Digimon – Not just a Pokemon ripoff.

The original team. Google searched for it. There are a disturbing amount of shounen ai digimon couples....oh the fanart... I've got some to include later though 😀

Now when I say this, I really mean it. Though I love Pokemon the most, the Digimon(short for Digital Monster, if you didn’t know) franchise isn’t all bad. Sure the names of the Digimon themselves are ropey(cherrymon, garbagemon….you get the jist), and it did get released unfortunately after Pokemon, which was suspicious, but there are many-many plus points about it. The games for instance, and its tamagotchi-roots.

And! The movie, or the first few tv short movies that were cut together for one movie in the west…. lol…. had good animation. The first one especially, I love it. I loved the style for the first few movies, and I got so used to the voice actors, I like them, even now, and I’m happy when I hear them again. (Like Izzy, Izzy’s voice actor was in the dub of Eternal Sonata, as Beat, Allegretto’s little buddy.) But for those who don’t like dubs so much, I’ve included the subbed, full, uncut version of the first movie, which truthfully, I haven’t seen yet lol. I’ve seen the cut down version in the western release lol.

And the first part of the english dubbed movie, just cause I love it, I’ve got it on as I type lol, on dvd of course, can’t type and youtube, too hard lol.

(Absolutely LOATH the digirap btw, in case you were wondering…. I did not loath the pokemon raps though lol… I had the album when I was younger, I learnt the lyrics… to pretty much all the songs lol.) I do like the real tv opening though, the original.

I did like the songs from the series… I need to find the soundtrack… the english movie soundtrack was good too, decent songs, Less than Jake is on it even! And lots more pop stuff. Anyways, again, for the art style, I like it, its better than Pokemon’s, but not as good as Medabots.  I like its kind of rough lines, the clothes don’t have much detail on them, but they flow nicely,and the colours are good, scenery is nice too. Obviously the movies look better than the TV series, but still alright, better than Pokemon at any rate lol. And, did you know, there wasn’t meant to be TV series, only a short movie ‘Digimon Adventure’, but after the storyboards for the short movie(which I included above)were finished, a TV series was commisioned(info sourced from guess where). EDIT: I also forgot to mention…. Digimon had a better through story. Pokemon was too…too…formulaic. Digimon was also guilty of this, it had a decent through plot.

Onto more pressing matters than the tv series or movies. The origins of Digimon itself! In 1997 a Tamagotchi was released. One orientated towards boys. The Digmon Virtual Pet. Now since the original Tamagotchi was released in 1996, it could be said it was still trying to copy Pokemon. BUT the Tamagotchi franchise is WAY different. Much girlier. Tis why the Digimon one was introduced. Only 2 years after its release did it get its anime counterpart.

The Digimon virtual pet evolved like Pokemon, though it evolved from an egg, and had way more evolutionary steps. Egg > Baby > In training > Rookie > Champion > Ultimate > Mega, theres also Armor Digivolve and Hybrid Digivolve. As I said, way more evolutionary steps. Unlike Pokemon though, evolution isn’t perminant, Digimon, depending on the series or game, change back into eggs. When they do this all depends on how well you trained them, in the games thats how at any rate. In the tv series they often de-digivolve to in training form after exerting themselves in battle. Thats another integral difference to the Pokemon franchise, Digimon are not there to battle, unlike Pokemon, which have tournaments set up. Only in games are they more for battle. Like in Digimon Championship, where its training style is strangely reminicsent of Monster Rancher, in that days go by fast, tournaments and battles come around often, and how you train them impacts on the digivolution.

Pic of the original Digimon Tamagotchi's. Click for source.

Another thing! Digivice’s! Just one more way of getting kids to spend their money, but a damn cool way of doing it. The Digimon Tamagotchi basically became the Digivice, or at least the later Digimon Tamagotchi’s looked like the Digivice’s in the TV series’s. I only have the 3rd season digivice, from Digimon Tamers. (FYI, The only seasons worth watching are seasons 1, 2 and 3. Adventures, Adventures 2 and Tamers. All had a darker story than any Pokemon I’ve seen, which is a nice change, but a darker story is the reason Monster Rancher got cancelled on BBC2…) I got it off ebay a while back, just to have the artifact, not to actually have the tamagotchi, I’ve got a tamagotchi aswell. Pretty one. I haven’t had it on for a while now… I’m tempted to unpause it now… but I just remember how much more complicated the later tamagotchi models are, jobs and parents and breeding etc… it’s just too much faff…. I liked my Nanopuppy…(thats what I had when the tamagotchi craze came to the UK when I was about 6-7. I didn’t actually own a real tamagotchi till…. less than 2 years ago lol. I want to get a new Nanopuppy… they circulate on ebay everynow and then… I missed my chance recently, some were selling in Canada pretty cheaply. I want an orange one specifically… and they had it… new….boxed….and I missed it… damn my distraction!!!) Anyway…. enough of tamagotchi’s lol. Back to Digimon, though essentially… that is how they started lol.

