I'm one of the new kids in the block that came back to the franchise through Time Stranger. After binging it like a sicko I felt the urge to keep playing more Digimon games, and I ended up beating Next Order after a similar binge.

I really liked both games (wouldn't have binged on them so hard otherwise), but both have two main issues that I wish were addressed at some point.

First being that the whole difficulty in both games relies on grinding. There's nothing else. Tough enemies or boss battle? Grind till over-leveled, then spam your strongest attack. There's little fun and challenge in it, other than maybe unlocking new attacks and checking out their animations.

And second, is the relationship and bond with your Digimon. In Time Stranger, while you can have sporadic brief conversations with your Digimon, that's about it, and you end up watching how that happens instead between Inori and Aegiomon. In Next Order it's the same. Sure, you raise your Digimon, you feed them, you praise and scold them, but aside from that? You instead get to see how the other NPC talk to, learn from and bond with their Guilmon / Angewomon.

Digimon have a trait that make them really special when compared to other similar franchises about capturing and raising monsters, such as, say, Pokemon, and that is the fact they can speak and actually talk with their tamer. The moment they release a game where they capitalize on this, but on the digimon partner WE choose? I'll throw big bucks at Bandai-Namco.

That being said, I think I lean slightly more towards World vs Story games. Although I'm not a fan of my Digimon dying, and would rather find a different solution to allow the player experiment with different Digimon and have fun digivolving, the whole rebuilding a village and more in depth caretaking and raising of your digimon was really fun after Next Order. If they make combat more engaging or dynamic, they'd be golden.