Worst MMO Ever? - Digimon Masters Online

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Digimon, that franchise which never quite took off, has an MMO, and it's awful.

Marvel as I endure 6 hours of DMO, enjoy the terrible combat, wonder why Agumon is spanish, cry at how pay to win the cash shop is.

Digimon players, I know you're crying out for a good game, but this isn't it.

Thanks to the Patreon supporters and Twitch subs who help keep the channel alive.

[Goose_BooseYT]

If you speak Spanish like that one more time, I WILL leave you on the second monitor PERMANENTLY.

[erickernodle]

I like how the digimon that are “about to mischief” are literally just walking around doing nothing. They’re only evil because the game says so.

[ener.g]

The sad thing is Digimon could really work as an mmo, if you really focused on combat, and making it feel good. Since it's digital you could have endless design choices for worlds and plot. So long as controlling your monster felt good.

[corvidaeae]

That's such a bizarre choice for an opening tutorial fight, since it's a recreation of the climax fight in the X-Evolution movie. It's not the most obscure Digimon thing, but it's obscure enough that there was clearly some level of love for the franchise at some point... and yet the lack of care also instantly shines through, because you're given Omegamon to fight with in a battle that very VERY notably is Alphamon's big moment. Not to mention that the MMO's story immediately switches to roughly following the Data Squad plot line, which has nothing to do with X-Evolution beyond "evil royal knights and yggdrasil". Just very strange all around.

[energyipad]

"If I were a Digimon fan, I would be insulted by this."

Very on point, Josh. This uses one of my favorite seasons as a frame for this shit. None of the story. None of the quality. Only the brand.
Sigh...

[iaminside]

Hahahahaha. This game is crazy. "You're thrown into a world with no direction. No clear goal. Nothing makes any sense. Good new is that you have a companion that is meant to help you. The bad news is that the companion meant to help you only speaks Spanish."

I think you did it. You found it.

[inanimatesum]

Its astonishing how something as the Digital World couldn’t be properly implemented as an mmo. There’s a lot of easy components and history of games to work with.

[ditzydoodle]

I used to play this alot back in the day, and I remember the day I stopped. I was killing mobs to collect eggs and data so I could get my favorite Digimon; Terriermon. I spent days, probably weeks gathering data and finally got one egg for Terriermon. I tried injecting the egg with said data and it 'broke' the egg, meaning I'd have to farm all over again to get more data and hopefully get another Terriermon egg. The fact I could just buy Terriermon off the shop for after weeks of in-game struggle, just ended any enjoyment I could have.

[warrenstandley]

"ooh it gets good at end game"

I had put a disgusting amount of time into this game and as someone who came close to reaching end game. It does not. It gets SO MUCH WORSE in the end game.

[FuelDropforthewin]

"This may be the most boring MMO I have ever played."

Given that this channel has reviewed both Khan Online: Rebirth AND Forsaken World: Gods and Demons, that is one hell of a thing to say. Ooof.

[redacted]

I was an original Beta tester for this game, it was actually better then. Besides all of the issues brought up in this video they actually made the game less forgiving over time and my experiences with their support team were just as bad in grammar, spelling and sentence structure and they even basically told me to shove it when I had issues with the game not working as intended.

[LWolf]

You know what's really sad? Back in the early (golden) days when the game existed only in Korea, people were going nuts in anticipation of global release. It looked so awesome and promising, with the gorgeous cell shading art which I believe still looks quite good. I vividly remember the trailer for the game, and how epic it all looked. People were literally going as far as making Korean accounts using fake Korean ID numbers and coming up with quazy-virus-infested translation files, just to be able to play the game. And when the global release finally came out, more specifically the Closed Beta, there were so many people trying to play that Joyxmax who had been running the game at the time, had to put in a 3h limit for each player. I don't remember if it was like a daily thing, but I remember being able to play for just 3 hours a day for a while before the game came out fully. It was amazing. Some of my best and dearest memories. With friends especially. As hard as it was with all the paywalls, I still fondly look back at how we used to struggle trying to find ways to get Evolutors so that we could unlock our digimons' evolutions. And of course endless grinding for eggs and data to try and get a 4/5 digimon (those who played know very well that nightmare).
It's a shame what has become of the game. It really did have a ton of potential. Honestly I think it still has, but most companies just look at it as a giant cash cow and continue with the insane pay-to-win system whilst not adding any new proper content. At this point the game really is only for the crazy fans who just enjoy the idea of collecting digimon.

[cursedex]

"We chat to ... this thing..." Josh, about the NPC looking like the Agumon he's been using for 5 hours now.

