Digimon Adventure Reboot Season Review | Billiam

0:00 yeah this is billiam so the digimon adventure reboot just ended digimon adventure coal and digivice is the actual title of the show i think people have been calling it digimon adventure sci it wasn't until the end of the show that i realized the symbol is actually supposed to be omnimod so that's neat when the digimon reboot was announced i was a little surprised after a sequel series which received mixed reception and a movie which received generally positive reception i figured digimon adventure as we knew it was over but this announcement just sort of happened low-key and now the show is over and they're already moving on to the next project a week later digimon ghost game when the show first aired it showed to be really promising with its production value and kick-ass music but immediately it also made decisions that upset fans like utilizing the plot to the show's

0:45 sequel movie our war game within the first few episodes which involves the kids saving tokyo from a nuclear bomb being launched by a digimon inside of the internet yeah real high stakes stuff for the first episode episode 2 even shows us omnimod who didn't even debut in the original anime but instead in the sequel movie they were getting way ahead of themselves way too quickly the first three episodes finish up this opening arc so when the show went on hiatus for a few months afterwards at the start of the pandemic all digimon fans were left with was this really bold decision they made within the first few episodes when i first saw the reboot announcement i really just wanted to have a digimon show i could watch with my friends so despite the bold decisions that turned me off as a digimon fan i tried not to

1:30 compare it too much to the original show and just enjoy it with my friends who had never seen digimon we started a discussion podcast something i've never done before and it was really fun to watch with them when the show came back it was alright but there wasn't much story outside of the group getting attacked by a strong digimon and then evolving to beat it it was very much monster of the week and with so much focus on battle it made tai chi seem very much like a shonen protagonist which i've never really viewed him as but there were some great and i mean great episodes then around halfway through the show its tone completely shifts into something more relaxed and fun yet still really cool and awesome at times well i think the overarching growth the original show puts its kids through is why that show is great i think the digimon adventure reboot

2:16 prioritized making some great individual episodes some of my favorite in the entire series so to celebrate this show ending i want to talk about why i think it failed to build an exciting overarching story despite having a really intriguing setup and premise and then talk about why i think the individual episodes make the show worth checking out using the internet without a vpn in 2020 is like going deep sea submarining without an emergency hammer to fight off the giant squid trying to steal your data you just wouldn't think of it so in honor of the legions of giant hacker squids conquered at the bottom of the ocean let's give a big thanks to expressvpn for sponsoring this video a vpn is a virtual private network which creates a secure tunnel the submarine type shape between your device

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3:49 i just hit connect in the app and oh my god i'm connected to a secure server so find out how you can get three months free by clicking the link in the description box below expressvpn.com slash billiam see ya the overarching plot of the show borrows a lot from digimon frontier the original cast of digimon adventure sons takuru and hikari have all been brought to the digital world and are introduced to their partner digimon they receive a mission at the ruins of an ancient temple from someone who is a holy digimon they must unite all the chosen children and stop an ancient evil which once almost destroyed the digital world by finding the new holy digimon however at the same time in the human world there's all these power outages and errors happening especially in tokyo these events in the human world prove to be connected to the events in the

4:35 digital world in the first three episodes the argemon have invaded the network and now all the trains in tokyo have gone haywire so taichi who has been transported to the network between the human world and the digital world must defeat the quickly evolving argument with his new pal agumon to save the trains from crashing similar disasters happen periodically throughout the show being connected to various bad guys they have to be instead of introducing us to the group all at once we basically meet one kid at a time getting an opportunity to be introduced to them their personality gimmicks and their digimon all at once including getting to see each one evolve and show off their cool powers episode 8 introduces everyone else to yamado and it's a wonderful episode rounding out the group to six leaves the show in a really nice place however from there the show got really

