Post by TM93 on Oct 28, 2015 2:18:09 GMT
So, November is creeping up on us, and that means Tri is just around the corner. You all know how excited I am to finally see how this new series turns out, and probably how I’ve been geeking out about it in general.
So I figure, I’m a bit worn out on building for a bit, so how about a bit of an opinion/review/thoughts post. This has nothing to do with DDA as a whole mind you, so if you don’t find general chatter about the Digimon Anime Franchise as a whole to be interesting, feel free to gloss over this post. But in the end, it is Digimon related, so I felt it fitting enough to post here.
Now, this is entirely an opinion piece, so don't take this all as fact. But feel free to add your own thoughts on these and other series yourself if you want to. Maybe your take on a few of the movies, I avoided them to try to trim the fat on this post.
So, let’s start at the beginning: Adventure. We all know it, we all have fond memories I’m sure of growing up and watching the original series back in the 90′s. But let’s be honest, despite the fact that it’s not only iconic to the franchise, and that we generally all got drawn into Digimon through this series, it’s not without it’s flaws. Now, obviously Adventure had a very tight budget considering the fact that it wasn’t planning to go anywhere past the Devimon arc at first, and even that didn’t have a whole lot to work with for resources. But all in all it pulled through.
Digimon Adventure
Ups
- Classic Series, Nostalgia is Strong With This One
- Both the Dub and Sub have their points, the Sub is better if you want something a bit serious, the Dub if you just want a good laugh, even if it’s at how bad it can be at times. That’s more than I can say for a lot of series, where the Dub has no redeeming factors at all.
- Fairly well-written, there are times when watching this series, you can think, and you can feel for the characters. It’s not particularly strong writing, in fact it’s fairly simple to the point that I wonder if all the deep symbolism found in the series isn’t actually there, but looking at what they had to work with, it’s passable.
- Active and action-packed, the series rarely goes an episode without at least one fight.
- Everything about Ogremon.
- Everything about Etemon.
- Everything about Numemon. Frankly a fair few of the ‘evil’ Digimon had a lot going for them, or at the very least they were enjoyable to watch onscreen for one reason or another.
- The Soundtrack. Butterfly and Brave Heart will always be recognizable to Digimon Fans at this point, and there’s several reasons for that. And in the end, they’re both great songs anyways, Digimon or not.
- Dramatic Tension. The party has a lot of ups and downs, infighting and drama pops up every few episodes. While at times it can get a bit exhausting that ‘oh hey they’re fighting AGAIN’, in the end, in my opinion, it helps keep the series down to earth; no group is perfect, especially when tensions are high.
Downs
- The animation and the voice acting have not aged well, plain and simple. Some of the scenes simply REFUSED to be animated, instead unmoving images were dragged across backgrounds. In addition, the CGI Evolution Sequences aged like milk.
- Everything about Hikari.
- If you enjoy any character that isn’t Yamato or Taichi, the mere fact that no one else achieves the Mega stage is a bit of a letdown, even if the other Digimon are still very combat-capable at the Ultimate level.
- While the level of action is a bonus, it also comes off as a very “monster of the week” type of series. Which, to be fair, it kind of was!
- Pacing. Oftentimes we get a series of 5 to 10 episodes which heavily revolve around everyone getting to the next stage, often one episode after another, then we get treated to a slog of them using the new stages. The series could afford to trim the fat a bit here and there to pick things up, or space out the evolution arcs a bit so it doesn’t feel so crammed into one session.
- If you’re watching the dub, prepare for a lot of translation errors and unfunny jokes, mainly because the dub team just kind of went nuts, and in a few cases because the company that owned the dub wanted to make a quick buck or make it more ‘localized’. It’s still not the worst, but the big bad fight kind of loses it’s edge when the characters are still making groan-inducing jokes, in addition to adding the word “Digi” to just about everything, even things that didn’t REALLY need it.
- The dub opening.