[alejandrosanchezsalcedo]

As a spanish speaking fan of Josh, i enjoyed his spanish pronunciation more than i should

[solierafromtheultrareconsquad]

The weirdest thing about this game is I swear the tutorial and the plotline change, like, every year or so, because I retried the game TWICE after initially playing it, and all three times, the beginning was completely different, I'm not sure why their priorities are THERE instead of literally anywhere else.

[m_milos]

I played this game religiously ages ago when I was a kid and I redownloaded it a couple years ago, played it for maybe a week, and I redownloaded it again a couple weeks ago.

The change between all 3 periods was insane. In my opinion the original was best, and not just because of nostalgia. The start was good, you had a clear and well-explained main storyline, everything was fantastic.

The second playthrough was a bit different. Actually, I don't remember much of it except they added a cutscene-esque tutorial in the beginning with Agumon which was weird, but they added more new player rewards, which was nice.

The 3rd time was just awful. That beginning is so weird, they changed the first town which was just so iconic and nostalgic to me, they make you evolve your Digimon into the highest stage in the first half hour of the game, then instead of sending you to the second area of the game, they send you to one that used to be accessed pretty far in the game (The place with the original anime Digimon and locations), it's just a fucking mess.

EDIT: Just watched a bit more of the video, and I just realized they hadn't changed the starting town when this video was made, but they did modify the previous one. But it seems like they change such major things every 3 seconds. Why??

[lemeres]

The saddest part about this game is that the franchise has been making MMOs.... since before they could be bothered to make it multiplayer. I remember playing Digimon World 3, a 2002 singleplayer RPG set in a fake MMO. Colorful sprite based overworld, 3d fights, kind of like pokemon, down to a gym leader progression. It brings in actual stakes when real world terrorists do a "you are now stuck in the mmo" thing, back in the 2000's era when that plot hadn't been done to death yet. The game wasn't amazing, but it had fun little subquests like talking to the married furry couple and asking them for their fursuits when you need a disguise.

[kawaiipotato]

God, I wondered when this one would get an episode. I played back during the original closed beta ages ago and hopped from the original Gameking launcher version to the Steam version, 2, 000+ combined hours of this disrespectful, lazy mess, and I ended up quitting around March of 2020, before that pointless tutorial got added in. I can safely say the late game experience and the early game experience are pretty much identical, only with more bashing your head against the wall later on since stuff gets scaled so ridiculously that unless you deal with all the upgrade systems, you're going to be struggling. The way they push you towards the shop with its low odds are disgusting, and I with an addictive, compulsive personality fell for it for years, thousands of dollars in and not wanting to quit because of the sunk cost fallacy taking hold hard, but also because of my attachment to Digimon. It always appealed to me and still does even though I recognize as an adult that some things are kinda dumb, and this was one of those games where you could take out any mention or show of Digimon, turn it into a generic Korean grindfest MMO with bland monster mechanics, and it'd lose nothing. It had that little care for what franchise it was utilizing, from its gameplay to its landscapes. The latter is a big shame because one of the big aesthetic appeals of Digimon has always been its oddness in the Digital World, these combinations of natural lush fields with modern world appliances like train track segments, random street signs, and things of that nature.

Hardly helps that later on the actual game pushes the grind to an absurd degree, Digimon Maze being the prime culprit. You need to collect up to forty of an item off a mob, and you'll get maybe two every eleven kills, if you're lucky, and you need to do this often three times a room before being allowed to move on. And this happens a few times per floor of the dungeon you're in.

Top that off with a dev and mod team that are some of the most unfriendly I've ever seen, a team that actively seems to dislike its own player base, and I wonder how this game has lasted even a few years. It had barely anything to offer when it was officially released past the brand name, and it has nothing to offer now. So many games have come out since DMO came out to now, and almost all of them are so much better. We even have a new Digimon MMO on the wind in the form of Digimon Super Rumble, and even from a glance it has to be better than DMO, we can only go up.

Writing my own review of the game when I quit felt so much like writing a restraining order to an abusive ex that kept making you think they were sweet and misunderstood when in reality they drained your energy, sanity, and wallet when they weren't harshly beating you and telling you that you're no good and you were lucky to have them.

Good riddance, DMO, and love the video, Josh.



Edit: Adding on for some extra context, things I failed to mention, and some replies to things.

