So I finally Played next Ørder.
When the PC port for Next Order was announced I was much happier than I had any right to be. Before then, I had basically lived in a state of resignation, thinking that I would probably never play this game. And the subliminal dread of knowing that there's a Digimon Game out there that one has not played can really grind a man down (The list of discontinued or otherwise inaccessible Digimon arcades and mobile games is a source of great frustration).
Now finally some of that weight has been lifted. But how much has my life been enriched by this experience? Has the new Steam version of the International edition actually turned something that started out with a notoriously broken Vita release into a decent game? Maybe from a performance perspective because it runs really well. But other than that... It's questionable.
Like the Cyber Sleuth it's a minimum effort port, in some senses even worse, And really it is not worth buying in its current state, not to mention the current price.
From the start everything about the game looks cheap and bare bones, from the resolution capping out at 1920x1200 and the minimal graphics controls including antialiasing “on” and “off”, to the low res and terribly compressed cutscenes.
Can you fault an old game for that? Maybe that would be unfair if we were talking about a game released over 30 years ago for MS-DOS. But we're not. The game was released in 2016, making the defense irrelevant because a port this shabby would have been embarrassing in 2016 as well and perhaps barely acceptable in 2006.
The opening sections of the game feature some of the most messy, un-intuitive and frustrating first impressions I've had in any game, and that includes plenty of other Digimon games.
It's worth taking a closer look at those introductory parts in particular because especially in games the first impression is vital for player retention and I have a feeling that if someone who, like me, prefers to play PC games with their keyboard and has any kind of standards might not make it through this ordeal, if they are not already a massive Digimon fan.
And even then I believe it is straight up counterproductive to get caught up in a mindset of letting anything slide because it's Digimon rather than thinking about if the game is actually good in any traditional sense. After thinking about it, next Ørder is (still) not a good game and here is why.
An Uninviting Tutorial
There are major problems right from the start: The tutorial during the first battle against Mugendramon is obnoxious absolutely useless to anyone not playing with a 360 controller as those are the only prompts displayed. Even worse all menu buttons are disabled, making it impossible to check which keys I was actually supposed to press. So I was basically blindly guessing at the start which really wasn't fun, especially since the game was very confusing about what you can or can't select with your mouse during combat, and often a click would trigger something unintended while the game wouldn't even acknowledge that mice even exist.
And this was confusing and unintuitive after I had initially checked out the very basic keybindings menu before starting the game, and I can't imagine how lost somebody would feel who just went right into a new game.
The button prompt problem also applied to the Cyber Sleuth port, but the difference in severity lies in the fact that CS has the most generic JRPG controls you can imagine which don't even really warrant much explanation, but next Ørder is... well, Digimon World but twice as busy which is not exactly intuitive at the best of times.
Needless to say, while trying to navigate the controls I had a lot of time to just look at what was happening on the screen. And oof, to say that the battle animations look bad is an understatement. Even after 7 years and an almost remaster, the game play feels janky and unfinished; movement and general enemy behavior is even more artificial and robotic than it was in re: Digitize.
So my first impressions included hunting for unexplained buttons while Mugendramon was walking in place against an invisible wall with his head twisted in a clearly unnatural angle.
In any other game encountering visuals like that means that something went wrong and the model is bugging out. But it's not, next Ørder just always looks like that. And this was in the "epic" tutorial battle that's supposed to get you excited.
After finally figuring out the correct buttons the game then continues to sabotage its own dramatic momentum. You get a sudden chance to evolve to Omegamon, the (actually pretty great) insert song starts blasting, there's some decent evolution and attack animations, Mugendramon gets hit... and just when there's a bit of a flow going, the action grinds to a stop mid attack with a sudden text box announcing something like “congratulations, you managed to ExE evolve into a strong Digimon” which is as distracting as it is unnecessary. And then Mugendramon just gets right back up, smacks Omegamon with a single attack splitting him up into your two partners and the fight continues as if nothing had happened.
So much for pathos. Maybe they had to insert that text box in the middle of the Omegamon sequence because if it didn't tell you that Omegamon was supposed to be super powerful, you wouldn't know that from the actual events.
Anyway, a combined attack from MetalGarurumon and WarGreymon achieves what Omegamon failed at because that totally makes sense.
Judging from the fact that Only WarGreymon, MetalGarurumon and Mugendramon appear in the cutscenes I get the impression that the ExE evolution to Omegamon was not initially meant to be part of the tutorial and was added at some later stage. Besides the nonsensical pacing this would also explain why the tutorial for ExE evolution mentions the ExE prompt replacing the button for a mechanic that the game hasn't introduced at that point.
