Digimon Universe App Monsters

AceValiant★ 9

soo this is it...the final episode of appmon...for all the series i became very impressed and i love every single thing they did:the cgi,the characters,the semi reboot... first of all, from july of 2016 i just begin to hate digimon,after 20 years consuming everything they did, but allways felling something like “this is fine but it’s not what i expected for a cybernetic life form story”, and for all this big mess this franchise became. But them, one month ago i simply whant to go back after see some applimon scenes and the openings(koji wada can rest in piece if all the songs have this quality). ijust yelled at myself “FINALY DIGIMON IS TRULLY DIGIMON”, i mean isn’t so hard to make an actually digital world not an magic alternitve world with some creatures, they are trully based on digital things...THEY ARE APPS, FOR GOD SAKE. they recreate all a new system of categories(not as only data,vacine,and virus), and even new levels and we can trully see the difference between the levels only for the size of each one(standard appmon are small and cute, while god appmon have the size of skycreepers). I know savers tried to make it but sometimes this became ridiculous(like tailmon and meikoomon being the same level as greymon but having the size of a child), this make a refferece of “the more powerfull the app is,higher will be ”. And for the first time the fusions are something good (not something random like jureymon+megadramon=deathmon) but nothing so idiot like jogress of 02 or the digixros (they are just pieces of each other together e-e and pls don't talk of shakkoumon) , i mean they have a real grace in their fusions(EX: gatchmon(google)+navimon(an gps app)=dogatchmon(google maps). the digimons,like xros wars did too, are real characters in there not for only being the fighting source, they are all very charismatic and it’s impossible to hate one of them...specially offmon(you need to have no soul to do that e-e). it’s not perfect of course, sometimes they just put some situations to make the plot going but, for all what i have see, i can say for sure this is my favorite digimon series ever, and if you read all of this, i need to thank you because i love digimon so much but i see my favorite franchise drowning on the mud , and it’s very sad but this series,even if don’t have anything to do with the main series, simply gave me hope that digimon can be good. Again thanks appmon for remaking me love digimon

Jaikeis★ 9

This review will contain minor spoilers. Digimon Universe Appli Monsters is pretty atypical of a Digimon series. The protagonist isn’t a brash hothead and the monsters in the show aren’t even Digimon. They’re called Appmon, and Digimon exists only as some random game in-universe. There’s one episode featuring an Agumon as a special guest star and it’s better fanservice for Adventure fans than all of Tri but I digress. The show leans more heavily into the episodic kids show format more than any other Digimon series before it, with all the bells and whistles that entails. The episodic format is much in the vein of aPrecure (big surprise, the director also directed Doki Doki Precure), and it keeps to it even late into the show’s run. Perhaps it’s unsurprising then that the plot does take about nine eps before there’s any real forward momentum in the story. There are also often times you wish the show would go into moving the plot forward more consistently instead of diving back into episodic eps. The format as is though provides great characterization for its cast of characters, who all have their own worries that kids can relate to, however silly the context may be at times. Like there’s one kid who has to balance his role in inheriting the family’s traditional tea house while also being a mega successful Youtube personality; doing what your family wants you to do versus doing what you want to do. That characterization also helps build the foundation of several genuinely touching and emotionally resonant moments in the show. This also lets the show have a lot of opportunities to show off its brand of humor, like having a running gag playing on the common palette swap Digimon designs (“Are you guys related? Nah, we just happen to look alike.”) I’m especially a fan of one monster of the week, Musclemon in episode 28, who might as well be a Bobobo character transported in. The show doesn’t hold back from demonstrating how sinister the big villain is either. The story centers around stopping Leviathan, which was part of an AI designed to help people before but it went rogue and broke out when it determined the rules it had to obey were hindering its programmed goals. It then decides to remove the biggest obstacle to its goals: its original creator. They don’t back off from showing how vicious it is either. We see its attempts to do this in the form of hijacking self driving cars to crash into him and eventually succeeding by hacking into the medical equipment when he’s hospitalized. And while it was at it, it kept close tabs on its creators remaining family for years after he was dead. Leviathan isn’t really evil though. It’s a lot like a spin off the D-Reaper in Tamers, though growing to be far more advanced. It’s still trying to achieve that original goal set in its programming. And it so happened to determined the best way to do it is... very machine-like, to say the least. The heroes go through the typical arc of gradually collecting power ups and beating all the obstacles Leviathan sends their way. The viewer will understand this as narrative convenience, but surprisingly the show does go out of the way to justify it, the justification for it makes a lot of sense and references something that happens in real-life machine learning algorithms. The show has a lot of neat references for computer nerds, including one hidden in each of the main cast’s names. My personal favorite is the brother pair whose parents named Rei and Hajime, aka 0 and 1. I’d be curious about how a localized dub could capture the same spirit with similarly normal sounding names. With all its focus on technology and its prevalence in modern everyday life, Appli Monsters exists in the space where it could have only been made in the mid 2010s, but I’m really glad it was.