Adventure 02
Now, most people didn’t care for Adventure 02, and I can’t entirely blame them. It’s not quite as good as Adventure, but it’s not without it’s redeeming factors, in fact I rather enjoyed it myself.
Ups
- The Soundtrack. Digimon delivered once again, plain and simple. Admittedly having a semblance of a budget can do that for a series.
- The variety of Evolutions was a plus. Things not being entirely linear was a bit refreshing.
- Daisuke, Ken, Veemon, and Wormmon. The only characters really worth paying attention to in the series for one reason or another. Their writing might not always be stellar, in fact Daisuke and Veemon are about as one-dimensional as they come, but at against the rest of the cast of Adventure 02, they stood out.
- The story. Now, there’s ups and downs here, but when it came to trying to send a message about teamwork and trusting each other, I would argue that Adventure 02 did a better job than Adventure. In addition, the fact that we actively saw characters juggling their real lives and the role of saving the world was a nice change from Adventure’s constant digital slog.
- The nice, wrap-up ending that left some things open, finally finishing (or so we thought) the tale that started with Adventure.
- The identity of the Narrator being revealed.
- Agumon in a suit
Downs
- The characters (bar those listed above). Every single one of them ended up being immensely bland, even characters who were somewhat colorful in Adventure.
- The story. The downside of the story and all these shiny new evolutions, was that in the end it played out less like telling a story at times, and more like trying to sell toys. It even felt like the reason no one could achieve the Ultimate stage was hastily written in at the last moment.
- The animation did not age any better than Adventure did.
- If you watched the dub, enjoy MORE terrible jokes and translation errors!
Tamers
Tamers: the pride and joy of the Digimon franchise for anyone who watched past Adventure 02. And honestly, it was indeed a good series, arguably the BEST series depending on who you talk to. That said, it’s still not flawless.
Ups
- Again, the soundtrack. Tamers was a series who knew how to make the music work in their favor.
- The characters. Thanks to a far smaller cast, everyone got more screentime to develop as characters, over rushing everything at once. They even took time to develop everyone properly.
- Impmon.
- Terriermon.
- The writing. The pacing was excellent for a Digimon series, evolution arcs didn’t feel rushed to me, it went along at it’s own pace and it thrived as such overall. This series could legitimately make you think and make you feel at times, no question.
- The animation. While it wasn’t flawless (in fact many sequences still suffer from “refuse to animate”), the stock sequences for things like evolution and card slashes, still hold up to this day, bar the terrible CGI sequences.
- Everyone who was considered a central character got their Megas. Even if Takato got another stage it was for a mere one episode and thus didn’t make the plot a big game of “Oh when’s Goku Takato gonna come save the day?”
Downs
- Culumon.
- Culumon.
- Did I mention Culumon yet? Because he deserves to be here three times. Minimal.
- While endearing at times, sometimes Guilmon’s childish behavior can get on your nerves.
- The Card Slash mechanic in the end felt like a toy grab, not because it was badly written while it was there, but because it essentially got tossed aside by the end of the series.
- The final fight against the D-Reaper. It’s not that it was a bad enemy, it’s not that the fight was not enjoyable or flashy, or like the rest of the series, thought-provoking, it’s that it took too long, and thus felt like the heroes were in no real rush to defeat it.
Frontier
Everyone’s favorite whipping boy of the franchise (bar Hunters maybe if anyone made it that far along), Frontier had it’s redeeming factors, but in the end, I still feel it was hands-down the weakest point of the series I’ve seen so far.
Ups
- New evolution mechanic that does not make the humans sitting ducks on the battlefield. I actually LIKED Spirit Evolution as a concept.
- As always, the soundtrack. Even if it wasn’t perfect, it had it’s good points.
- The animation (again, stock sequences overall). The franchise seemed to have learned it’s lesson about tossing in CGI creatures. The CG is still present, but it’s not nearly as bad.
- The final fight felt accurately dramatic and urgent, although it did suffer a bit from “get knocked down twice, get up three times” syndrome.