The overall problem with next Ørder attempting one of those "taste of power" openings instead of the more slow burn approach of previous games is that the intensity of the combat just doesn't scale well. Even with Ultimate Digimon the attacks feel floaty and disjointed, the low resolution particle effects don't really help and outside of the signature attack animations nothing about the battle seems particularly intense. When around half an hour later an angry Patamon was headbutting my Gigimon and Mochimon to death the hit animations seemed just as impactful.
Perhaps after you've raised your own Ultimate there's enough of a bond to make you feel like they have grown very powerful, but the visuals alone fail to convey that on their own. Which is bad for the tutorial because this sort of "epic" opening is entirely based on providing enough spectacle to distract the player from the fact that the game has not yet given them control over anything. There just isn't much spectacle in next Ørder, so they are forced to rely mostly on non-represantative cutscenes to signify scale and that just not a good look because you know that the game won't keep that up.
Further Port Issues
The section after the fight in which you meet Jijimon, your partners are reborn and are filled in on the basics of the plot are is generally fine but the struggle against the inane controls continues the moment more mechanics are introduced, namely during the introduction of the training mini-game.
Even before starting that part I encountered another minor annoyance. I wanted to open the menu because I really needed to check the keybindings again and I also wanted to save before I might accidentally mess up my Digimons' stats but the tutorial hadn't mentioned the menu so I wasn't even sure if I could open it yet. The fact that I received “mail” implied that I could, so I started hunting for keys again.
Again, common sense seemingly didn't apply. Usually you'd expect the system menu to come up upon pressing the start or home button, and from my by now blurry memories of the key bind screen, Start and home were for some arcane reason bound to the left and right control keys respectively, but pressing them did literally nothing (later I noticed that one of them lets you skip cutscenes which is nice I guess) neither did escape, or any key on the home row and I was about to give up when after much aimless mashing I got the main menu to open with V. On the key bind screen I saw that V was bound to the Y button, which was never mentioned in any of the tutorials so far (turns out they only tell you its purpose after you finish training section which is far too late in my opinion).
Anyway, in the training menu the game features some of the most baffling keybindings I've come across recently. It seems in the console version you are meant to use the right and left sticks of the controller to set the training type of the first and second Digimon partner. That's kind of weird and, considering that you cannot use the left and right sticks to control your Digimon in battle or anywhere else, it honestly seems like they wanted to have this sort of simultaneous dual control in other parts of the game but then changed their minds about it, leaving the training menu as some strange vestigial remnant of that approach.
In any case, having two kinds of directional input is easily achievable on PC, after all we do have two groups of "canonical" movement keys, arrows and WASD, so it's a no-brainer that dual controls would be bound to those two key groups but nooope. The second stick is controlled with TFGH, which coincidentally is also the sound I made when I looked at those keybindings.
But we're on PC, so surely we can just rebind them to the more sensible arrow keys, right? Wrong. You can't because the arrow keys are FORCIBLY bound to the D-pad. So given that they were so adamant about that, there has to be some vital and very specific use of the D-Pad, right? So what does the D-Pad do? most of the time nothing at all, but in menus it works exactly like WASD except in the training menu, where it also does nothing at all. I'm beginning to think that no one involved in this port had any clue about keyboard controls.
Not that the regular menus are user friendly either. There are technically mouse controls but they are the sort of half baked controls that are almost worse than having none at all. Logic dictates that you should at the very least be able to target anything with the mouse that you can target with stick or pad on the console but not in next Ørder where in seemingly in every menu someone did a bunch of coin flips to decide which arbitrary menu items the mouse can click. And it gets worse. If you click your mouse somewhere where there's nothing to click you expect the click to do nothing. Again, not in next Ørder, where instead any click anywhere clicks on the last "valid" button your mouse had selected even if the cursor is no longer there. The lack of effort here is astounding.
Imagine any other piece of software on your PC doing that: You scroll through a website on your browser, click into empty space and get sent to some other page because at some point your mouse happened to hover over a link. This is completely broken design.
So I finally gave up on the whole keyboard business and plugged in my PS4 controller and even then the game continued to disappoint, as depending on my controller settings it either refused to recognize the controller at all and when it finally did let me use it, the button prompts continued to show 360 controller buttons. This is literally a port of a "PS4" game, how could they mess up things this badly?
