izigame.me

I wanna start off by saying, I love Digimon World. I'm gonna give this a proper review but first, Do not buy this game at full price. This game is worth 40 bucks CAD at best. It's a port of a Seven year old game that was slightly enhanced since time of release and given a feature to run like 40% faster while you hold down the cancel button. This game is so a** backwards, it doesn't even support resolutions higher than 1080p. And it was released THIS YEAR.
That being said, this review is based off my experience and can dramatically differ from yours. However this game is NOT worth it's asking price. The MINOR changes absolutely do not warrant this ridiculous price.
Also...Don't be ashamed to rely on guides either written or in video format. You can go blind if you want but, if patience isn't your thing guides are gonna be your everything. Ive seen so many people lose their minds at how much 4D chess i was playing, planning out every step of the way for my own amusement and it turned them off from the game. You don't HAVE to do that. I do it cause i enjoy that sort of thing. Use guides or go in blind do what you gotta do if you're really gonna play this game. But only on sale.
So. The review. Digimon World: Next Order is a game that encapsulates the core design of digimon. Digimon was meant to be the male answer to Tamagachi which was a v-pet toy for girls. Digimon was the male equivalent and that's what you're getting here. A complete, full on game that maximizes the Tamagachi element. You're given two partners which is rather unusual since normally you only get one however this is due to the fact that there's a mechanic that allows you to perform an extremely powerful form of DNA Digivolution (Jogress) that literally combines the stats of your partner, making them into a titanic power house that can let you overcome any hurdle. You can also combine your digimon together if they're compatible to make into a brand new digimon. However you must have two partners so the way it handles it is it effectively takes an immense amount of data from one of your digimon and merges it with the other to form it into a new powerful combined form. The remaining digimon is regressed into its previous stage, creating a severe imbalance between your partners.
Every problem in this game has an answer in the form of it's recruitment mechanic. For example, You can avoid that draw back by recruiting a certain digimon and upgrading a facility in order to be able to DNA digivolve using the data of the residents you recruited previously.
This game primarily focuses on:
★ Raising your digimon
★ Finding and recruiting Digimon to rebuild Flotia (central hub) in order to expand your abilities
Your digimon have pretty short life cycles which are determined by their Evolution stage.
In Training digimon die in a day. Once they become rookies,their life spans increase by several days but will only digivolve around the time their age passes 3 days. once they digivolve into champion, their lives are extended again and they will evolve to ultimate around (but never before) age 7. Ultimate iirc will evolve 3 or 4 days later into Mega where their life span will increase once again. There are certain modifiers that can extend this life span. Once they die, they're reincarnaded where a portion of their stats are transferred over but its not a significant amount at first. This can be demoralizing to many people epsecially if they felt they put a lot of work into their mon. The greatest hurdle in this game is that evolution is incredibly difficult to control. the harder you try to plan out your first generations the harder the game will fight back. It IS possible to get exactly the mons you want but you WILL be comepletely frustrated.
Recruiting as many digimon as possible will make raising later generations significantly easier and can even assure you get the digimon you want. If you're a strategist that likes planning for things, You're gonna find yourself incredibly frustrated so plan very lightly and roll with the punches as they come. Things get easier over time. The focus is raising not story or combat.
Combat however will give you the most bang for your buck. Time moves one whole hour while you train in the gym, which takes away several hundred stat gains you could earn through combat which doesn't progress time. Training effectively should be used to advance a large amount of time quickly rather than to increase your stats.
The story is nothing special. The game is effectively a follow up to the original Digimon World game so its basically more of the same...except its its missing impact at the end. The story just sorta. Wiffs at the end so if you're expecting a solid story, you might wanna consider a Digimon story game instead.
The game has some nice Danganronpa peace time tracks so its very easy to just lose yourself in it. The battle themes are okay but imo are used weirdly. like some tracks should have been swapped around
The ExE mechanic (The powerful temp fusion mechanic i spoke of before) is a total tonal killer. It completely ruins the tone of a boss fight by using that ridiculous opening title sequence theme. Its so bad that i actively avoid ExE on handheld and just replace the track on PC.It basically treats your opponent like a joke at that point which to be fair, they are but like...still...i want the fight to still FEEL like its got stakes. Especially when you get to the final fight which has an amazing track but you can't hear it cause its overridden by that garbage anime OP. It lasts through out the remainder of the fight and never goes away so you're basically punished for using a mechanic they put in the game. Go look it up. "Digimon World: Next Order Final boss theme"
Now look up the next order opening theme. And that's what you get if you dare use ExE. So ExE is effectively pointless cause the cost of a assured victory is the death of atmosphere.
Now we get to the bad. Bugs. my experience on PC was plagued with the must infuriating bugs that caused my didgimon to casually be murdered far before their time because of some value in the back end jumping out of bounds. This is impossible to fix without reverting to a save that doesn't have this error yet, however that doesn't fully eliminate the problem cause the value, whatever it may be can still easily jump out of bounds then the game will murder your digimon in cold blood. This forced me to completely restart my game after 6 hours of trying to go back to previous staves to try and avoid this bug. I was so infuriated with how the game wasted 30-50 hours of my life, murdering my digimon over and over again cause of the garbage engine constantly tripping over ladybugs and dying. Once i started from zero, the bug was completely eleminated but i was so frustrated, I didn't even want to play anymore. I got over this by using cheat engine to try and restore my save to a tolerable state and somehow, the game was totally fine with me cheating. 80 hours of legit gameplay? No. You go straight to hell. But cheating? Nah based. You're fine. So in cheating my way back to where i was, i was able to finally complete the game without a single error or bug. This game is beyond frustrating. I enjoyed the actual core gameplay loop but the engine itself is a bleeding nightmare. Ive encountered a ton of insane and apparently unique bugs that just made the game unplayable, not to mention how dated this game feels. Thats why i cannot in good conscious rate this game higher than a 5/10. Without the bugs? 7/10. The price tag knocks off a full 3 points for how old this game feels to play. It really feels like a bandai game.Stuck 10 years behind everyone else. Im totally fine with the visuals. The game looks perfectly fine but it controls and feels like a PSP game that was upscaled to hell. You wouldn't pay 90 bucks cad for a game like this back then, you shouldn't now either.