Downs
- None of the characters were really likable or relatable, I often ended up wondering why they all went along with the same hairbrained action without question, or at least voicing concerns.
- It hit that Adventure level of Pacing again, but it somehow felt worse, and I can’t explain exactly why. Maybe because the filler episodes just felt less important, or felt less related to the plot itself.
- Once the Mega stages were achieved, until the final fight more than half the cast became glorified cheerleaders due to the fact that the stage required them to give up their Spirits. If you did manage to enjoy any of the three characters who DIDN’T win the evolution lottery, sorry about that.
- Needless animation sequence that will stick in my head forever: Grottomon Slide Evolving to Gigasmon, doing NOTHING, then Slide Evolving back to Grottomon. He’d already shown his power as Gigasmon and Grottomon, this sequence LITERALLY added nothing other than to spare a few extra seconds of work for the animation team.
Savers
Few people made it this far into the Digimon series, and personally I think if you missed Savers, you missed out overall, it kept me coming back over and over again. Then again, I might just be weird. It also might be because it kept reminding me of Gurren Lagann. Can’t imagine why.
Ups
- Masaru and Agumon.
- Soundtrack. The first opening was lackluster, but the second was perfect, and the evolution theme was excellent.
- Character dynamics. Not necessarily great writing, but more how Masaru just caused trouble for everyone, and got crap for it.
- BanchoLeomon.
- The entire group dynamic of the Royal Knights.
- Animation quality. Some of the sequences seemed to have gone off-model, but finally I got treated to a Digimon series whose action sequences could ACTUALLY look pretty good. In addition, due to the shading and lighting effects, the CGI Evolution sequences don’t look terrible, and often blended almost seamlessly into hand-drawn animation.
- Everyone not only gets a Mega, but a Burst Mode as well.
Downs
- Masaru and Agumon simply dominate the series both story and fight-wise to the point that the rest of the cast feels lackluster. In any other Digimon series, Ikuto and Tohma would have been pretty fair characters, but they just sort of fell by the wayside in this series, barely touched on, if at all. Yoshino was just not a great character at all, plain and simple, to the point that I think the writers picked up on it, when the main group hit Mega, Yoshino and Tohma basically just went ‘oh do what Masaru did’. If you like them, great, but despite that it felt a bit rude to the other characters when.
- The pacing once more felt a bit iffy at times. We got quick sequences of everyone getting Evolutions, then long slogs of filler for upwards of 10 episodes sometimes.
Now, I haven’t even watched Hunters yet and I’m not sure I’ll finish Xros Wars. So I cannot, in good conscience, give a say on series I didn’t finish.
Now, as a closing statement I simply want to say what I want to see from Tri.
- Give everyone a Mega. Just let us have this. Also fix up Kari’s Mega from Magnadramon to Ophanimon. It really made no sense to push the Dual Angels bit with her and TK, then change it to Pink Falcor and Armored Angel in Hurricane Touchdown, when a female Armored Angel already exists.
- Patch up the weak points on characters, and give us a reason to like characters who were either weak before, or got even weaker in Adventure 02 (TK, Kari, and Sora: looking at you).
- Don’t just explain away Adventure 02. Either let us know this is a separate reality, or give us a real reason why Taichi got his goggles back and the Adventure 02 team isn’t present at all. Even if you didn’t like Adventure 02, it’s a bit of a gaping plot hole to leave if it’s a direct sequel.
- Keep up the writing we expect out of the series bare minimal. If we get deep, throught-provoking writing that blows Tamers out of the water, GREAT. But it needs to be at least on-par with what we saw in Adventure. Don’t just hold our hands with this one, keep in mind that your target audience is now 16-24, we can handle darker themes and more serious plots without it being spelled out on a whiteboard.
- Make sure the animation and sound quality is up to snuff. I don’t think I can handle this series if we just re-use the terrible CGI Evolution Sequences. The action looks good so far: keep that up.