5:22 messy separating the newly formed group almost instantly and giving us the ultimate evolutions of the digimon immediately making the show feel obnoxiously formulaic for nearly 12 episodes straight right at the beginning bad digimon new evolution bad digimon be instantly there's very little development to the group rapport in the series outside the characters all being nice and supportive of each other they choose to make the moments where all the kids come together big avengers style team-ups really only being reserved for moments to make them all look really cool together while the events in the real world often motivate the mission in the digital world the overarching plot seems to be disconnected from the individual plots outside of just reminding us that one world affects the other they try initially to do the same narnia style time difference between

6:08 worlds the original show had with time moving slower in the digital world than in the human world but the device of the digital world affecting the real world makes it very difficult to understand the flow of time between the two worlds and how they're different or how long they've been gone for but when they're responding to things that only take minutes in the real world it does give them enough time to respond to it in the digital world because things are slower but then just to confuse everything at one point kosherow creates a software to solve the time difference so they can keep up with real world events on his ipad the digital world itself is one of the less interesting depictions of it it feels like new super mario bros just generic set pieces that could be used in any adventure show poison lakes snow areas desert river there are pixelated effects in the background which i like very much but it's missing the weird set

6:54 pieces that made the original show's digital world so charming like the disconnected phone booths on the beach the factories that made nothing useful or random refrigerators full of eggs next to the hot spring the fact that these are naturally occurring things in the world made it feel fun and sporadic and while later episodes show a lot of scenes of the kids eating and finding food in the new show it's never really a challenge with the digimon not really getting tired or hungry the only real survival concern in this world is avoiding getting eaten by digimon which that's a new thing yes many of the digimon in 2020 are directly competing and trying to consume one another to gain power which is an overarching theme throughout the show that ties many of the episodic stories together it's then revealed by devimon that the digital anomalies in the real world are the bad

7:40 guys consuming power from the real world yummy while there are some wonderful moments in the first half of the show it was hard to really enjoy it because it felt like they were putting way too much emphasis on tai chi like way too much there are huge stretches of episodes where the side characters either only get one or two shots and during the last stretch of episodes in the devi monarch yamado and tai chi and takaru who was kidnapped by deviamon are left in the digital world while sora koshiro joe and mimi are sent to the real world without their digimon it's not an interesting real world arc as far as digimon goes per se but it gives them this return of the jedi style dual objective thing to do to take down the newly evolved devimon so that's kind of neat deviant is draining power from the real world to

8:26 evolve this sends a bunch of trading ships and military ships in this sea to almost crash into one another which can cause an international crisis so if things go wrong here they're afraid war could break out between iran and the united states so the kids have to communicate with their digimon in the network to take down the devimon's minions that are enabling his power up and causing this disaster it's clever it's interesting the only problem is they stretch it out over three episodes but its execution only leaves enough content for one episode by the time it resolves you almost forget its purpose or what they're doing and that objective inside the network is just part of the time they spend separated from the others which sidelines them for six episodes only for them to get back to the digital world and sidelined like for another seven first 33 episodes straight are a non-stop rush of fights and bad

9:12 digimon whenever i hear the bad digimon music i want to scream and it's not like the plot progresses quickly it's just always sprinting on a treadmill however i feel like maybe now that the show is over the first half will watch better in a binging setting so when i say these progressed slowly know that i was spending weeks in between watching these episodes waiting for them to come out however it's right at the beginning of the millennium monarch when they reached the new continent that suddenly there was a change in the show like a major creative shift in the show's tone especially after it returned from the holiday hiatus after episode 30 which prematurely gave us the debut of war greymon still cool though the all-terrain vehicle digimon commandomon joins the team and hikari is brought to the digital world when the side

9:58 characters return and with a major exposition drop given by lapman we learn about the ancient war and how millennium on a weapon used by the darkness is trying to resurrect itself and how six warrior digimon were led by two holy digimon to defeat it long ago eventually hikiri meets the other holy digimon tailman and they head off to the place where millennium on hopes to resurrect itself millennium on sends out black lightning around the continent powering up digimon who try to stop the kids and who try to store the energy for millennium on in these crystals where there still are big bad digimon to defeat at this point in the show the show finally becomes about the other ensemble characters as well with character work which really should have happened much earlier in the show

