The digital world is in trouble and it is up to you to restore order and save it from destruction! Choose a male or female avatar and begin your adventure with two Digimon companions and discover over 200 more to collect, explore, and battle with. Form bonds by feeding, training, disciplining, and Digivolving them while building and upgrading your town. Use all of your skills to issue commands to your Digimon in AI battles and cheer them to victory!
Digimon World: Next Order originally came out on the Vita and PS4 in 2016 and 2017 respectively. While there are times it does show its age, it is overall a really fun game! I love the dynamic of taking care of your Digimon, training them to get stronger in one of the 6 different stats, and then using them to battle. I also found the AI battles and issuing commands to be more enjoyable than I expected. There is a big grind to this game, so be ready for a lot of training and battling, but if you enjoy those kinds of games and enjoy Digimon, this will be a great time, especially on the Steam Deck!
Without any changes, Digimon World: Next Order can be played at 60 FPS with a battery drain that hovers around 7W - 10W generally. The game looks crisp and gorgeous while running near perfectly, only having VERY minor stutters when running around the world.
The game fits perfectly with the Steam Deck controller and doesn't have any visual bugs or glitches that I encountered. I had a good experience with it, but I did notice 2 things in the settings which I found interesting.
In the "Graphics" option of the settings, I saw only 3 options in front of me: Resolution, Anti-Aliasing, and Depth of Field. Resolution starts off at 1280x720, which I assumed was the max it supported, but I was actually able to change it to 1280x800 and it stretched the screen correctly! I'm not sure why it doesn't default to the native 1280x800 if it supports it, but I am happy it does.
I also notice anti-aliasing and Depth of Field are turned off. You can actually turn these on and run the game without any issues, but I would recommend keeping Depth of Field off. There are some areas where it will react weirdly and make your entire screen blurry, which can feel jarring when it happens randomly. Turning it off will not only fix this, but will also slightly reduce battery drain, making it stick under 10W.
Digimon World: Next Order is an enjoyable foray into the monster-collecting RPG space. If you are a fan of others, like Pokemon, and want a enjoyable switch-up to the formula with tons of grinding, this will be a wonderful game for you. As someone who loves games with lots of grinding involved, huge Disgaea fan here, Digimon World fits perfectly into my type. With no changes needed to enjoy the game fully, this is also a Best on Deck game, though if you decide to go into settings, you can expand the screen to the entire Deck and up some graphics quality without losing performance or battery!
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