Saving the Digital World

I have found myself in a bit of a lull for the past few days. Nothing has come up for me to write an angry post about and all my “Best of” posts are for the upcoming week along with some religious-themed stuff (a topic I rarely touch for reasons you’re likely to find out here in the coming week). Thus I have nothing in particular I want to write. I have ideas for a few topics, but nothing I want to do because I want to do more “research” on the subject.

For example, I’d love to discuss the relevance of certain enemies in certain dungeons of Persona 4, a game in which you explore the nightmare worlds of certain characters and attempt to save them from their hidden personas. I’d love to discuss deeper meaning within a game like Bastion, but that requires explanations of the game’s narrative before I can even get into the meaning and that ended up being longer than I would like. And there isn’t a film I’ve seen recently or that I remember worth discussing that hasn’t been discussed to death by me already. Sorry, I loved Frozen, but I did two weeks of posts about it and I’d hate to beat a dead horse more than I should.

This week I want to discuss something I rarely talk about due to a lack of a reason to… Digimon. 

I love Digimon. I grew up watching it alongside Pokemon. I understood the differences between the two and loved them both despite the inherent weakness one had over the other. Pokemon was something I could enjoy in a variety of ways from trading cards to games to the anime to manga to collectable miniatures to movies to Smash Bros. Digimon didn’t have that luxury. Yes, they had an anime. But their card game and miniatures weren’t as popular. They don’t have nearly as many movies under their belt and none are nearly as memorable as Mewtwo Strikes Back. They had a couple of games but, again, they aren’t played in the millions like the average Pokemon release. And if they have a manga, I know nothing about it.

The problem with Digimon, despite it being a stronger series in its own right, is that it’s under the shadow of Pokemon. This is the same problem a game like PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale has when trying to become a mainstream fighting game with the same basic concepts that Super Smash Bros has. You are trying to compete with something that has already captured that same audience you’re after and they have had a long time to maintain that hold of that audience. 

Just like it’s hard to really get into PS All-Stars knowing that everything it can do, Smash Bros basically does and if you already own Smash, why bother adopting something new? That same problem occurs with Digimon Vs. Pokemon. Pokemon had a whole THREE YEARS from when the initial games launched and a whole TWO YEARS from when the initial anime started before Digimon even joined into the competition. That was enough time for Pokemon to become popular not only in Japan, but all over the world as one of the biggest phenomenon to hit kids from across the globe. And the fact that Pokemon went from game to TV to everything else in that short amount of time built it a transmedia empire, allowing it to dominate in multiple forms of entertainment with little effort before Digimon came out.

It’s safe to say that gamers, anime fans, and those who play trading card games all talked about or at least had working knowledge of Pokemon. This leads into the first problem Digimon would have, regardless of how good it is. With Pokemon being such common knowledge, it’s only fair to assume Digimon would be written off as a cheap knock-off to most anyone. Those who didn’t were either of the open-minded variety and watched both or of the “I didn’t watch Pokemon or didn’t like it, but this show is actually good” group.

So right off the bat, Digimon was destined to have a smaller fanbase than Pokemon simply because they didn’t time their release well. But competition is still good and Digimon was probably (and still remains) the only good competition Pokemon ever had to a collectable-monsters toyline with the only other possible competition being Transformers, but that’s a different kind of demographic altogether. Because Transformers were all about cars and robots and squarely aimed at young boys. Pokemon and Digimon were both gender neutral for the most part because both involved cute monsters and badass monsters, allowing just about anyone to really enjoy it without shame of gender stereotypes.

All that said, competition is good and Digimon was a worthy competitor. So how do you go about competing with something like a Pokemon or a Smash Bros? The simplest thing to do would be to not. As experienced with World of WarCraft, most who competed with them were merely copying them and doing nothing new or different with the MMO formula. This also applies to shitty generic FPS games after the popularity of Halo or crap super hero movies after the success of Avengers or Dark Knight (pending on your flavor of hero). 

In the case of PS All-Stars their way of competing with Smash was to be exclusive to a different console entirely, use different characters (obviously) from Smash and implement new mechanics that Smash hadn’t thought of yet like a system where you gain energy over the course of a match to perform specials. While some of these new ideas worked, others did not. First off, character selection-wise, PS All-Stars fails right out of the gate because many characters in the roster would not really be considered ‘iconic’ Sony characters. Kratos, sure. But Dante from the NEW DmC? That game wasn’t even out yet. Where’s that Crash Bandicoot? And while I hate the series, Final Fantasy VII is what sold the PS1, so surely one of those little shits deserved recognition in there as well. And while the special-system was a good idea (in theory) the problem was that the specials were also required to actually kill someone in the game. This made games last entirely too long and made things get really boring really fast. This ultimately made Super Smash Bros. Brawl (arguably a much slower title than Melee) feel MUCH faster by comparison. 

But let’s look at Digimon. They brought some new ideas to the table that Pokemon did not such as having their creatures talk, making them feel like participants to the stories rather than tools or plot devices to a story problem. They also actually had mystery and intrigue to the series because the Digital World was something unexplored and unexplained and remained as such for two whole adventures which made the series compelling. Pokemon didn’t have that because they translated the show from the game and that was about it. The games had mysteries in the ways of glitches and easter eggs, but nothing that kept you coming back to your TV from week to week. Above all else, Digimon had stronger characters. Sure, they didn’t have my beloved Team Rocket, but Devimon, Etamon (the motherfucking pimp), Myotismon, and the Dark Masters were some dastardly fellows and a few of them had some impressive designs to their characters. But with all this, what kept Digimon in Pokemon’s shadow? 

As I said before, Pokemon came first and really cornered the market on collectable monster games in multiple forms of entertainment. By the time Digimon came into the scene, they didn’t really have an in because not nearly as many were willing to give them the same chance they gave Pokemon. But the other big issue is marketing. Pokemon developed the phrase “gotta catch em all” which incentivized being there for everything and experiencing as much as possible. Keep playing games and watching the shows in order to see and catch all the Pokemon. Digimon didn’t incentivize their product in the same way. You watched it for a good story about kids and monsters being lost in a strange new world and that should have been enough. But for some, it wasn’t. 

It’s 2013 and Pokemon has released ANOTHER game which sold millions of copies. They released ANOTHER set to their trading card game. They started up ANOTHER season of their anime which is based on the new games. And they’re still just as popular as ever and probably the one thing keeping their parent company, Nintendo, afloat thanks to booming 3DS sales. Digimon? For as much as I loved them, they just kind of faded into obscurity. Their newest season of the anime only just aired after a FIVE YEAR HIATUS in the United States, and that season is THREE YEAR S OLD in Japan. Though that’s not a surprise since the anime really hasn’t been spectacular since series 2 which was MANY years ago. 

Maybe someday we’ll do another post on Digimon with a little more attention to the details. Find symbolism behind some character or meaning in a certain storyline. But for now, let’s just bow our heads in silence as those of us who enjoyed the series pay our respects to Digimon. You were a superior who with bold ideas, let down by lesser marketing and having your competition pretty much be the Huns of the cute-collectable-monster world. Sorry, Digimon, you will be missed. See ya next time.