Builds off the base of World Championship 2009, which had taken a completely different direction to the ones before. This one is definitely a much lesser jump, but features new areas, new duelists and of course, new cards.

It includes the same box puzzles and stealth sections as before (the stealth sections take place in the exact same hallways as last time), but now there's also a handful of "time reverse" puzzles which are some of the slowest sections in the game. To be honest I'm not a fan of the story stuff in general. Dialogue goes on way too long for a narrative I just don't care about (I've never seen 5D's, which I assume this is a direct re-telling of, but with an OC thrown in, kinda like Spirit Caller). The city of Satellite is just kind of boring with most areas feeling the same, though the brief trip to the Spirit World was a nice change, and I wish we could get more places like that, but I understand it's not the games fault as long as it wants to stick to the anime.

Luckily unless you want to rush through it, the story takes up a relative little amount of the time you play this game, as unlocking packs requires so much grinding of duels that you can go hours without progressing. Which sounds like a bad thing, but for me I enjoy it.

One aspect I've come to appreciate from these games over the Tag Force series is how you can't just duel anyone at any time. Tag Force stories feel anti-climatic because most of them just have duels against people you can find on the overworld and duel infinite amounts of times. These games make major characters like Yusei and Jack inaccessible except for specific story points, until the post-game where you can duel them as much as you want.

I appreciate that the game made DP grinding a little easier too. Slightly buffed numbers to certain bonuses, and a "bonus bonus" which continuously goes up the more bonuses you unlock. This gives a purpose to all those bonuses that you can get for summoning hard-to-summon monsters, as in the past it is never worth trying to summon Gate Guardian for an extra 100 points, but now do it once and not only do you get those 100 points, you also get an extra point for every duel going forward. Still not worth it? Maybe, but the more of these you do the more it adds up, and if you plan to grind a lot, it makes it worth it in the end.

And speaking of grinding, you can get speed spells from the expanded duel runner side game. While buying them from a pack is an option, doing these short time trials can net you up to 3 speed spells per ~1 minute run, plus some DP for your trouble. Unfortunately buying actual bike parts still costs DP no matter what.

While I do think this game is better than the last, and how couldn't it be when it's basically just that game but a little more, it doesn't fix many of the issues I had, and in some cases makes them worse. Performance in duels is still bad, especially when the field starts getting full and the AI takes a long time to do anything. This is exacerbated in tag duels where you need to wait through 3 AI turns to get to a single one of yours.

Card distribution is still so freaking bad. Archtypes are spread out across so many packs, all of which can only be gotten at different points in the story, and many can only be unlocked post-game. It's near impossible to build actual decks beyond just strong staples for most of the playtime.

I still think Turbo duels are the dumbest most half-baked idea. I already complained about them in my last review so no point doing it here.

The lack of ability to unlock anyone from past series sucks. And I can't remember if it was the case for the last game, but even your tag partner choices are heavily limited in this one. At least in 2008 I know you could get absolutely any duelist as a tag partner by dueling them 10 times.

I'll be real, while I think it's still fun, I don't care for having a story in this type of game. I loved 2008's world concept where you unlocked different areas and fought against different opponents, many of which had different gimmicks. And where beating challenges would unlock anime characters in World Championship mode.

The exploration and world design in this game is fantastic. They really open up almost everything for you straight away to do in any order you want. There's so many fun things to discover, and getting a new Digimon to your town is always exciting to find out what they'll add, and how it will make things easier for you (and then disappointing when they do nothing but stand there).

This game really does feel like those tamogachi games brought into a fully fledged 3D world. With all the pros of raising a little guy to become powerful, to the cons of having to find a place for it to shit every 5 minutes.

The whole dying and rebirth system is a pain in the ass. Mostly because of the fact every new Digimon will require a lot of repetitive training in the gym. It sucks so much to lose an ultimate level Digimon and then be forced to spend hours getting a new one, because to get back to the area you were just clearing you're going to need your new Digimon to be at least as strong as you already were, if not stronger. The game does very little to mitigate this grind - the new Digimon will get a small stat boost depending on how much your previous one had, but it's so minor that it's really just saving a few training sessions. You can also upgrade the gym to get bigger boosts per session, but the 2 Digimon you can recruit to do this are literally right next to each other at the end of a pretty long section of the story (and that's IF you know where you need to go to get them asap). I don't understand why they couldn't spread them out a bit...

I guess you can't really not have it though since it's sort of baked into Digimon's core design. Still annoying.

While a guide is heavily recommended for the game imo. You probably could get by with just exploring constantly, it'd just take a lot longer. I know as a kid I had no idea what I was doing in the game, and yet there were still places and moments in this replay that I recognised and thought to myself there's no way kid-me would have been able to work all this out. I guess I just brute forced my way through it until I found something that did something.

The requirements for Digivolutions however are a bit of a cluster mess. While players could easily get by either just going with what the game gives them, or trial and error, through stat-requirements, the fact weight and care mistakes matter a lot is something I feel few people would intuitively work out. Weight because many heavy Digimon require massively force feeding the prior form to meet those requirements, and care mistakes because not all Digimon require <x amount made, but some have a minimum amount needed. Who would ever guess that not feeding your Digimon when it's hungry and not letting it sleep could lead to some actually good evolutions? And yet supposedly these things shorten a Digimon's lifespan, so to get certain Digimon you have to shorten their life? That's kinda messed up.

I love a lot of this game. It mostly just gets really frustrating with how often you essentially have to reset the whole process over and over, going through the same slow boring gym training and having very little to show for it when that Digimon dies.