Izzy and Tai, as I know them from the dub lol.

The concept of Digimon themselves is actually more submersive than Pokemon. Digimon at least don’t preach reality, they live essentially in a Digital world. (Later on this becomes less so lol) Pokemon just start out being real. Digimon actually have more chance of ever being real. Since they start out digital lol. Technology just has to get to a point where we can enter a virtual reality, then Digimon could be a reality. Pokemon cut themself off from this possiblity by setting it in a alternate world, strange world in Pokemon…. they keep finding new places with new Pokemon… if they had the technology to store creatures in palm-size balls, they would have the techology for travel, and would have discovered the other places WAY sooner. Professor Oak must have been a pretty crappy professor not to look outside of Kanto… lol. As kids we overlooked this though, we just went ‘Cool! Own very own monsters!!’ And got sucked in. I remember saying, the week before Pokemon aired on terrestrial tv, that I bet I wouldn’t like it. HAH. How wrong was I… So wrong that I’ve wasted days playing the games, probably £100’s of pounds if not more on the cards… and memory I could have used to useful things memorising names… When I was younger I could chant off the 1st 151, I think I just about got to 252, but after that it got too much lol.

Comes from Deviantart... will find link soon.... Renamon and her tamer... Rika!! Thanks to 'Justnobody' lol

Sadly quite a few of the Digimon designs played towards Furry-fans tastes…. poor Renamon…. the things I stumble upon via google image search…. :shudder: Even one where she….was a he….very disturbing…. Thats another thing…. female and male digimon… it seemed like there were more a one-gender kinda monster. I don’t remember seeing any Agumon girls lol. Same for male Gatomon lol. Some were harder to dissern which were which, like Patamon, though as he evolved it was easy to tell lol.

As for the games. Digimon World for the Playstation was brilliant!! At the beginning you get sucked into the digital world via your Digimon Virtual Pet, and you’re told by Jijimon(which looks a bit like Gen’ai) to rebuild the town, you start with a baby, and have to train and care for it, feeding and whatnot. Just like the tamagotchi, only on your Playstation, in 3D. The gameplay was fun as hell, battles were good, and simple. (Though I can’t remember exactly how they go…) There are mini games too, fishing and stuff. Fishing should be a staple of any RPG or Sim lol. The next Digimon game I played was Digimon World 2003(all these kind of Digimon games have world in the title.), I think we missed one in the UK… Digimon World 2003 was awesome too, different kind of awesome. After that was Rumble Arena, a vs style PS1 game, and the card games, which I didn’t play because the Pokemon Card game on GB was more than enough fun(seriously, it was addictive!). (There are quite a few games in between… but I didn’t play them… links can be found on the wiki page.) Then came the DS games, Digimon World DS(imaginative titles I know…), Digimon World Dusk and Dawn, and now, Digimon World Championship.

In the previous DS titles you go out with a team of Digimon, like Pokemon games, and complete quests, tasks etc, capturing new Digimon on the way. Championship is so different, but soooo good. You start out with one digimon, you start training, feeding, cleaning up poop, sending it into battle(which are auto-fight, you train them, then sit back and watch them fight, the lazy-mans digimon game lol, but it works well, and its quicker.) leveling up your tamer level, hunting new digimon, getting new items, new training sections, for different stats, like wisdom, speed etc. The time of the game goes really quick, the clock starts at 7am and finishes at 11pm. It sounds like its long, but goes so quick when your busy switching your digimon from pen to pen, getting they’re stats up, healing them when you work them too hard and making sure they’re all doing what they’re meant to lol. I have 6 at the moment, keeping an eye on all of them is hard work lol. And to make sure they regenerate instead of dying, they have to have been in at least 10 battles, otherwise they disappear instead of turning into an egg. That works much like the Chao Garden in Sonic Adventure 2 Battle.(LOVE that, don’t love the rest of the game lol)

It's much harder to find pics of the girls from Digimon that it is to find the guys from Digimon lol.

More fanart from deviantart, need to find the pages… not now… too late… I need to go to bed…. I might do another post just about the Digimon World Championship game, because it is so awesome, I just wish I had more time to play it. Of course I could always sacrifice internet time, but I really don’t see that happening any time soon lol. Unless I get put back to dial-up speed in some freak accident lol. So anyways, hope this has given someone an insight into Digimon lol. Most people who would stumble across this would be searching for digimon stuff… so I assume they’ll know abit lol. Regulars might not know loads about Digimon though lol. I just hope I get someone addictive to the games lol. I mean, don’t get me wrong, Pokemon ftw, but theres just something about the original Digimon game, and the latest one. And Monster Rancher too… fan-tibbly-tastic.

Tags: agumon, chao, dawn, digimon, digimon championship, digimon ds, digimon tamargotchi, digimon virtual pet, digimon world ds, digimon world dusk, digital monsters, ds, Games, gatomon, nintendo ds, patamon, patomon, playstation, pokemon, tamagotchi, v-pet, virtual pet