It's a new generation of Digimon, kind of.
We still have two kids from the other series here, and they're not just any kids. They're the Ace in the Hole, we've got the special powers and the better quality Digimon characters.
Or at least they would, but there's some weird Cosmic event going on in this world that makes all the former Digimon and their Partners moot.
So it's pretty obvious why this is happening.
We need an excuse for new characters, but we don't want to get rid of the old line up either. So we keep them around as more of an advisory role and handle off the Saddles to new people.
Obviously there's a lot of marketability to go into this show and you want to keep the old audience, so you got to keep the old characters. While somehow being able to make your new character stand out in such a way as to not to make them add ons to an already established world.
And this is very difficult to do.
You somehow have to be able to create a whole new story while simultaneously sticking to the continuity of the former season.
And a lot of the times it really didn't feel like they did.
For one thing all the original kids were hiding their involvement with the Digimon from their parents again.
Something that seems really out of the ordinary, given that everybody at the end of the first series already knew about them.
It's kind of hard to hide your involvement with digital world when your parents watch you and all of your friends literally fly up into the sky and had off into a giant portal jutting out of the horizon.
So the twist with this series is that one of the chosen kids has turned evil. And not just that, but he's decided to enter the digital world to try and conquer the thing like an over crazed Genghis Khan.
His actions have caused something of a problem within the digital world. And now the forces that be you're trying to send out new digital devices to a new breed of children to try and combat this problem.
Or at least that's the idea at first.
That is until they discover that all of them along with the Digimon Kaiser himself are part of the same group who were supposed to be the next generation of Defenders. But once again one of them turning evil and screwing everything up kind of alter the equilibrium.
Unlike the original show this group of children isn't hindered to the digital world.
They're free to go to and from. They can return home, back to school, live moderately normal lives and seek assistance from the previous generation.
In a lot of ways they have it easier than their counterparts. Though the show pretends like they don't.
In fact the show has this weird disconnect with the power of all the little monsters.
In the original show was fairly straightforward Digimon who gradually get more powerful over time even when they weren't in their evolved forms.
But here everybody just feels kind of neutral and sometimes they feel like they're super-powered and other times completely outmatched for the situation.
Creatures they could easily defeat in one battle could destroy them the next and it just felt inconsistent much like a lot of the show's overarching story.
It's kind of upsetting given that I think the structure should have been stronger here. You have a strong cast of characters and a consistent story that continued on for the first 20 episodes and then they just kind of throw stuff at the wall in the later half, seeing what sticks, what doesn't.
In some ways feeling like they just made things up as they go along.
At least when the original show came out it's inconsistency was understood.
Original Digimon was only supposed to last 13 episodes. So it made sense for all the characters to be on a tiny little island and to wrap everything up at the end.
Then expanding on it later when the show was given more time to do so.
Here it feels the opposite.
We start strong with a fun character Arcs involving one of the kids getting over his evil ambitions, Then trying to reintegrate into the real world and pay for the mistakes he did in the digital world.
But after that it just feels des-interesting.
We're introduced to these new evil ''threats'' who just mindlessly want to do evil things for presumably no reason.
As time goes on it's revealed that they're working for someone else, but he's given poor introduction and he seems to have just come out of nowhere.
The secondary group of characters that are supposed to be the bad guys just aren't as interesting as the first.
I think it would have been better off if they had started the Digimon Adventure 02 series with these underling bad guys, this weird old guy who wants to turn the entire world evil so that he can enter it and then have that progressed into corrupting one of the kids to become the Digimon Kaiser.
Looking back at the show now I almost wish it was a slice-of-life series instead. I think it would have been a lot of fun to watch these kids go about their mundane days, dealing with all their typical school day issues and relationships with friends. Then occasionally intermixing that with their little Digimon friends and going off and having adventures in the digital world from time to time.
No massive overarching bad guys or having to save the world plots.
At least not after the Digimon Kaiser Saga.
That would have been a good introduction to get people into the show after all the characters here were great.
Everybody has their own personality and corks and internal struggles to get through and I think a lot more time could have been dedicated to just seeing them living their lives or maybe trying to figure out why there digidestined to begin with.
It's a question that the original kids didn't have a lot of time to ponder.
They only fruit that storyline at them in the last five or six episode and I think that was only there is a kind of cliffhanger for a possible second show.
Which this show ultimately became.
But despite everything I said: I still mildly enjoyed watching it. I didn't want to watch it episode after episode like I did with the original Digimon show and some of the story elements I found kind of weak but ultimately it's still enjoyable and if you're a fan of Digimon you'll probably get something out of it.
I have to admit a big reason I continue to watch this was so that I could get up to speed with all the newest Digimon shows that are coming out. The Digimon Tri and his new film that's popping up in a small time. Will any of it be any good? Maybe I have my doubts to be honest, but I'd like to be proven wrong.
Oh and the animation in the show is just as clunky and cheap as it was in the original. Anytime a creature or a vehicle moves from one spot to the next especially when they would literally just shrink the image on screen and make it look like it was disappearing into the foreground. There's not enough of it to take you out of the show but it's really obvious every time you see it.
It has fairly enjoyable music. A lot of it's just reuse from the other show but their original materials fairly enjoyable too. And the art style is still nice, it's not as wonderous as the original show but a lot of that comes down to not spending so much time in that digital world again. Also there's only like three or four episodes where the digital world actually gets any real-time to itself. Otherwise it's just a basic backdrop for our characters to run around in or it's completely neglected when the characters are out in the real world doing other things. Oh and that's to say nothing of the other worlds that pop up in this show. There's a Lovecraft demon possessed evil world there's a world where your emotions can alter the fabric of time and it's argued that there's a bunch of other realities too. So great we have that gordian knot on top of everything else.
On a completely random note.The show seems more censored when it comes to explicit materials (or put it simply: cheesecake shots) You don't get as many ridiculous looking busty women running around. But you do get an awful lot of physical trauma to children. The amount of kids that gets smacked around in this show and punch is ridiculous.
I swear they were trying to outdo themselves from the original show. Everybody gets slapped in the face at least once.
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