Digimonhas had an incredible few years. Once merely second-fiddle to Pokemon, it has since had the brilliant Digimon Ghost Game anime and the extremely underrated Digimon Survive to set it apart. If you’ve been out of the Digi-loop since the days of Tai, Matt, and Sora, right now is the best Digimon has ever been.
But then we get Digimon World: Next Order, a seven-year-old Vita game recently ported to PC and Switch, and I suddenly feel less confident in my position as a ride-or-die Digimon Liker. It’s a big miss in an otherwise solid few years for the series.
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Digimon World: Next Order shares much of its core gameplay with its PS1 predecessors. Hurled into the Digital World, it’s up to you to raise Digimon through a combination of grinding in the gym, battling, and more Sims-like lifestyle management. All the while, you and your partners need to strike out across the world, finding and recruiting friendly Digimon to return to the town of Floatia and help raise it from a small village into a bustling city full of shops and services to help on your quest to stop the rising tide of Machinedramon attacks.
In addition to caring for their hunger, fatigue, toileting needs, and ensuring they’re absolute beasts in battle, you’re able to help your partners grow up into bigger, stronger forms. Unlike other monster-taming games, like Pokemon, your Digimon will die. The goal isn’t to raise one Digimon to be the very best like no Digimon ever was, but to instead raise them enough to pass on a solid foundation to the next generation, hoping it will slightly surpass the ones that came before.
It’s a neat idea in theory that should encourage you to try out new creatures and strategies, but killing off the Digimon you’ve put so much hard work into has the side-effect of making Next Order’s difficulty curve all over the place.
You’ve finally raised a decent pair of Digimon and have successfully battled your way through to a new area. It’s taken hours of training to get to this point, and now you’re ready to complete some quests and expand your city. You’re not getting stuck in battles as much, and things are looking good. Then one of your Digimon suddenly drops dead and turns back into an egg, and you’re forced to retreat back to Floatia to engage in another long session of training to get your Digimon not even back to where it was – but to a point where it won’t die as soon as you leave the city walls.
The constant death and rebirth gives Next Order such a stop-start pacing that you could be sitting training in one room of Floatia for hours at a time, playing the same mindless slot machine mini-game over and over again. Your hard work is then rewarded with a quick burst of progression that lasts until your other Digimon corks it a few in-game days later, and the cycle starts all over again.
If that constant training and grind were decent, it wouldn’t be so bad. As it is, Next Order is simultaneously obtuse and shallow. The amount of stats and figures you need to track can be overwhelming at first, until you realise very little of it matters unless you’re aiming to evolve one of your partners into a specific Digimon. Battles are equally superficial, with your main strategy rapidly devolving into having your partners tank hits until you’ve built up enough energy to destroy your opponent with a combo super move.
Every fight plays out the same, with the only difference being whether it’ll be you or your opponent that gets immediately KO’d. That or, sometimes, the fun third option of ‘everyone does hardly any damage, and the fight drags on way longer than needed’. Next Order doesn’t tell you what level your Digimon are, so gauging how tough a battle will be before you engage the enemy relies solely on three vaguely-defined colour indicators that could mean anything from a hearty challenge to immediate death. As progression is so non-linear, thanks to your Digimon dying, it’s not even like you’re able to safely rely on older areas to grind it – they might be too much for your newborn partner.
Punishment for losing a fight is brutal. You’re sent all the way back to Floatia, with your Digimon potentially needing expensive medical treatment, and stat reductions across the board top things off. Spend a few more days playing the training slot machine, rinse and repeat.
While moving across it can be a real digi-arseache, the world is the one highlight of Next Order. Digimon’s aesthetic is almost dreamlike in nature, with all sorts of monsters inhabiting fields of capacitors, deserts of abandoned servers, or cities of bone and discarded data for the spookiest amongst them. Those moments you stumble across a whole new zone to investigate are the rare hits of satisfaction that might just drag you through Next Order.
It’s just a shame that, in a year where we’ve had a near-perfect rerelease in Metroid Prime Remastered, Next Order is still just a slightly enhanced port of a Vita game from 2006. A sprint button is a useful addition, and character models look impressive enough, but areas can be small and sparse, animations look incredibly stiff, and each area is broken up with loading screens to make zipping around Floatia feel more awkward than it should.
For everything Digimon World: Next Order offers, there is something better. If you want monster-taming, Pokemon and Monster Rancher are right there. If you want specifically Digimon, Cyber Sleuth and Survive are more than enough to have your fill. If you want anything other than wonky pacing, shallow combat, and frequently cringeworthy writing, Next Order probably isn’t for you.
Digimon World: Next Order
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Digimon World: Next Order marks the sixth entry in a series dating back to 1999. It follows the journey of high-schoolers Takuto and Shiki as they are transported to the Digital World.
Score: 2/5. A review code was provided by the publisher for the purposes of this review.