- Work on your pacing. Since this will be a series of short movies, I’m sure it’ll be easier, but it’s still very easy to fall into the traps of “bunch of talking, no action” and “action without reason”.
So I figure, I’m a bit worn out on building for a bit, so how about a bit of an opinion/review/thoughts post. This has nothing to do with DDA as a whole mind you, so if you don’t find general chatter about the Digimon Anime Franchise as a whole to be interesting, feel free to gloss over this post. But in the end, it is Digimon related, so I felt it fitting enough to post here.
Now, this is entirely an opinion piece, so don't take this all as fact. But feel free to add your own thoughts on these and other series yourself if you want to. Maybe your take on a few of the movies, I avoided them to try to trim the fat on this post.
So, let’s start at the beginning: Adventure. We all know it, we all have fond memories I’m sure of growing up and watching the original series back in the 90′s. But let’s be honest, despite the fact that it’s not only iconic to the franchise, and that we generally all got drawn into Digimon through this series, it’s not without it’s flaws. Now, obviously Adventure had a very tight budget considering the fact that it wasn’t planning to go anywhere past the Devimon arc at first, and even that didn’t have a whole lot to work with for resources. But all in all it pulled through.
Digimon Adventure
Ups
- Classic Series, Nostalgia is Strong With This One
- Both the Dub and Sub have their points, the Sub is better if you want something a bit serious, the Dub if you just want a good laugh, even if it’s at how bad it can be at times. That’s more than I can say for a lot of series, where the Dub has no redeeming factors at all.
- Fairly well-written, there are times when watching this series, you can think, and you can feel for the characters. It’s not particularly strong writing, in fact it’s fairly simple to the point that I wonder if all the deep symbolism found in the series isn’t actually there, but looking at what they had to work with, it’s passable.
- Active and action-packed, the series rarely goes an episode without at least one fight.
- Everything about Ogremon.
- Everything about Etemon.
- Everything about Numemon. Frankly a fair few of the ‘evil’ Digimon had a lot going for them, or at the very least they were enjoyable to watch onscreen for one reason or another.
- The Soundtrack. Butterfly and Brave Heart will always be recognizable to Digimon Fans at this point, and there’s several reasons for that. And in the end, they’re both great songs anyways, Digimon or not.
- Dramatic Tension. The party has a lot of ups and downs, infighting and drama pops up every few episodes. While at times it can get a bit exhausting that ‘oh hey they’re fighting AGAIN’, in the end, in my opinion, it helps keep the series down to earth; no group is perfect, especially when tensions are high.
Downs
- The animation and the voice acting have not aged well, plain and simple. Some of the scenes simply REFUSED to be animated, instead unmoving images were dragged across backgrounds. In addition, the CGI Evolution Sequences aged like milk.
- Everything about Hikari.
- If you enjoy any character that isn’t Yamato or Taichi, the mere fact that no one else achieves the Mega stage is a bit of a letdown, even if the other Digimon are still very combat-capable at the Ultimate level.
- While the level of action is a bonus, it also comes off as a very “monster of the week” type of series. Which, to be fair, it kind of was!
- Pacing. Oftentimes we get a series of 5 to 10 episodes which heavily revolve around everyone getting to the next stage, often one episode after another, then we get treated to a slog of them using the new stages. The series could afford to trim the fat a bit here and there to pick things up, or space out the evolution arcs a bit so it doesn’t feel so crammed into one session.
- If you’re watching the dub, prepare for a lot of translation errors and unfunny jokes, mainly because the dub team just kind of went nuts, and in a few cases because the company that owned the dub wanted to make a quick buck or make it more ‘localized’. It’s still not the worst, but the big bad fight kind of loses it’s edge when the characters are still making groan-inducing jokes, in addition to adding the word “Digi” to just about everything, even things that didn’t REALLY need it.
- The dub opening.
Adventure 02
Now, most people didn’t care for Adventure 02, and I can’t entirely blame them. It’s not quite as good as Adventure, but it’s not without it’s redeeming factors, in fact I rather enjoyed it myself.
