Digimon World: Next Order Review

Greetings noble readers! After some much deserved RnR, escaping my small island prison for a glorious two weeks I return to you all! Now, in keeping with my weaby theme as much as possible. Here comes my latest review of another Digimon Game. Digimon World: Next order, also known as Digimon World: NeO. Crazy I know.

So this game was released this year, 2016, in Japan and riding a high of having smashed my way through the Digimon Story game I immediately imported NeO. Now in all honesty I didn’t know what to expect as Digimon games tend to vary in style. The predominant archetypes however are the Digimon world and Digimon story. What’s the difference? Simple. Digimon Story allows a player to raise a team of Digimon, plausibly based on the later Digimon world games (namely 2-4), sadly and fortunately I have no experience with these games, I have watched play through and dear god they look awful. So, okay, yeah Story has taken a lot of influence from the older games however Next order, is truer to the ps1 game, Digimon world.

So with that in mind what do I have to say about this wonderful wonderful game? First of all, an English patch would be great. My hiragana is terrible and have had to rely on the play through of some marvellous you-tubers I’ve been fortunate enough to meet through social media sites. Anyway, I’m digressing lets get on with the nitty gritty shall we?

The story. Okay, so I didn’t necessarily understand what was going on a good 90% of the time. But here’s the gist of it (I think). Basically, much like in the ps1 game, your character is pulled through their Digivice, which is styled after the V-pet pendulum series where the first game revolved around the original v-pets, the difference being the pendulums would allow the trained creature to reach mega level, maybe even ultra in some of them. So, yeah back to the story. You’re pulled into the digital world, this time by accident rather than design. Jijimon tells us that there is an unusual level of mega Digimon causing problems and that since you’re here you might as well figure it out before they find out how to send you home. During these mindless shenanigans of perpetual combat, trying to find food and Digimon to join the city (yup, just like DW1). However, instead of being alone in the digital world there are a few more human characters. Hirose Kouta, a boy partnered with Guilomon,Oofuchi Himari, a girl with Salamon and another Boy dubbed Hiro, who judging by his clothing style is the character played in Digimon world one. There are a few others but act mostly as catalysts or villains, there are also some cameo appearances from well known characters from older games namely Mirei and Shima. The back story is that these four characters took the top four spots in a Digimon competition winning special Digivice.

The game play. Unlike the last Digimon game I reviewed, cyber sleuth, the battle system has been changed and has reverted back to the AI battle system. Your Digimon rampage about, quite often ganging up on some poor fool who decided to pick a fight with you. Oh, yeah, rather than raising one partner Digimon you raise two. This ties into the battle mechanics, while the Digimon attack on their own and move as the AI pleases the player does get more input than he/she would have back in the ps1 days. Holding the shoulder buttons of the vita; yeah it’s another vita game, surprise surprise, just can’t kill this wonderful little hand held, brings up radial menus that allow for the selection of techniques. The basic command, pressing the circle button, increases order power the Digimon posses, the higher the order power the more powerful the move each partner can use. At the start of the battle the order power is set at the level of affection your Digimon hold for you as their tamer. Another addition to the radial battle menus and order power is the ability to DNA Digivolve for a short period of time, so long as the partners are compatible obviously. So, that’s it for the battle system. Game play is broken down into various parts, training, upgrading Frontier (the town that’s replaced file city). The training has changed from from the old days, the Digimon are now in fixed positions with in a building, each joy stick assigns a Digimon to the training equipment. You then get a power up bar with icons in various squares, reminiscent of the training from the original v-pet key chain, but ultimately quite boring to look at as opposed to Digimon World 1 where your partner would run a round, hit things, it was entertaining as a kid.

But yeah anyway, the upgrading the town. A new feature is the ability to have one your Digimon gather resources you stumble across in the world as you gallivant around. The resources are used to periodically upgrade the town or the various buildings within. Personally, I don’t think this was needed, seems a bit grindy, which the game has freaking loads of any way, as you can only carry so many resources but meh, I suppose some one out there will enjoy it. Another feature I enjoyed was the increased number of baby digimon to choose from at the very start of the game, immediately after the tutorial which contains some utterly glorious cutscenes.

Another new thing. The Tamer talent tree, it’s pretty cool. Okay, a few things can break the game,retaining a percentage of the trained stats, increasing happiness grating bonus tamer experience, carry more resources etc. While in the old games tamer level unlocked different tournaments and the likelihood of reaching the ultimate(or perfect) level. I’m yet to explore the talent trees fully but so far they work, make some things easier while like I said it breaks some things, at some point I will have hopefully hatched a Digimon with maximum stats very early on. However this can be counter productive, evolution is based on the partners parameters, care mistakes, stats weight etc, in this case carrying over stats after death(yeah Digimon die of old age) can be frustrating if you’re after a certain evolution. That being said you never know what parameters will lead to what Digimon, however interacting with your Digimon, usually praising after battle or training session, can sometimes reveal a requirement or name of a possible evolution.

So for gameplay, I’ll give it an 8/10 simply for the wealth of stuff the creators crammed into the game. I’m knocking points of rather unfairly as I just don’t understand the vast majority of whats going on without the aid of Youtube. That being said I’ve always been the type who prefers playing games over watching some one else.

The graphics. Well, considering its a hand held and the graphics in the cutscenes are reminiscent of ps2 era games, maybe even some ps3 games, I’ll have to give it a 9/10. The game is glorious, brightly coloured and the cut scenes, delicious eye candy. While on sleuth I was overly critical next order delivers a fine quality of graphics and unlike sleuth you can change the damned camera angle, so hoorah for that. Yes this was brief but my mind is turning to mush…so… yeah, its good, looks good. Feels like a Digimon game. The scenery has the traditional mix of man made objects seemingly kicking about at random around the world, resistors and the like. I’d like to see some trams but ah well, can’t have everything and I may have missed some somewhere. The map is expansive which is good.

The sound. Oh yes the sound! 10/10 for sheer nostalgia. The music is has been updated from the original Digimon world, it really tugs at my hear strings and the Digimon, well they are as load and annoying as ever, their sounds have changed for the better but there’s still that flair from way back when. Don’t care if all this opinionated favouritism makes this score unfair. Bite me, the noises and music are glorious. End of discussion.

Finally, replay value. I’ll say an 8, naturally it’ll be easy to screw up the first play through by blaring your way through the tamer talent tree with as much grace and wisdom as a fat moron (well, me). If you’re a true fan the completist in you will come out and you’ll have wanted to raise every last one and starting fresh means a whole new adventure, not litterally, just different partner choices early on.