The Digidestined have passed their first test and defeated the evil Devimon. Afterwards they receive a strange transmission from a awkward looking elderly ''man''.
Who informs them that they have to make their ways off the island and over to a giant continent.
In search of a new device simply referred to as a crest.
Said crests can make their Digimon evolve to even more powerful levels and this will help them on their goal of returning home and solving the mystery of why they're there in the first place. (Tho the kids don't seem that interested on the second part yet.) From this point on they start out on a new Quest looking for the crests around the continent*.
It starts out fairly similar to how they first arrived in the digital world.
Find a strange new alien Place, Explorer said place and deal with hostile enemies.
Eventually discoverer a hierarchy who has some nefarious plan for world domination.
Only unlike Devimon the new enemy (Etemon: This ridiculous rock and roll monkey Digimon it looks like an amalgamation of every American stereotype wrapped up in one)
He's a lot more of a direct threat.
He's this loud over-the-top doofus who at first glance comes off as incredibly harmless.
But turns out to be the most powerful Digimon on the entire world (or at least thinks of him self the most powerful).
But none the less is proving to be way too much of a threat for the children to handle.
So they have to go on the run while this overpowered monkey man hunts them down with an army of his own Digimon in an attempt to destroy them.
He's kind of the opposite of Team Rocket from Pokemon.
There a bunch of dopey idiots that are always shown to be significantly weaker than the main characters.
Not the case here.
Etemon if given the chance will Slaughter any of the Digimon if they try to fight him one-on-one and even as a group they can barely stand up to him.
To make things even worse he has a special ability in where he's ridiculous singing can deprive all the Digimon of their fighting Power thus making them completely useless.
His introduction really changes the dynamic of the show. The kids can't fight their way out of their issues if they simply believe enough or rely on dumb luck to save the day.
They have to start resorting to sneak tactics and work their way around the army of Digimon lest they be discovered. They're given a few advantages along the way like discovering one or two certain Digimon who are very powerful and willing to help them. Even one little fairy Digimon who tries to train them to be more effective in combat (or maybe he was just looking for an excuse for someone to wash his floor. It's Karate Kid rules after all. Anything could be training if you make it intense enough.)
Just to show how much you shouldn't depend on sheer willpower there's even an episode where Tai tries to force his Digimon to evolve to the next level. Resulting in the creation of Skullmon. A skeletonisk monster who's technically more powerful than anything else in the show up to that point. But is chaotic in mindset.
Essentially it's a demon creature that will destroy you, the enemy and anything else defines because it's been deprived of all Humanity. Dingymanity?
And all of this makes up for the stories of episodes 14 through 18. It's just the kids travelling from one place to the next some of them find their crests they have a couple of random battles with other Digimon discover a few places they've never seen before like a village filled with blanks or a strange ship that floats around in the desert controlled by this awkward bird who turns out to be working for the enemy.
It all just adds more personality to the show. Especially since now the enemy Digimon started to be flushed out as well.
With most of them cowering a fear of Etemon as they try to get his computers working again after the whole thing went haywire.
Or putting out with their bosses outbursts because the kids keep showing up an awkward sections because of digital trickery or manipulation of the environment.
It's all pretty basic until we get the episode 19. The episode I would argue was the first truly good episode of the entire show. That's not to say that they haven't been entertaining or amusing beforehand but they've all been so in a kind of silly cartoon Sense.
Episode 19 is the first episode that really starts to dive into just what it is these kids are witnessing.
Finally discovering that they're living with in this strange digital world that's actually match with the information superhighway back on Earth.
In a sense they're kind of on Earth only in a computer form.
This is probably the last time you could get away with the internet being described as a literal rail more information clusters around travelling from place to place.
So it's finally made clear to the kids that they're inside a digital world and are themselves composed of incredibly dense computer data.
Tai takes this information a little too lightly, starts becoming Arrogant with his movements. Thinking that because he's made up of data it's impossible for him to die.
Until the end of the episode when it's made abundantly clear that if he dies here that's it.
It leads to an breaking down in tears because one of his friends Surah was kidnapped by the robot Digimon and he was unable to saver after being confronted by an electric fence that he wasn't able to pass through. Certain places in the digital world are simply illusion and you can walk through them if you know where to go. But because Ty is now confronted with death yet again he becomes unsure of himself. And it's this mixed in with the surprising a good dialogue of the beginning of the episode and the really good pacing of the rest of the episode that makes for such an interesting event.
The kids are trying to storm this upside down pyramid where this computer Digimon was being kept captive. He told them via the internet's (on Izzy's PC) that if they save him he'll give them the location to one of their crests and other chunks of information.
But it turns out that once he's free he didn't care about the kids and left them to die at the hands of Etemon (Who was also there looking for this robot too).
Which leads into episode 20 where Etemon has site up security all around the pyramid in hopes of captureing the kids.
So the kids have to divide up their team. One group going into the pyramid while two other groups create various diversions to lure everyone away. As to save Sora from being a captive and hopefully get away from Etemon before he figures out what's going on.
It all culminates in the destruction of the pyramid in the end. When the robotic Digimon decides to destroy everything. Which leads to Etemon being infused with this virus material that makes him almost omnipresent.
At this point Tai is finally able to evolve he's Digimon to its ultimate form and defeat Etemon.
In doing so Tai and his Digimon get sucked into the void and end up back in the real world. Tai and he's now devolved Koromon staring and disbelief at crowded streets for normal people.
Overall the story is getting better. The Animation is kind of weird. The hand drawn characters and environments are perfectly fine but they keep trying to digitally move them around to show the distance between them and a current item moving away or there's this horrible scene of them on a boat in the water with what has to be some of the worst cartoon water affects I've ever seen.
I don't really want to harp on this stuff because who cares.
The actual hand drawn animation is perfectly fine. It's stylized nicely enough and the story still okay but my God they're just some things that you should probably keep to conventional animation if your computers aren't up to the task.Kind of ironic given that it's a digimon show and you'd think computers would be for front on your mind.
*They also receive these little necklace devices that holds the crests.
But they're found so easily and conveniently that the episode isn't worth much time. They literally get eaten by a giant evil whale, defeat the evil gear within said whale, find their crests and then end up on the continent.
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