Side note: It's also one of those games that does not permit you to quick load, you have to quit and reenter to load a save.
Presentation and flow of Combat
Well, I ended up ignoring Tokomon's advice to evolve to Child level, went out to the city where my partners got immediately massacred by a bloodthirsty Patamon. This was the first time the game actually felt fun. At least until the Patamon rammed my last surviving partner into a rock which confused the camera to such an extent that it clipped through the terrain and started spinning around out of bounds for a bit. Pure quality (and not the last time battles would glitch out).
After evolving my partners Patamon stood no chance, and from we're off to the general gameplay loop of quests, combat and V-Pet shenanigans. Unfortunately the game never managed to be better than just okay, the entire experience just feels consistently unpolished and cheap in most aspects save perhaps the music, which is pretty good all around.
As mentioned earlier, battles look worse than in re: Digitize and it comes down to speed and motions in combat. Combat in DW1 style games has never actually looked good. Because all combatants are controlled by very rudimentary path-finding algorithms everything alternates between blind aggression and mild confusion.
In earlier installments this resulted in Digimon sticking to awkwardly slow movement, waddling around each other and occasionally reorienting because that's all the engine was capable of. It looked awkward but next Ørder's approach to movement looks downright buggy and broken.
The game tries to be faster and more dynamic but is technically unable to convincingly keep the models in sync, the limited amount and static duration of the animations results in the Digimon just kind of sliding around the arena while their bodies execute animations might or might not actually match. The critical difference is that while the old style of combat was not especially fast or fluid, the movements themselves were not actually unconvincing. It at least looked like the Digimon themselves were doing the running, and not like they were action figures getting pushed around the arena by a bunch of half-blind toddlers.
Attack animations generally look decent on the Digimon executing them but the hits themselves are floaty and disjointed as mentioned before. That's not different from other Digimon games but it matters a lot more in World games; In Cyber Sleuth the disjointedness of the attacks works as part of the general abstraction of turn based combat but when you take that abstraction away, have actual real time battles where the attacks are meant to connect physically and the Digimon attempt to position themselves in a way that makes sense, it is very distracting and obvious when that attempt at physicality fails.
Then there is the annoying arena each fight takes place in. In previous games fixed arenas existed too, but not as obviously; If A Digimon ran too far away from the battle it would simply immediately turn around and if possible run into the opposite direction. Again this looked a bit weird but it didn't look broken.
In next Ørder the barrier surrounding the arena is made explicit via a red outline. What's the issue with this? Well, the barrier is always there but the AI still doesn't realize it is. Digimon will constantly attempt to back up or just run straight into the barrier and they also love pushing each other into it. So what we are left with is that for a majority of combat encounters we watch Digimon sliding around an invisible wall which looks just completely silly and kills all immersion. Many otherwise decent animations are undermined by this issue as movements that should look good end up looking bizarre and fake because they are stopped by solid air.
Overall, having the barrier show up as an effect around the battle, calling attention to itself, seems like a desperate bandage that the developers slapped onto the issue of never having figured out sensible movement.
Story and Setting
The main story can best be described as a badly paced one cour anime plot with some of the most flat and uninteresting characters the franchise has produced so far. The less said about it the better, but the utter witlessness on display here is sometimes amazing in its own bizarre way. I was treated the world's most transparent red herring, the most cliched Shounen character arcs, the most derivative and uninspired villain with his completely obligatory goon squad and of course the always popular mysterious amnesiac character. Zero originality all across the board.
Oh and the actual World of Digimon World next Ørder? For the most part it's pretty pretty boring and most of all incredibly padded out.
It seems like each area had just one idea for a neat visual feature, enough for one maybe two levels but the game copy pastes the same assets across five or six levels instead. One of the bigger hub-like areas might have one more detailed area, maybe a building and the rest is just the most repetitive generic terrain you can think of.
Taking the early levels as an example; For the Nigh Plains the game reiterates the classic gimmick of having transistors growing out of the ground because “digital” and besides a few comically big cables that's it. Level upon level (many not more than simple corridors) with the same exact transistor and cable models, the same boring gray rock and grass formations repeated at nauseaum.
Next stop, the server desert where the same models of half submerged servers is repeated across numerous variations of the same generic orange rocks and sand dunes. At the logic volcano someone was very proud of their two models of a wooden bridge and a temple gate because that's all there is in that level besides more rocks and the same lava lake backdrop for almost the entire section. And so on and so forth, a few later levels manage to less egregiously boring but 90% of the game remains a visual slog.
