Digimon World: Next Order is an open-world adventure bursting at the seams with different Digimon, city building, places to explore and so much more. At times, it can feel a bit chaotic and there's a lot to learn with this rerelease from the days of Sony's Vita handheld. Knowing where to start is part of the challenge.
There are many features that will unlock over time or through exploration, and many of these features may be a surprise for newcomers. Don't worry if you're feeling a bit lost, the Digimon cast is there to help you and once you've learned the intricacies of some of the systems, you'll be the greatest tamer there ever was.
Death Is Constant
Yep, you read that right, death is an ominous presence for much of Digimon World: Next Order. You'd better get used to it. Your Digimon, precious as they might be, will die. It's just a part of life. No matter how you care for them, Digimon pass on in order to bestow power and increased stats to the legacy Digimon that come after. If you've got a super powerful BanchoLeomon it will die and the next egg you choose will inherit some of that power.
Tamagotchi Toilet Time
This Digimon adventure is essentially a city-building-adventuring-Tamagotchi. That means looking after your Digimon is a top priority. You'll be responsible for all of their needs, including feeding them, telling them when to go to sleep and, of course, making sure they use the restroom. Missing any of these will result in grumpy Digimon, worse battle performances, and constant complaining. Thankfully there are toilets throughout the map, and you can carry portable toilets, in the shape of swans, for some reason.
Hands-Off Battling
When it comes to battling your Digimon know their way around a fight. Fighting is controlled, for the most part, by AI. Digimon will choose the abilities themselves drawing from a pool of MP. You can cheer them on building OP - Order Points - which can be used to activate the same skills, but removing the drain on MP. The majority of batಌtles will see you taking a hands-off approach and watching from the sidelines occasionally shouting encouragement.
Materials
Strewn across the digital world are colourful pockets of materials that your Digimon can harvest. These areas will reward you with everything from wood to different types of fluids. The materials are then kept in city storage, ready for you to begin upgrading specific buildings. It takes a few hours to get to the upgrading, so you'll likely have a good amount of materials to get started. These harvesting spots should never be ignored. They hand out random stacks, sometimes giving you a rare resource. They're refilled often and stay in the same place, so check them out constantly.
City Building
It's time to upgrade Floatia. In order to upgrade the city you will need to do two things; find wild Digimon who will relocate to the city after you complete a task for them; and spend stored materials with the Builder to improve facilities. The Digimon who join you will set up shop, quite literally for some, in different parts of the city. Some will collect special items on expeditions, one will fly you to places you've visited, and another sets up a hospital to provide you with healing items. Each of these buildings and services can be upgraded further with those important materials. If you feel like you're missing something, it's probably because you haven't found the necessary Digimon yet.
Training Roulette
When training your Digimon, you'll need to hang out in the training centre. You are able to choose which stats to train, and you can use food to boost this training, guaranteeing certain results. Once you've chosen a stat to train, you're presented with a roulette wheel. Stop the moving counter on a filled square, and you receive 1.25x bonus points to the stat. You'll see different icons here reflecting the bonuses of food, growth spurts, and friendship but they all reward the standard 1.25x. There's no need to aim for a particular icon. The more bonuses, the higher chance that you'll hit that bonus.
Quick Travel
It takes a while before you'll unlock the ability to use a Sender who can fly you out to regions you've already visited, but you can use fast travel to fly back to Floatia from much earlier. There's an item that can be won in battles or bought from vending machines, called Auto-Pilot. When used from the partner menu, it will teleport you from wherever you are right back to Floatia. This is super helpful if your Digimon are tired, or you need to visit the fields to top up your food supply.
Not A Collect-Em-All
Newcomers to the Digimon franchise may be unaware that this isn't just a Pokemon clone. The two franchises have always been in competition with each other, but aside from journeying with monsters, they're very different. In Digimon World: Next Order, your goal isn't to collect every type of Digimon. That's impossible here, due to the life cycles of the digital monsters. You can discover the different Digivolutions, but you won't have a team of monsters or boxes full of variants as you would with the Nintendo series.