When not slamming their head into the dojo wall, the player takes their partner Digimon out into a relatively small overworld to fight and complete quests.
#DIGIMON WORLD NEXT ORDER REVIEW TRIAL#
This makes for a ton of trial and error, especially considering how poorly explained the training mechanics are, and it remains frustrating until an option to eliminate unwanted Digimon evolutions unlocks in the mid-to-late game. Every evolution requires certain stat values to reach a specific threshold, and these are initially obscured until their requirements are discovered via semi-random means. Every Digimon can and must evolve several times to become strong enough to progress through the game, and the player spends most of their time in a dojo selecting training commands to boost their monsters’ stats.
While fortifying the player’s headquarters is reasonably entertaining, the rest of the game amounts to little more than wading through menus and watching AI creatures fumble around in battle. The story that serves as window dressing for the entire affair is so devoid of charisma that it might as well not exist, with predictable characters who spout one-liners about trusting in their partners and little else of value. Some of them, when defeated, return to the player’s home base, adding more facilities to streamline and improve creature development…until their partner Digimon die, and then the cycle begins anew. As a goofy-looking Digimon trainer who only talks in repeated interrobangs, the player is tasked with raising two creatures from egg to adulthood and using their abilities to clear insipid quests that typically involve fighting other Digimon. The game runs in cyclical fashion, despite having a banal story to tell. But somehow, against all reason, that only made me more stubborn about not letting it win. Digimon World: Next Order continues this trend, building a tiresome, threadbare narrative around a dense and impenetrable creature-management simulation that relishes in gut-punching the player every time they make progress. In the ancient battle between the earliest Pokémon and Digimon games, the former triumphed thanks to its simple (yet deceptively deep) mechanics, while the latter opted for complexity at the expense of accessibility. How? Why? Has humanity transgressed so egregiously that somehow, in some twisted way, we’ve earned this misery? Will I ever be happy again? Why is there so much poop? People like these games enough that six of them exist. It is also an experience that can be likened to poop, one that kept me and two tenacious friends up into the night obstinately blazing a trail through its unique vision of creature-rearing hell.
#DIGIMON WORLD NEXT ORDER REVIEW FULL#
And poop they shall, ever onward, piling high into perpetuity, a dull-purple avalanche of electronic excrement to engulf everything in its haunting enormity.ĭigimon World: Next Order is a video game full of creatures that poop. Under the right conditions, even digital lifeforms can poop. You see, it’s not just organic life that poops - oh no, my sweet summer children. Taro Gomi’s sage wisdom has further application than my two-year-old self could have ever imagined.
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