This sort of rampant repetition and asset reuse is not new in Digimon games but next Ørder is one of the more ridiculous examples along with stuff like Digimon Masters.
Even re: Digitize and the original Digimon World shared a similar design weakness, but at least re: Digitize felt more detailed by having each section be more compact. The original Digimon World leveraged the distinct style of pre-rendered backgrounds to create a world that looked dense in detail while leaning at times into a more grungy and untamed feel that the mostly characterless mid- to low-poly environments in next Ørder can't replicate. The principal issue is simply that the game attempts to bloat itself up, tries to have a big world to explore but lacks the resources, resulting in mind numbing repetition.
The Digimon don't fare much better. Between the waves of drone-like enemies, NPCs with generic and arbitrary personalities offer generic and arbitrary fetch quests which define the entirety of their existence, world building or any sense of immersion is a rarity, the writing peaks at some half decent jokes.
The closest the game comes to having some sort of subplot is a conflict between meat and vegetable faction of Digimon which is so isolated in scope and comes so out of left field without any relevance to anything else that it fails to meaningfully expand the setting or foster any sense of identity or culture in its inhabitants. The fact that the gameplay loop dictates that pretty much all NPCs will eventually move to the city (most of the time at the drop of a hat or after relatively minor requests) further drives home the point that the Digimon don't belong anywhere and never really seem invested in anything, meat related or otherwise.
It doesn't help that the main plot which is supposed to be main source of dramatic tension exists exclusively in its own bubble as well. No non-plot critical Digimon in the game seems to actually give a damn that the world is (supposedly) in a crisis, the state of "utter chaos" that the game's description advertises really isn't apparent anywhere except by the fact that the Digimon "left the city"... but almost all of them seemed to be doing just fine wherever they happened to end up, so you don't really feel like a hero when you round them up again, more like some pushy real estate agent.
Having NPCs oblivious to what is mean to be a world ending threat is something that occasionally happens in games... but they could at least have tried. All the way back in Digimon World 3 you could talk to random NPCs across the map and their responses would occasionally change to fit the story. Digimon in next Ørder just either completely ignore you or talk about their quest once you cleared some conditions.
On the other hand, if the plot was actually integrated with the world, there would have come a time when all you'd need to say to a Digimon would be "Wanna hang out at the only place in the world that's currently safe from the infection that could kill or mutate you at any point?".
The game makes sure that Floatia remains at the center of the plot and for what it's worth it really tries to push the development angle compared to previous World titles with city and building upgrades, multiple sectors and a bunch of additional activities but the vision of expanding the quaint Village of Beginnings into an large city succeeds only partially. Like with the rest of the world the ambition of the concept exceeds the amount of effort put into the execution.
The upgrade system with multiple levels per building seems nice but the actual changes to the buildings are often so minimal that I found myself barely noticing a difference when the city proudly presented its new and improved facilities.
Then there's the general lifelessness. Even at 110+ prosperity and pretty much all upgrades the city looks mostly desolate almost abandoned. A drab place where everyone works but no one seems to live. Besides a few token “citizens” in a corner somewhere the city is mostly a row of Digimon workers silently standing at their posts offering their various services to empty plazas and streets, the player being their only customer. They might as well be vending machines which of course is all they are in terms of actual game mechanics.
But the failure to cover up the purely functional nature of everything in Floatia is an issue because video games in general have figured out how to create a semblance of liveliness among NPCs and towns for literal decades. This particular game just happens to not manage that. A shame, once again.
Conclusion
Did I forget something? Oh, yeah, the actual evolution and raising mechanics. They are okay. They work. The game thankfully does not go out of its way to be obtuse about evolution requirements. It's still grindy but that might just be an inherent style of the "genre". There's just not much to talk about here because it's a section of the game that really wasn't upgraded that much in general and while there are criticisms, they wouldn't apply only to this particular game.
But maybe if you're an actual fan of the raising mechanic everything else is forgiven. There's a V-Pet simulation in here with everything else just being a pretense to generate some reason, any reason to have your Digimon run around and get into battles. And I guess for that It's sufficient; I could see how even a lackluster world, sketchy looking combat and a predictable story theoretically beats 16x16 sprites with two frames of attack animations and no story.
But even then I would argue that fans of V-pet raising mechanics (even if I'm not among them) deserve something better than a game that seems to constantly fluctuate between "Did they even try?" and "It seems they tried something but it clearly didn't work."
And Bandai charges full price for this in 2023.