Bandai Namco

Been thinking about digimon because of the pokemon masters lore thing again. Muddy memories of merchandise driven shows flowing back in my mind
Bakugan was pretty good for season 1 with their whole “aliens and humans getting along” and the whole like secret thing being unveiled by a main character’s mother when her son got sent to hell but I don’t recall later seasons as well, there were aliens. They put less emphasis on the core 6, it was mostly the boys. Completely sucked, Alice was too good for that show.
Beyblade was unhinged especially the metal versions because they had like super beyblade spirits and evil dragons and like dragon satan spun left and the evil villain sounded like an internet troll you’d find in a lobby attacking Ginka and friends and then there was like a meteorite that had super duper Satan but the power of friendship defeated him

Digimon is absolutely bonkers. Digimon and pokemon are like apples and cantaloupes the only thing they have in common is the fact that they have “Mon” in their name Digimon lore is fascinating because you think about how in pokemon you have to actually struggle to like get a Mon outside of the standard first starter/partner but in adventure 1 and 2 they are basically coded to bond to a chosen child and it’s never questioned why these random aliens are willing to die for these random aliens they just met They’re lines of code. Tamers especially bluntly bonks this with how different the gogglehead dynamic is with his deviantart OC Digimon coming to life but it’s been years since I watched tamers and the most i remember is how Juri nearly caused the apocalypse because Leomon died because that Mon has a quota to fulfill

A lot of adventure to 02 story leaving people like “what the heck was any of that supposed to mean” did not help with the fact that the directors of 02 were fighting over what they wanted the show’s direction to be AND a lot of lore for 02 was tied to an untranslated wonder swan game and then tri has other stuff and like I’m still here like “what is homeostasis, what is the dark ocean, does any of that actually matter” and the answer is “maybe?” Ryo is like the most confusing guy because like he hops canon and milleniumon is a living time paradox and like none of this is in English whatsoever you either have to play the game yourself or hope a YouTuber has the entire thing right and like the story of the hero tied to the villain not by choice but by like fate and it’s like “damn that’s a good story premise” only for the execution to be like a roulette of “how does this work.” Remembers Ryo shows up in tamers Actually it was multiple wonderswan games You think a Ryo OVA would probably fix this, but it seems like all the new movies going forward are more about “adults and Digimon have a totally different dynamic compared to children and Digimon where the point is they might need to separate and we will have multiple movies for this premise”

I kinda miss the older designs, Tri mostly just had them in school uniforms and like if you put the art style of adventure next to tri you’d be like “huh?” They made a new girl and her Digimon was like all the dead Digimon but she was a catgirl and I was like “yeah that checks out gatomon/tailmon is pretty popular” but like I could not tell you anything else about Digimon because I watched majority of my Digimon stuff when I was like 12. Maybe 13. I don’t know. One of the guys punched a Digimon, I think. Adventure got a reboot but they did not extend the same favor to 02.
Whipping out old reliable adventure nostalgia in the form of just taichi and maybe Matt but if you like any season past adventure Toei says to go live in a ditch As much as I lambast Pokemon for being overly nostalgia heavy I always think "it could be worse, you could watch the wonderment of the franchise be drained away and all the characters mostly just wear school uniforms in a movie sequel that actively hates the sequel cast and implies they lost offscreen and make some movie plots following have the same plot of grow up and leave your Digimon forever, but they'll come back for the adventure 2 epilogue anyways so whatever".
At least Meiko was cute. A lot of people sometimes wanted to be digimon characters and would always want to be like, I'd be tai, or kari, or Matt... As for me, people assumed as a younger sibling I'd want to be Kari or TK. No I wouldn't want to be Kari because every time an episode or movie focuses on Kari she's facing perpetual horrors.

I relate to Izzy because he was in the OG on his computers and I said he is so me. I don’t even know what happened with ghost game, apparently none of the internal companies were talking to each other so the animation didn’t have like a major evolution show up whatsoever.