10:43 finally happening but still despite this the characters rarely if ever disagreed with each other meaning that while they had their own personal journeys to go on their relationships were really based on them only being supportive friends to one another and not much else so there is character development per se but there's a shallower feeling to it because there's not much relationship development and although there's still some episodes that look better than others with less action even the episodes that aren't firing on all cylinders in terms of their animation improved tremendously in quality every week it just became new fun adventures with these characters i liked in terms of story flow i have a lot of the same problems with digimon adventure 2020 that i had with digimon frontier the story motivation for the characters

11:29 really is just that they're walking or going somewhere with things happening along the journey but adventure 2020 is 17 episodes longer than frontier so it's even worse the devi monarch in the original show wraps itself up in 13 episodes which gives momentum to the series but it's 24 episodes here and a lot of stuff happens in between the heroes they're unaware of what the villains are doing they just want to go beat the [ __ ] out of them in the original show devymon used the black gears to make good digimon evil something the kids eventually caught on to aiming to destroy the gears rather than hurt the digimon in this show he has sound birdmon which can hypnotize and control other digimon but the kids don't really figure this out within the devi mon arc and if i remember correctly

12:15 they end up killing some digimon that are just being controlled by deviamon even the edaman arc in the original show threads its story into the individual episodes the kids are looking for the crests but the episodes are all connected because they all have to do it while hiding from edemon it makes him an intimidating villain despite being so silly and despite the spectacle to many of the major villains in digimon adventure 2020 edaman's still a more memorable villain however the original series different arcs outside of the character growth never really felt connected with one another but like in frontier the villains in 2020 are very interconnected with each other making the overarching story feel like one big picture and i think when it's all laid out and explained it feels like a very smart well thought out season it's just those

13:02 threads between each episode are so weak so you're constantly forgetting about what that story is in a lot of ways the original show basically has an episodic structure but these narrative threads help make each individual episode's story in the fights they have with new digimon each episode which really are just random monsters of the week feel connected they even do it at times minotaur mon fights against leomond they know each other and are ideologically opposed minotaurmon believes in devimon's cause but then we never really get another digimon that has been ideologically persuaded by the bad guys i was expecting this to be a big theme i mean why wouldn't digimon prefer to take energy from the human world rather than [ __ ] eat each other it's frustrating because so frequently this show has brilliant ideas that it's almost

13:48 embarrassed to tell you about and millennium on evolves from chimeramon who was created by scanning all the digimon we've seen and the villains go through the rigamarole of having to scan all the digimon and create chimeramon before evolving into millennium on but except for a line about sephiroth scanning these digimon and watching this weird version of chimeramon mutate into millennium mon they don't explain that process to you so that you can't appreciate it millennium on has the weidman act as minions but they remain at the site of his fated resurrection so why not throw the vademon into these episodes as instigators after building the vademon up for like 13 14 episodes what do they do they stand absolutely still at the altar of millennium on and

14:35 they shoot star wars lasers at the kids as they try to prevent his resurrection early on the show seems to establish a lot of things that end up feeling like loose ends but it does come together to create one holistic collage contributing to the same caricature of the digital world i think two great examples of how this show just disappoints you only to reward you for having to trust it for an obnoxiously long time is ogremon who starts building a rivalry early on with tai chi and greymon only to be prematurely killed by metal tyranimon the first major ultimate digimon in the show it's disappointing to see this rivalry end so early on but then later tai chi returns to the continent with agumon and they run into rebellimon the evolved form of ogremon who recognizes tai chi and agumon but they don't

