DIGIMON STORY TIME STRANGER
Vince Pavey talks to Ryosuke Hara, producer at Bandai Namco, about the challenges of creating the latest expedition to the Digital World
What do you think separates the Digimon Story games from other Digimon stories? The Digimon Story series has long served as a flagship title among the many Digimon games, consistently offering a classic RPG experience that is accessible to a wide audience. With this latest installment, we’ve remained
especially mindful of that tradition throughout development. Our goal has been to create a game that not only resonates with current Digimon fans, but also welcomes back those who once loved Digimon but have since drifted away, as well as newcomers who may not be familiar with the franchise but enjoy Japanese RPGs. We truly believe this is a title that can be enjoyed by a broad range of players.
These responses have been translated from Japanese, and have occasionally been rearranged or edited for clarity.
The last Digimon Story game was Hacker’s Memory back in 2017. Why has a new one taken so long? There are two major reasons behind
this.The first is that we dedicated a significant amount of time to building a coherent world centered around
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the themes of ‘the bond between humans and Digimon’ and the setting of the Digital World known as Iliad. Since Digital World: Iliad has rarely been depicted in previous Digimon content outside of games, developing it was a completely new challenge for us. We also spent considerable effort enriching
the narrative framework to more deeply portray the emotional connection between humans and Digimon. The concept of ‘time travel’ emerged as one of the key elements from this process. The second reason is purely the scale of implementation — we needed substantial time to incorporate over 450 Digimon into the game.
What were the main development challenges, and how did you take them on? As mentioned earlier regarding world-building, one of the biggest challenges we faced was implementing over 450 Digimon at consistently high quality. From a technical standpoint, this was extremely demanding. While the previous title featured over 300 Digimon models, they
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