>>40540470Yes but people on /vp/ oversell it a lot for the sake of shitposting.
It is very story-driven and the first few hours are spent establishing the setting, the main characters and introducing the core gameplay systems. The story and characters are not really original but they're well executed, with decent character development and the story getting engaging and having decent stakes once it gets rolling. But there's nothing much in the way of exploration, you get a number of hub areas you go back and forth between and simple dungeons.
The story can be enjoyed by people with zero knowledge about the franchise (I've seen people going in fully blind surprised by things that Digimon fans have come to expect after 20 years), but it is certainly better for a digimon fan, as someone who's been a fan since the beggining Cyber Sleuth is exactly what I wanted from a Digimon story geared towards older fans who grew up with it.
Once you get the hang of it raising Digimon also becomes pretty engaging. Evolving and de-evolving them to learn different skills and build your moveset/adapt for the challenges at hand feels more reminiscent of SMT than Pokémon, thouhg still got an identity of its own.
Biggest problems of the game are the inconsistent difficulty curve (Normal is braindead, Hard is all over the place with difficulty spikes and basically limiting what kind of team you need to have due to Hard being just a stat multiplier which can make the endgame and optional fights complete unfair bullshit) and the translation of the Cyber Sleuth portion being very bad, clearly a rush job done because Bamco of America had zero faith in the game succeeding in the west. It's the kind of dry and often slightly innacurate text you'd get in an early PS1 Square title, for reference. If you can understand spoken Japanese that is less of an issue as the characters personalities still shine through voicework. Hacker's Memory has much better translation, as do later Digimon games.