LogFAQs > #924107887

Sora DOESN'T KNOW HOW TO LOVE so she can't get her crest of love to work (Sora crest offscreen get btw) and is emo. It'll be interesting to unpack why she feels that way and figure out how we'll get pa-MYOTISMON IS HERE HE HURT BIRDRAMON GARUDAMON SMASH YAY. Come to think of it, how is Garudamon able to do that well against Myotismon but he's such a struggle for the whole team later?

There's an eighth kid Myotismon is going to earth to find them we should find them first! His goons buy him enough time to get his troops through the door and lock it behind us. We regroup with Gennai for an exposition dump, and for once I feel like we are actually given time to catch our breath. Gennai explains how he has some cards that will re-open the portal, but we have to be careful to figure out the puzzle correctly with them. Also the Digiworld is a computer program. Izzy gets enough info to narrow the puzzle down to a 50-50 shot, and Tai guesses correctly. Back to the real world!

hai guyz we all grew up in the same orphanage apartment complex, where there was a "terrorist attack." Garudamon d. Mammothmon (5:31, Wing Blade). The explosion triggers Tai to remember that the "terrorist attack" was from Greymon fighting Parrotmon. Probably Kid #8 is somebody else who was watching that night, like the rest of us. On a SUPER UNRELATED note, Tai and Kari's cat is playing with a Digivice and it falls onto a truck. Kari remembers the fight but doesn't recognize Tai's Digivice. Izzy finds the signal from the extra Digivice, but so does Raremon. Kabuterimon and Izzy d. Raremon and DemiDevimon (8:27, countout). Wizardmon swipes the digivice though.

My rating: 7/10
The pacing is getting worse I feel like. There was a lot of good character stuff that we missed out on, even if it was kinda fillery. Tone has definitely gotten more serious as things escalate, which means less dub humor but also less cute art. In the Nostalgia Critic review of Last Airbender, there's a line where he calls it (IIRC) "Chessboard storytelling." You have this cool world and memorable characters and epic plot, and what you've done with it feels like a dry recap. Knight to Queen's 7. I'm not doing it justice, but that's kinda what this reminds me of. We just barely have enough time to figure out what is going on and how, but we have zero time for why. We get a bare minimum of character development or motivation or emotion, and that was always a hidden strength of Digimon. I'm a lot more tolerant of that kinda fault than most people are- a lot of my own attempts at storytelling focus more on the mechanics of the plot than fleshing out details of the characters and setting, but....geeze. Digimon (at least this season) has cool creatures, a crazy isekai setting before that was cool, and more depth and pathos and character development than you'd expect from a kids' show. None of that is given any time to happen here- we've got a long list of plot points to check off and only so many pages to do it. And Digimon (especially up to this point) is not a show that can be boiled down like that well. If there aren't character arcs leading to new Digivolutions at key points, mechanically it becomes "oh it's that guy's turn to hit Ultimate."

It's still a 7 because it's still Digimon, but it's just kinda missing its soul, and for me just riding off the association. I care about all of this because the anime made me care. I'd be bored if this was my only exposure to the story. There is no love, and as any of the Umineko topics will tell you, without love it can't be seen.
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Tone yo' flab