Ups
- The Soundtrack. Digimon delivered once again, plain and simple. Admittedly having a semblance of a budget can do that for a series.
- The variety of Evolutions was a plus. Things not being entirely linear was a bit refreshing.
- Daisuke, Ken, Veemon, and Wormmon. The only characters really worth paying attention to in the series for one reason or another. Their writing might not always be stellar, in fact Daisuke and Veemon are about as one-dimensional as they come, but at against the rest of the cast of Adventure 02, they stood out.
- The story. Now, there’s ups and downs here, but when it came to trying to send a message about teamwork and trusting each other, I would argue that Adventure 02 did a better job than Adventure. In addition, the fact that we actively saw characters juggling their real lives and the role of saving the world was a nice change from Adventure’s constant digital slog.
- The nice, wrap-up ending that left some things open, finally finishing (or so we thought) the tale that started with Adventure.
- The identity of the Narrator being revealed.
- Agumon in a suit
Downs
- The characters (bar those listed above). Every single one of them ended up being immensely bland, even characters who were somewhat colorful in Adventure.
- The story. The downside of the story and all these shiny new evolutions, was that in the end it played out less like telling a story at times, and more like trying to sell toys. It even felt like the reason no one could achieve the Ultimate stage was hastily written in at the last moment.
- The animation did not age any better than Adventure did.
- If you watched the dub, enjoy MORE terrible jokes and translation errors!
Tamers
Tamers: the pride and joy of the Digimon franchise for anyone who watched past Adventure 02. And honestly, it was indeed a good series, arguably the BEST series depending on who you talk to. That said, it’s still not flawless.
Ups
- Again, the soundtrack. Tamers was a series who knew how to make the music work in their favor.
- The characters. Thanks to a far smaller cast, everyone got more screentime to develop as characters, over rushing everything at once. They even took time to develop everyone properly.
- Impmon.
- Terriermon.
- The writing. The pacing was excellent for a Digimon series, evolution arcs didn’t feel rushed to me, it went along at it’s own pace and it thrived as such overall. This series could legitimately make you think and make you feel at times, no question.
- The animation. While it wasn’t flawless (in fact many sequences still suffer from “refuse to animate”), the stock sequences for things like evolution and card slashes, still hold up to this day, bar the terrible CGI sequences.
- Everyone who was considered a central character got their Megas. Even if Takato got another stage it was for a mere one episode and thus didn’t make the plot a big game of “Oh when’s
Downs
- Culumon.
- Culumon.
- Did I mention Culumon yet? Because he deserves to be here three times. Minimal.
- While endearing at times, sometimes Guilmon’s childish behavior can get on your nerves.
- The Card Slash mechanic in the end felt like a toy grab, not because it was badly written while it was there, but because it essentially got tossed aside by the end of the series.
- The final fight against the D-Reaper. It’s not that it was a bad enemy, it’s not that the fight was not enjoyable or flashy, or like the rest of the series, thought-provoking, it’s that it took too long, and thus felt like the heroes were in no real rush to defeat it.
Frontier
Everyone’s favorite whipping boy of the franchise (bar Hunters maybe if anyone made it that far along), Frontier had it’s redeeming factors, but in the end, I still feel it was hands-down the weakest point of the series I’ve seen so far.
Ups
- New evolution mechanic that does not make the humans sitting ducks on the battlefield. I actually LIKED Spirit Evolution as a concept.
- As always, the soundtrack. Even if it wasn’t perfect, it had it’s good points.
- The animation (again, stock sequences overall). The franchise seemed to have learned it’s lesson about tossing in CGI creatures. The CG is still present, but it’s not nearly as bad.
- The final fight felt accurately dramatic and urgent, although it did suffer a bit from “get knocked down twice, get up three times” syndrome.
Downs
- None of the characters were really likable or relatable, I often ended up wondering why they all went along with the same hairbrained action without question, or at least voicing concerns.