1. Yes, 2, 000+ hours. That is just what the sunk cost fallacy and being a fairly firm Digimon fan made me commit. Keep in mind, when I started back during the CBT era, I was still in middle school, when I was much more 'hardcore' a fan, and was less picky and knowledgeable about games and unscrupulous monetization tactics. I associated it after with the weird nostalgia and the Digimon brand, and even when that wore off, it just became, "Well, I've grinded my way to the top for so long and spend so much money, that'd all go to waste if I stopped, and there's nothing else as far as Digimon MMORPGs..." It sounds stupid from the outside, but it is just that, and that's exactly what this game preys on. Sucking in and keeping fans of Digimon who are willing to settle until they break and can't take anymore. I'd gotten to the upper ranks of the game, nearly all the major Jogress Digis at no less than 4/5, grinded the Spirit Digimon to 99 so I could nab Susanoomon, max-Digiclones, I got the stat boosting cards that need cash shop items to activate, I'd grinded for days and weeks in dungeons for the best accessories I could get at the time, I pulled hair and teeth for X-Antibody quests. I endured so much before I finally decided I couldn't take it anymore and said goodbye. So please understand, I'd done a lot that made it hard to force myself to say enough was enough, please don't do it to yourself if you've ever even remotely considered starting.

2. A fair point I saw was in regards to performance, which, while I hear is better now, was pretty atrocious at times back during the time I played. Crashes and huge lag and delays weren't uncommon, and not just that, but they happened almost seemingly at random. Nothing quite like being near the end of a several minute long hard mode dungeon run only to have the game give up and eat your entry pass along with your time. Or trying to move and attack and having a solid several seconds of time where animations happen, but nothing takes effect until everything up to that point happens all at once.

3. Bots, God, the bots. This created the normal issue you tend to see, lots of gold seller advertisements flooding chats and a bunch of clearly bot accounts just littering the hub area all the time. Let's be real though, that part's not abnormal for any MMORPG anymore, especially grindy Korean ones. But the way the dev team handled it baffles me. Basically, any player can target another and report if they suspect botting/AFK/cheating tools. Then, a sort of "quiz" pops up where you have to click specific images before the time runs out. If you fail, you get booted, and your account receives a strike and timeout. Three strikes, you're gone forever. The issue with this was they attached a *500% EXP BOOST REWARD* to the person who made the report if the player gets struck. This led to a lot of malicious nonsense since the exp grind was so awful where innocent people would get reported just for sitting still for more than thirty seconds in a field. I can speak to experience with that from a time I moved myself intentionally out of the way of mobs in a field to go to the restroom for a couple minutes, came back to a bot check nearly done, and got a strike. Given reports among friends and groups I was in at the time, I clearly wasn't the only one. Just a system ripe for abuse.

4. RNJesus rules DMO, and RNJesus is a cruel, malevolent god that has its fingers dipped into every element to specifically work against you. Digicloning, a necessary process for strengthening your digimon's four basic stats for endgame? Anything past the first 3 - 6 ranks basically requires reinforcement to ensure you don't fail, or worse, lose a rank. And if you wanted the best stat increase and not the lowest possible, better have the very rare, specific version of a Digiclone item, or try your luck with various resets. Trying for a Digiegg that's better than 3/5 (scale) so you can make them bigger and alter their base stats? Without a guaranteed rank Digiegg, which is either bought from the cash shop or earned through specific events, good friggin' luck, you'll be fortunate to get a 4/5 after I kid you not, 50 attempts. I've spent days on-end trying to go for the items needed to get the Miracle Digiegg from the Keramon dungeon with no luck, and each time I did and tried to make something with it, the attempts always failed.

5. The cash shop is atrocious. Plain and simple, it always has been, with items you basically NEED to advance into the later game being locked behind a pay wall of at least a few dollars for things like Burst Modes or whatnot. The introduction of loot boxes and them becoming just a normal thing with every new Digimon though was the point where I'd finally started to pull my head from my arse and distance myself. Basically every Digimon and special evolution introduced now is part of a loot box that's not only fairly expensive, but only has a 0.1% chance to get the thing you want from it. These new Digimon too are all fairly powerful, and all of them fairly popular or at least attractive for collection, so they know people will be willing to spend the heavy bucks to try for them. It's very intentionally predatory and disgusting.

So again, I need to emphasize, don't ever try this game if you've considered it, and if you are stuck in it like I was, please get out, however you can, and stay out. DMO is not worth it, no franchise would ever be worth putting yourself through what a game like this will do to you.

[barelycompetitive]

I'm two minutes into the video and got a popup from Malwarebytes reminding me to do a scan EXACTLY as you mentioned Xing Code 3. Since the video was fullscreen I didn't realise it wasn't a joke reference and thought it was just a bit xD

[CelticGuardian]

As someone who grew up with Digimon, still loves Digimon, and will advocate it's a great series for kids and adults... this saddens the heck out of me. I can't imagine how disappointed I would've been as a kid if my first experience with the series was this rather than the anime, or heck, one of the PS games.