"Wanna be the biggest dreamer..."
So, a few nights ago, I finally finished Digimon Tamers, and now that I'm 3 series through my watch through them, I'm honestly getting digi-ed out. Still, only 1.5 more series to go. Anyways. Tamers is, however, the last of my nostalgic digimon series, since after that they sort of stopped showing anime for Saturday morning cartoons, and that subsequently led to not following the franchise since those were the days without the internet as we know it. Frontier did come a little bit later, but there were complications with that show and my watching it that we'll get to in a later review. Again, dub names are used in this review for consistency's sake, since I watched the dub.
Digimon Tamers is the third installment of the Digimon franchise. It takes place in an alternate universe that is separate from the Adventure/02 verse. In this universe, Digimon exists like it does in our universe, as a TV show, card game, money-making venture. If you watch the dub, like I did, the Digimon that the characters watch is actually Adventure/02, but this isn't carry over from original Japanese. It starts with the main character, Takato, creating his digimon, Guilmon, who becomes real and then they go on adventures and save the world, as per usual. Most of these adventures take place in the real world, as opposed to the digital one however.
After this rewatch, I can probably say with some certainty that Tamers is probably my favorite Digimon season. I always liked the "real world" aspect of the show, since I felt, even when I first watched this series when I was 11, that I could relate to it more than I could to Adventure/02. Takato was just like me, a fan of the show who really wanted a digimon compared to one of the characters from Adventure/02 who chosen by fate to go to the digital world. Something I knew wouldn't happen to me. Regardless of what I wished. I think I was also at an age where I could recognize and understand the darker themes that are present in Tamers. (And it probably had nothing to do with the fact that I owned one of the Tamer D-Arc/D-Power toys that had the blue card that you could slash and that I thought was the coolest thing ever. Nope. Nothing to do with that.)
Tamer has a really strong story, I think, and is more focused than it's predecessor, Adventure 02. The plot is pretty thought out, and with a smaller main cast, it's easier for them to pay attention to the characters more. Granted some of the episodes aren't very strong, or just plain filler, but overall it's a solid show. It really played with the Digimon concept, sort of breaking it down and then rebuilding it, but that really makes the ideas fresh, as opposed to continuing on in the Adventure universe, which ended with the epilogue. And even though the themes and the tone are darker, the show still comes across as a kids show.
Stuff I liked:
-Tamers gives me my favorite Digimon, Guilmon. I think he really is an adorable dork and I love him for it.
-I always thought that the card-slash/Digi-modify system was really cool.
-The movies for Tamers were actually not bad. I mean, they acted like regular anime movies with a lot of exposition at the beginning, which takes up too much time, leading to a rushed climax and abrupt ending, but they were really well animated, and looked really good.
-The ending of Tamers is powerful, at least in terms of Jeri, but also rather sad as well. I kinda forgot how sad it was.
Stuff I wasn't as fond of:
-There was kind of an entire subplot missing with Yamaki and HYPNOS, and why it was there exactly, and why Yamaki hated digimon so much and had to get rid of them. Looking back, that kind of bothered me. There's a suggestion that it's government run, but why it's so important is just not there and it's kind of annoying.
-I find the appearance of Ryo to just come out of nowhere. Granted he's placed in there since he's a hero in one of the video games, but still. He just shows up and has all of the same powers as the main 3, what with bio-merging and everything. It just sort of feels tacked in there and not really organic. I mean, we don't even know how he got to bio-merge.
Overall though, Tamers remains a favorite of mine, and the rewatch proved that I can still enjoy it. Next up: Digimon Frontier or Digimon Savers. 2 more and then I can stop talking about it,