There’s no new game plus with Digimon World: Next Order. Instead, the game encourages you to keep going with the file you have. When you finish that fourth chapter in the story mode, the whole digital world opens up to you. You meet new post-game Digimon, get additional quests, and end up getting the ability to have Digimon live forever. A hard difficulty is made available after completing the game, but starting a new game at that level means starting over fresh. Which means it might be better to explore all the new things you can do in your existing save. This can take you quite some time, because the extra adventures and dungeons are capital-H Hard.
Let’s start with the life span issue, since you might have a Digimon or two you’ll want to keep around once you get someone good after the fourth chapter is done and the credits have run. In the main game, you’ll be forced to say farewell to characters after about 20 days. In Digimon World: Next Order’s post game, you can work with Holyangemon and Lord Knightmon or the Royal Knights to keep your characters alive forever. Holyangemon tells you how much life your partners have left, while you can talk to Lord Knightmon to increase their life span by 99 days.
Once you beat Digimon World: Next Order, you should also start getting digimails about new EX Scenarios. There are a few that take you to new dungeons in the Dimensional District and task you with going around the world to accomplish goals. They’re incredibly difficult and will require you to be at your best. You only get one EX Scenario quest at a time, which means putting in effort to get everything done. Rina, Jijimon, and other characters have things for you to do in extra missions. It might take some time for one to appear after completing another, so there’s a patience issue. Also, like many of the complementary adventures, some can involve some fights. The last time I played, the game had me unlocking toilets at the Nigh Plains.
This is a good thing, in a way, because it’s almost like Digimon World: Next Order is giving you time to train. While waiting for the mails to show up and give you access, it isn’t a bad idea to stat-grind or start searching for and defeating the Royal Knights to unlock additional Dimensional District dungeons to explore. Armageddonmon is going to be your first big bad to fight in that space, at least he was right there in my game, and it’s a good fight for getting your feet wet. Though, to be fair, I was a bit done by the time I reached this point. After so many hours training, watching my partners battle, and completing missions, I was satisfied with my excursions and didn’t feel like I needed to do more.
Perhaps this is why my favorite post-game activity were the Network Battles. When you head to Jijimon’s hut, you can register your partners to old-school devices and fight against other people online. I wasn’t as big a fan of this during the main game, since I felt like I had the worst luck. (If I registered Champions, sometimes I’d be put against Ultimates. When I entered Ultimates, I’d come up against Megas.) Once I had two Megas in the post-game, it was suddenly a fun thing to watch. It was like I could appreciate my hard work. It’s a very hands-off approach, but is a quick way to earn Network Points that can quickly and easily be exchanged for recovery and stat boosting items. Each day offers different items you can swap points for, and you can use these on your characters or sell them for bits.
I’ll admit that by the time I reached the fourth chapter of Digimon World: Next Order, I was about done. This is a very long game that involves lots of grinding and planning. The post-game feels like it’s about testing you and giving you a chance to face some amazing foes. There are extra bosses to find and face, EX Scenarios to clear up, opportunities to make your characters practically immortal, and chances to really prove to others how good your partners are.
Digimon World: Next Order is available for the PlayStation 4.
