Thread by @GMMan_BZFlag

Let's take a look at a China-exclusive #Digimon toy: Digimon Memory Walk.

This is a pedometer that can link with a WeChat mini program. It became available towards the end of January 2024, and MSRP is ¥99 CNY (~$14 USD), but retails at ¥79 CNY (~$11 USD) in some shops.

Think of it as the Vital Bracelet, except cut down to the bare minimum. There is no LCD screen on the device, only a button for connecting to NFC and a LED for indicating mode and battery status. The NFC connection only works on Android due to limitations on iOS WeChat.

I don't have the device, and don't plan getting it as a priority, so you'll have to settle for some photos on Tieba (a Chinese message board run by Baidu). tieba.baidu.com/p/8885747716

That doesn't mean I couldn't play with the app, though, and I have alternate means of emulating the device. Here is a quick video demonstrating the gameplay loop.

To use the mini program, you need to have WeChat installed. Then scan this code inside WeChat.

When the mini program opens, you are notified that the app only supports Android. You can try it with iOS or Windows, but the steps reading section won't work. You'll be prompted to accept the terms of service next.

After that, you get a welcome notice about what you can do in the app. Next is a description of various screens in the app. Finally, you get to see the landing screen. Tap start to enter the main menu.

On the main menu, there are buttons for visiting your codex, go to loot boxes (don't worry, there's no microtransactions, will explain later), settings, go to the wallpaper section, and finally, with the big button, read steps from device.

First step is to read the steps from the device. Here it gives you some instructions. Basically, make sure the device is in connect mode, and press the read button on the screen. Then tap the face of the device to your phone's NFC reader.

I don't have the device, but I do have a Flipper Zero, so I generated a compatible NFC file to load up some steps. Actually, a lot of steps. The device can track up to 999999 steps. The count is reset when you transfer the steps to the app. Every 1000 steps gives you a key.

If you have more than 1000 steps, the app animates the progress bar for every 1000. If you load a lot of steps, this happens. You can't navigate anywhere in the app, but you can close and reopen it, and your keys will be there.

After you've got your keys, you can open loot boxes. The keys are purely based on steps, so there's no real money to be spent. In fact, the app doesn't even have a web API to talk to. All of your progress is saved locally (and you lose it if you remove the app).

Tap on the key button, and the app will present you with three boxes. Tap on any of them, it doesn't matter, because the prize is determined only after you pick a box. The boxes' colors are random and have no meaning, and the boxes have no special property to affect the result.

After you open the box, you'll see what you got. There is a 25% chance to get a memory, 20% chance for a rare item, and 55% chance for a regular item. After the item type is picked, an item of that type is selected randomly. It doesn't check whether you already have something.

If you do happen to get a duplicate, it's converted into Memory Coins. You get one coin for a memory, two coins for a regular item, and three coins for a rare item.

In your codex, there are three categories: "memorable scenes", which contains the memories; "precious codex", which contains the regular items, and "rare codex", which contains the rare items. There are 20, 20, and 15 items in each category, respectively.

Tap on an item to see details. For a memory, you see a thumbnail, the name, and a description. Tap the expand button to see the full frame in landscape.

A regular item is not too exciting. It doesn't even get its own full resolution image. Instead you just see the thumbnail stretched a bit. Name and description are shown below the image.

Rare items are more interesting. They're like regular items, except you get a turntable view of the model. Tap to pause/resume the rotation. (Implementation details: these are just videos. No realtime 3D rendering involved.)

Lastly, we have the wallpapers section. Here, you can unlock wallpapers for your phone by earning coins. You don't actually spend coins. Instead, when you gather enough, the wallpapers unlock themselves, and the number of coins doesn't reset.

I did try this, but I don't think it works properly. You get an error about the app not having permission to save to album because of privacy policy issues.

And that's kind of it for the app and the device. Overall, it's pretty underwhelming. You get a device that's completely useless without the app (remember, no screen, so you can't even use it as a standalone pedometer), and there's barely anything to do in the app.

With how they've implemented the loot boxes, it could become very frustrating to obtain items, because due to its pure random draws, you become less and less likely to get something new as you play, it becomes incredibly grindy. It took me almost 500 keys to unlock everything.

That's not to mention the awful asset caching behavior. What you've seen in the video was under ideal conditions, where I manually set up a DNS server to resolve the app's backend to a single IP address, and primed that CDN node to precache all the assets the app could access.

If you don't go to special lengths, most of the time images would fail to load, and the loot box screens would have weird shadows or missing graphics.

Half of the CDN nodes actually can't contact the backend, and the other half requires being hit 3-5 times before it will actually attempt to contact the backend to fetch the file. Otherwise it just gives a 404 status.

I don't know if this is just because I'm accessing from overseas, but it seems like some real weird behavior that Tencent needs to fix on their cloud services (the assets are hosted with CloudBase, which manages Cloud Object Storage on behalf of the dev).

It's funny, because you can see the asset loading latency even on their promo video (seek to 18 seconds).

With the underwhelming amount of content and general jankiness of the app, no wonder it's only got about 3.5 out of 5 stars in the mini program's reviews.

I would say there's no point buying this, but if you really want to, you can find it on AliExpress by searching "Digimon Holy Plan". (I'm not sure who came up with that translation.)

@threadreaderapp unroll

I forgot to mention, here's the settings screen. It lets you view the terms of service, customer service contact info, and the how to play hints that were shown when you first ran the app. There's also a mute button and that's the only setting you get.

It's worth noting that in the support section, they give you a WeChat account to contact, but the ID isn't actually a valid WeChat ID. I don't know what they were thinking.