While the two games are tied when it comes to critic scores, Digimon Story: Time Stranger has completely obliterated Pokemon Legends: Z-A's user score. Digimon Story: Time Stranger finally released earlier this month, a staggering eight years after it was first announced. The latest game in the long-running franchise tasks players with putting together their own team of Digimon to battle through dungeons and take on increasingly challenging bosses, all while solving a time-traveling mystery.
Pokemon Legends: Z-A released just a couple of weeks after Digimon Story: Time Stranger hit store shelves, reigniting the decades-old rivalry between the two franchises. At first, Pokemon Legends: Z-A reviews placed it ahead of Time Stranger from the standpoint of professional critics, but now the games are tied, with Time Stranger trouncing Z-A's user score.
Here's My Current Pokemon Legends: Z-A Team Plan
With most of the Pokedex confirmed, I am currently debating and locking in my main team for Pokemon Legends Z-A.
Digimon Story: Time Stranger Reviews Compared to Pokemon Legends: Z-A
- Digimon Story: Time Stranger - 9.4
- Pokemon Legends: Z-A - 3.7
At the time of this writing, both Digimon Story: Time Stranger and Pokemon Legends: Z-A have overall review aggregate scores of 79 on Metacritic, while the user scores for the two games are 9.4 and 3.7, respectively. Pokemon Legends: Z-A is ahead of Time Stranger on OpenCritic, but just slightly, with Z-A having an 81 and Time Stranger earning an 80. Regardless of the critic scores, the user scores paint a pretty clear picture. Time Stranger's 9.4 user rating makes it the second-highest rated game of the year, right behind Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, while Legends: Z-A's 3.7 makes it one of the year's lowest-rated new releases.
Now, there is a caveat to consider here. Pokemon Legends: Z-A has only been out for a couple of days at this point, and so it's highly unlikely that the people leaving 0/10 and 1/0 review scores on its Metacritic page actually finished the game. It seems pretty obvious that Pokemon Legends: Z-A's super low user rating is the result of review bombing, with people spamming the overly negative scores for a few different reasons.
Pokemon Legends: Z-A's user score was 3.8 during the first draft of this article, but it dropped to 3.7 right before publication.
Looking through the negative reviews, it's clear that fans are mainly protesting Pokemon Legends: Z-A's underwhelming graphics, Nintendo's Palworld lawsuit, and the perceived "laziness" of the Pokemon franchise. Other negative reviews seem to be born out of the Digimon vs. Pokemon rivalry, with recommendations that fans play Time Stranger instead of Legends: Z-A. But no matter the reason for the Pokemon Legends: Z-A review bombing, the fact remains that it has a user score of 3.7 while Time Stranger has a 9.4, meaning that the Digimon game has solidly beaten the Pokemon game in this key arena. It will be interesting to see how the two games' scores continue to fluctuate as more reviews are counted from both professional critics and users.
- Released
- October 3, 2025
- ESRB
- Teen / Fantasy Violence, Mild Language, Suggestive Themes, Use of Alcohol
- Developer(s)
- Media.Vision
- Publisher(s)
- Bandai Namco Entertainment
WHERE TO PLAY
- Genre(s)
- JRPG, RPG, Creature Collector
Source: Metacritic