15:21 recognize him it creates this nice little bow tie for the character and it's a great episode but it's only after they convinced us they abandoned this plotline that we get it so i can imagine not a lot of people got that far devi mon 2 ends up being a really cool character way after the end of the devi monarch continuing to explore his relationship to angemon and then even coming in toward the end of the show in an interesting way similar to the way the villains come in in frontier towards the end of the show but once again they convince you the plot had been concluded disappointingly before they pick it up again all those vignettes with the side characters i mentioned early on also become really fun recurring side plots with their own side characters that play into each of the kids development in a fun way but not before they totally convince you that they're not going

16:07 anywhere and the show does set up or seems to set up a lot of things that don't pay off like alluding to sora and koshiro's family lives when they're in the real world only not to follow up on it it might surprise you there's a lack of a major human world arc i can't help but think argomon who serves under the show's final villain was supposed to overgrow tokyo like in the digimon savers movie like did they cut out a human world arc here the way the show ends makes it feel like they avoided going into the human world intentionally like they're going to do more within this continuity but it's disappointing not to have it in this anime in this season but even with the characters coming from the original adventure and the story borrowing a lot from frontier there are characters and elements from all sorts of digimon media it feels like

16:54 they wanted to create a digital world that's inspired by all the others that came before it complete with the racing track it would surprise you that the digimon are the star of digimon much more wild and savage than ever before they're constantly trying to eat the kids and their digimon the real villain of the show is the intense competition between them and the violent nature of the world itself with many of the episodes in the later half of the show being about the kids helping digimon who have been displaced from their homes are terrorized by a stronger digimon in the area although there are still feral big digimon there's also a lot of grey characters introduced at this time too who are only bad because they needed to be strong to survive in this harsh world but as we get to the end of the show these characters who we've met throughout the course of the show become recurring characters making many of the

17:41 individual digimon memorable in their own right and the digimon are at their all-time high in terms of how cool they are don't get me wrong this show has some of the clunkiest looking frames digimon has ever had but every anime i've been watching this season has suffered a bit in terms of quality because of the pandemic so let's highlight some of what's great about it they really pay attention to the digimon's physicality these are not humanoid fighters these are weird-looking dinosaurs and creatures and nothing accents this better than metal greymon's debut typically digimon goes for recycled animation attacks and this show does it too with rpg style projectile attack animations but metal greymon and his debut just goes right in and bites metal tyranimon all the digimon sizes and shapes are so

18:26 different cedrum cedramon slithers like a snake togamon which has always been a digimon i've used as an example of a stupid [ __ ] digimon ends up being one of the coolest characters in the whole show an energetic boxer getting real close into the enemy and with rebellimon they even managed to make some of the more edgy try-hard stupid-looking digimon look really cool all by putting a lot of emphasis on their physicality like how would this unicycle motorcycle goblin monster actually move his chainsaw arm stops working in the middle of the fight and he has to keep hitting it till it starts working again it's awesome however once again this is not always the case this this show has some of the absolute best and worst of metal greymon but i have never liked the digimon as creatures more than this show

19:12 makes me like them there's so many little highlight moments that are just that's so cool that digimon did that like there's one point where angelmon gets hurt real bad and she starts walking for the first time and puts her fists up and suddenly this once powerful elegant digimon looks real fragile and humanoid the show even gives us a bunch of surprise evolutions that we haven't seen these kids achieve before however they do manage to spoil almost every single evolution in the preview for the next show and with the episode titles and then episode 45 they they caught on to kids not watching the episode previews and not wanting to spoil themselves so they spoil it in the preamble of the show they're like hey matt's about to get metal guru ramon stay tuned well i don't think this version of the adventure cast is

19:57 developed as interestingly as their original counterparts they do a good job of creating caricatures and giving the kids their own things to do to make these interesting versions mimi is always promoting workers rights and organizing digimon in the companies something which the other kids and even the digimon start to catch on to as well [Music] i've always loved these characters but now there's been interesting and different qualities brought out in them in this reboot that i also love about them that is exclusive to this reboot i have a video discussion series where i go through this show episode by episode the baby flame podcast it's not done yet uh but if you want to hear me and my friends reactions to any moments in

