Much better as a game than Cyber Sleuth and Survive

Sadly this is just not a good game.
I usually don't mind occasional repetitive mechanics in games but this one could be called "Digimon World: Soul Grinder" and it would be the most fitting title for it.
Even the menu system is grindy! Like, if you want to exchange materials for example, you need to click through the menu literally every single time, no bulk exchange. It doesn't even show you your stock so you need to interrupt the spam clicking several times to check your stock at another NPC. What this game really excels at is giving you insane amounts of unneccessary clicking tasks and not showing you data where you need to know it.

The further you progress the game, the more of your Digimons lifetimes you need to waste grinding them back up to the stats you need just to continue where you left off in your questing. Those things live for like 20 days if you evolve them to mega and dont feed them life increasing food and with a maxed out training hall it takes you 15 days to get their stats to around 5-6k each which is what you need in chapter 4 and 5 and that takes around 2-3h of your real time.

Story is the typical "save the world from whatever" and interrupted by mandatory side quest requirements, but entertaining enough (when you grinded back up to continue with it).

Battles are mainly you watching them fight and occasionally activating a signature attack, so its neither tactical, nor is there any real action for you to control. Said signature attacks even bug out occasionally, freezing the fight for a while or sometimes even not activating at all.

Graphics are... well, this game was originally released in 2016 for a handheld console and they never bothered improving anything for the ports to other devices. It really looks the part. The zones feel rather bare too.

Movement feels very slow, you can't skip attack cutscenes, evolution cutscenes, anything really, and your mons do their one sound every time you do something with them until you finally deactivate sfx sounds to not go insane.

Even the main selling point here, having a variety of more or less popular Digimon to team up with, was done kinda lazy. Some Digimon have several color or element variants while other, rather important ones even, are missing entirely and many digivolution lines are very awkward. Like, there is Beelzemon but no Impmon and it can only evolve from Garudamon or BlackWarGrowlmon even though at least Myotismon exists?? There is Rosemon but no Lila- or Sunflowmon, Meicoomon doesnt have its usual Mega Raguelmon and so on.

Many very weird decisions have been made here and you really need to love the Digimon franchise a lot and also have a very grind resistant soul to really enjoy this game.

While I love digimon, and would love for one of the games to be finally good....they mostly all suck. The combat mechanics are incredibly lame, the whole premise of not being able to control movement is lame...the balancing and whole idea of there needing to be so much grinding or...one shot is incredibly boring. You just farm boring one shot battles non-stop to then go farm more boring one shot battles? It is fun to raise the digimon and see it digivolve and the aspect of needing to raise them in the correct ways to go through certain digivolutions is awesome...but the overall gameplay is super bland, boring, and incredibly disappointing. These games could be so much better. Maybe one day.