Digimon Hacker's Memory - No Digivolution Part 1: Airdramon's Escape (Hard Mode)

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MoogleBoss

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Published on February 10, 2018 3:19:44 PM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LeMtPl-hZTU

Game:

Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth - Hacker's Memory (2017)

Duration: 5:12

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21

Some may remember the No Digivolution challenge I finished a little while ago in the original Digimon Story Cyber Sleuth, in which I managed to prevail and beat everything in the story on Hard Mode in spite of the common knowledge that Hard Mode is far from perfectly balanced, and even a fully functional, digivolved teams struggle against some of the latergame bosses. The playthrough in question can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbSv8zSDR9c0splRhOhi4hpgtZwPDcQJf

Anyway, I was waiting for a sequel to the game in Hacker's Memory and decided to buy it. It's not perfect but has to be the best Digimon I've played, hands down, even though I could see possible improvements being made - namely, an option to skip the cutscenes and a lengthier postgame, because the only thing we have right now is one randomly generated 30 floor dungeon. Many issues and quality of life failings of the original Cyber Sleuth have been fixed, so the mechanics are much improved.

I wanted to do another No Digivolution run, and here's the ruleset:

- No Digivolution

The main one. A lot of time in the game is spent digivolving back and forth to unlock new digivolution, pass on skills and build up the ABI stat to become stronger and get access to higher-end forms.

Since nobody ever digivolves, we rely on scans (and the Black Market) for the Digimon available to us. Their stats are lower due to the absence of ABI, their level cap is low, and we're limited in our strategies to what's scannable in the wild.

Dedigivolution is allowed however, and could be situationally useful to get into less advanced forms that we've encountered as enemies but had no chance to scan, or to increase the cap of a viable Champion or Ultimate. Having a higher level cap on something like AeroVeedramon or Wisemon could save our life (and it did in the final battle of the Cyber Sleuth 1 No Digivolution challenge).

- Hard Mode

This one's obvious; we want to get the most challenge out of it. Better balance in CS should make it less masochistic in some places.

- No Save Transfer from the original Cyber Sleuth

By transferring your Cyber Sleuth save, you get an instant 100K yen, which lets you exploit the farm immediately, a Tactician USB for grinding. This is nothing game-changing, as a grind could get all of these things in more time, but you also transfer your original Cyber Sleuth medal collection, and some of the awards are actually endgame equips that you don't get otherwise, and can be seen as gamebreaking. Your options for de-digivolution are also expanded if you export your Field Guide to this game.

Also kind of a given, but the NX DLC Digimon may not be used to win battles, since that would defeat the point of the challenge. Though the NX Digimon's stats aren't very high (around Champion level), they start with 200 ABI and have the highest-end skills. Crusadermon NX with Acceleration Boost/Fist of Athena and +150 attack from training early on can proceed to destroy the whole game and you will forget you're playing a No Digivolution run.

- No Researcher USB on event battles / offline colloseum cup enemies

Something I did in the original CS that I thought I should repeat again. In CS1, you could repeat some cups to get OP Digimon like Kuwagamon early, or enter battles against the likes of Wisemon with 6x Researcher USBs to have a 100%+ scan rate after repeated encounters, and if you didn't abuse that you'd only scan them 10+ chapters later. While it seems like they've made some event Digimon unscannable (were they watching my playthrough or something? lol), I'm going to ban this again and limit myself to Digimon encountered in the wild and the Black Market of course.

On the topic of the Black Market... While I do think that you have no sensible reason to destroy it in-game if you care about convenience and saving time, it's pretty damn important for this challenge. During endgame, you get access to utility Digimon (who improve exp and money gained and item drop rates) as well as some stellar piercers like BlackWarGreymon. It'd be stupid to abstain from utilising their availability, so we're obviously saving the Black Market.

In this playthrough, I'll be recording all major battles worth showing, and what is or isn't a boss is probably best decided by the enemy's health. If it dies in one hit, it probably isn't a boss lol. It seems like a lot of forced story battles aren't really boss material, whilst many of the optional quest battles are about as tough as the storyline bosses, if not more proficient.

In this video, I face the first Security Wall (Under Kowloon lv. 2) and Airdramon as part of a quest. Security Walls can be tough on Hard Mode, especially when doing a challenge like this.

(I'm out of text space already; see comments for the last part of the video description)

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