which was less a film-accurate recreation and more a hodgepodge of oddball characters scattered around a metal causeway — exactly how it felt to upend my toy chest and cobble together a scene from whatever random action figures I had on hand. I sat bounty hunters and podracers around a table, lorded over by a giant slug-like Hutt walking on spider legs (Graccus, a crime boss from Adventure mode) and stood C-3PO up on the side wielding a lightsaber, because why not.

While I couldn’t physically touch everything, there are several advantages to the digital nature of augmented reality. I could grab a character and make them bigger to more precisely move their limbs around and then shrink them back to the size I wanted (or leave them huge, Attack of the 50-Foot Woman-style). There were also digital effects to add, like explosions, smoke and laser bolts. It was while angling one of the Empire’s iconic TIE Fighter vehicles up above my diorama and placing green laser blasts as if they’d just been shot from the fighter that I felt a sort of technical glee from staging a scene — a frozen moment of tension and adventure that felt, well, Star Wars.

Playset mode and the «action figure»-esque technology behind it are inspired by a pre-visulization tool ILM built for filmmakers to stage their own scenes, albeit one far more technically complex that’s full of «menus within menus,» as Palumbo described it. The game’s developers made Beyond Victory’s version far more simplified for gamers, he continued, citing a mantra I heard repeated multiple times during my preview: «The main driving philosophical difference was toys, not tools.»

Palumbo has been working in virtual reality since the Oculus Rift’s second developer kit was released back in 2014 and emphasized how much playtesting went into developing Beyond Victory. He called out the game’s accessibility options like having both seated and standing modes to play as well as completely mirrored controls for players to be able to use either hand. It should be no surprise that ILM is filled with Star Wars fans who offered feedback on how things should feel in the game, with Whitney shouting out quality assurance manager Marissa Martinez-Hoadley’s specific corrections about how things like a lightsaber should feel and operate.

That attention to detail has been what’s made Star Wars toys the implements of magic for decades of kids (and kids at heart). Beyond Victory brings that joy to augmented reality with some novel perks using its visualization tech: during my preview upon the ILM developer’s suggestion, I took the lightsaber out of my toy-sized C-3PO’s hands and scaled it up fill my hand. With the press of a button, I ignited the lightsaber and waved it around, looking and sounding straight from the films — digital, perhaps, but real enough to thrill the kid inside me.

Star Wars: Beyond Victory will be released on Oct. 7 exclusively for the Meta Quest 3 and Meta Quest 3S.

Technologies

Microsoft and LG Team Up to Help You Play Xbox in Your Car (Not While Driving, Please)

Long road trips soon might be a lot more fun for back-seat passengers.

If you just can’t get enough Xbox, take heart. Soon, you may be able to play even in your car. (Not while driving, duh, this is a passenger-aimed perk.) Thanks to a partnership between Microsoft and LG, you can access Xbox Cloud Gaming on internet-connected vehicles.

The vehicles must have LG’s Automotive Content Platform, and a new app will soon appear there to play cloud versions of Xbox games on in-car screens. Access will be available for Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscribers, and some of the more popular titles include Gears of War: Reloaded, Forza Horizon 5 and upcoming releases like Obsidian Entertainment’s The Outer Worlds 2.

ACP is currently available in Europe on the Kia EV3 and will soon be available on the EV4, EV5 and Sportage models. The tech behind it is LG’s WebOS platform, which also powers its smart TVs and enables streaming platforms such as YouTube, Hulu, Netflix, Disney Plus and others.

«Our work with LG is the latest example of Xbox expanding to new places, building on partnerships that already bring Xbox Cloud Gaming to mobile devices, PCs and TVs,» Xbox Marketing Vice President Christopher Lee said in a press release. «By adding vehicles to the mix, we’re giving players more choice than ever in how they enjoy their games.»

A representative for LG did not immediately respond to CNET’s request for comment.

Xbox specifies that «all services operate in compliance with driving safety regulations» — naturally, you can’t play while driving. Only passengers in back seats can use their infotainment system screens to play.

First, connect to a compatible Bluetooth controller, then launch the Xbox app from your internet-connected in-vehicle infotainment system. Finally, log in to your Xbox Game Pass subscription and play.