- It hit that Adventure level of Pacing again, but it somehow felt worse, and I can’t explain exactly why. Maybe because the filler episodes just felt less important, or felt less related to the plot itself.
- Once the Mega stages were achieved, until the final fight more than half the cast became glorified cheerleaders due to the fact that the stage required them to give up their Spirits. If you did manage to enjoy any of the three characters who DIDN’T win the evolution lottery, sorry about that.
- Needless animation sequence that will stick in my head forever: Grottomon Slide Evolving to Gigasmon, doing NOTHING, then Slide Evolving back to Grottomon. He’d already shown his power as Gigasmon and Grottomon, this sequence LITERALLY added nothing other than to spare a few extra seconds of work for the animation team.
Savers
Few people made it this far into the Digimon series, and personally I think if you missed Savers, you missed out overall, it kept me coming back over and over again. Then again, I might just be weird. It also might be because it kept reminding me of Gurren Lagann. Can’t imagine why.
Ups
- Masaru and Agumon.
- Soundtrack. The first opening was lackluster, but the second was perfect, and the evolution theme was excellent.
- Character dynamics. Not necessarily great writing, but more how Masaru just caused trouble for everyone, and got crap for it.
- BanchoLeomon.
- The entire group dynamic of the Royal Knights.
- Animation quality. Some of the sequences seemed to have gone off-model, but finally I got treated to a Digimon series whose action sequences could ACTUALLY look pretty good. In addition, due to the shading and lighting effects, the CGI Evolution sequences don’t look terrible, and often blended almost seamlessly into hand-drawn animation.
- Everyone not only gets a Mega, but a Burst Mode as well.
Downs
- Masaru and Agumon simply dominate the series both story and fight-wise to the point that the rest of the cast feels lackluster. In any other Digimon series, Ikuto and Tohma would have been pretty fair characters, but they just sort of fell by the wayside in this series, barely touched on, if at all. Yoshino was just not a great character at all, plain and simple, to the point that I think the writers picked up on it, when the main group hit Mega, Yoshino and Tohma basically just went ‘oh do what Masaru did’. If you like them, great, but despite that it felt a bit rude to the other characters when.
- The pacing once more felt a bit iffy at times. We got quick sequences of everyone getting Evolutions, then long slogs of filler for upwards of 10 episodes sometimes.
Now, I haven’t even watched Hunters yet and I’m not sure I’ll finish Xros Wars. So I cannot, in good conscience, give a say on series I didn’t finish.
Now, as a closing statement I simply want to say what I want to see from Tri.
- Give everyone a Mega. Just let us have this. Also fix up Kari’s Mega from Magnadramon to Ophanimon. It really made no sense to push the Dual Angels bit with her and TK, then change it to Pink Falcor and Armored Angel in Hurricane Touchdown, when a female Armored Angel already exists.
- Patch up the weak points on characters, and give us a reason to like characters who were either weak before, or got even weaker in Adventure 02 (TK, Kari, and Sora: looking at you).
- Don’t just explain away Adventure 02. Either let us know this is a separate reality, or give us a real reason why Taichi got his goggles back and the Adventure 02 team isn’t present at all. Even if you didn’t like Adventure 02, it’s a bit of a gaping plot hole to leave if it’s a direct sequel.
- Keep up the writing we expect out of the series bare minimal. If we get deep, throught-provoking writing that blows Tamers out of the water, GREAT. But it needs to be at least on-par with what we saw in Adventure. Don’t just hold our hands with this one, keep in mind that your target audience is now 16-24, we can handle darker themes and more serious plots without it being spelled out on a whiteboard.
- Make sure the animation and sound quality is up to snuff. I don’t think I can handle this series if we just re-use the terrible CGI Evolution Sequences. The action looks good so far: keep that up.
- Work on your pacing. Since this will be a series of short movies, I’m sure it’ll be easier, but it’s still very easy to fall into the traps of “bunch of talking, no action” and “action without reason”.