20:43 particular you can just easily find whatever episode you want to and go listen to it but here i want to highlight some of my favorite episodes so let me guide you through this show here's what i consider to be an essential episodes list so if you've seen digimon and didn't want to sit through all 67 episodes of the new digimon adventure here's what i got for you episode eight the children attack the fortress this is when yamado meets the group yamado has himself become a character trope in digimon and this episode is just such a refreshing way to tackle this kind of character in an introductory setting i really appreciated it episode 12 lilymon blooms this episode features mimi and palmon befriending a guardramon while being hunted by andromon it just ends up being such a beautiful episode episode 24 final stage done devimon watch this one for the all-out kaiju action super high

21:30 quality animation that i think will become one of the many things this show is remembered for episode 32 soaring hope this is the first episode which really explores takaru as a character outside of yamado it's a cool chase episode with commandomon running from these wolves and a giant cerberus man episode 37 mimi chon wars it was quickly evident that mimi was a favorite of the writing staff this episode sees mimi organizing digimon workers to revolt against the evil gagmaman it has some callbacks to an earlier episode that i think you can appreciate if you've seen it but it is just a wonderful episode episode 38 the blazing blue friendship the viral episode kids growing up today will remember this episode forever this is going to be like a remember how [ __ ] up that was kind of thing gobuman

22:17 is crucified and yamado has to save him from mephistomon who's sacrificing digimon for millennium mon joe's in this one too and the aid he provides creates a great silly balance to such an intense episode it's such an absurd thing oh three in a row episode 39 giagamon potato hell joe bonds with a digimon over their mutual love of french fries but the digimon gets upset because they're gonna discontinue french fries because he's the only digimon with hands thus he's the only one who can grab them and eat them throws a temper tantrum episode 43 clash the king of digimon edaman and volkanman i think they're both big tough guys who claim to be the king of the digimon but their music makes all the other digimon around them act weird it's

23:04 like a rap first punk rock music battle it's real fun episode 44 hickory in the moving forest the kids accompany the giant legendary pedal dramon across the wasteland where it will inevitably face off against its rival it's a bit of an environmental episode right here episode 46 sword of hope kosher otaku yamado and taichi are taken off into the inner world of sephirithmon and must face off against their past enemies episode 50 the end the holy battle another episode to watch just for the spectacle alone giant kaiju monsters it's awesome episode 54 the vagrant war demon rebellimon just a good one by the end of the show i had a lot of appreciation for what this version of digimon was in terms of its story i just wish it had the time to really explore these characters as human

23:49 beings a bit more because i just wanted the emotional weight of the original adventure to be paired with this story in the digital world it's so close to being really good the final fight with omnimod is so incredibly well animated but without that conflict between matt and tai which develops into a friendship it just doesn't have that same weight it's still a spectacular ending an ending that i think is really only worth watching if you do sit down and watch the whole show but i might be wrong you might just get a kick out of the fight and the ending does leave the world open for more in terms of what i would want to see from digimon in the future i think it would be interesting to see digimon expand its story within the same continuity for a while introducing new characters and having new stories but having the ones we know still exist the

24:37 fact that there's a time difference between the digital world and the human world means you can return to it and have it be a completely different place and while i don't need these characters to be the focus anymore it would be cool to know that the kids growing up watching digimon today are also going to watch them grow up like we got to do watching the original show i'm not sure what the plan with the new show digimon ghost game is i'm going to watch it i enjoyed adventure 2020 enough to you know give another show a try right now but i'll probably wait until it's over to make content on it overall i didn't love the digimon adventure reboot but it was still something i enjoyed watching every week it was really fun and it had some of my favorite episodes of digimon ever and the community aspect of it was really exciting we were watching a new digimon show every week and i was excited to spend more time with these

25:24 characters if you just want more from the characters uh yeah check it out so here's hoping digimon ghost game is good uh so until then i'm tired i'm stressed i will get sleep soon [Music] so [Music] you