LogFAQs > #924206830

Kari's sick, so Tai and Izzy head into the city to find medicine. That's Machinedramon's domain, and their adventure tips him off. Even with Andromon's help, he's a tall order for the team of five. He busts them down to Rookie, but Kari gives Agumon the energy to go one more time, and he does the stereotypical driveby-slash-pause-enemy dies bit. And the Numemon lived happily ever after, I guess. WaruMonzaemon too. Three down but we're running out of book!

Piedmon shows up and beats the snot out of WarGreymon and MegaKabuterimon while the other three kids go for help. Matt is in some symbolic cave or something and starts pushing even Gabumon away, but then there's a glowy thing and we are told not shown how Gabumon and the crest of friendship helped him beat all his baggage or whatever all that was. No time for character development the kids are here! Matt makes the big save. Joe and Mimi have showed up at some point too. In one of the creepiest anime sequences, Piedmon turns the whole gang to keychains in two shots instead of like an episode, minus TK, Kari, and I guess Patamon, because TK is DETERMINED and he reaches MagnaAngemon. Gate of Destiny, and it's over. Man it's one thing to rush through plot points but now it's leaving out big chunks of stuff. Joe and Mimi were supposed to go around recruiting our old friends! The team was supposed to get keychain'd one by one in terrifying fashion! Thousands of boys were supposed to have an awakening during the LadyDevimon/Angewomon catfight! WarGreymon and MetalGarurumon (and Angewomon?) were supposed to be part of the finish!

Unfortunately we found the source of the Dark Masters' power- it's Apocalymon. We fight. We lose. He breaks the crests and starts to dissolve everybody, but Possessed!Kari saves us. The real crests were inside us all along, everybody attacks, Apocalymon down. He's gonna self-destruct! We contain the blast with one last deus ex digivce. To be fair this was rushed as heck in the anime too- I think I saw on tvtropes that this was intended to be a longer piece with more satisfactory build.

Time to go home, after some cryptic references to future digidestined. At least we don't have time to have everybody cry about leaving the digimon behind?

My rating: 5/10
Not much left to say that I haven't already. There is so much character development and emotion in the Dark Masters arc that we...just didn't get, at all. Apocalymon barely felt like a bigger deal than a mon of the week, and Piedmon did only by comparison of how long he lasted. (like a chapter once the fight started?)

Overall rating: 5/10
...It gets a baseline of respect for being freakin' Digimon, or it'd be off to Half Price Books. It was faithful in the sense that they didn't, like, CHANGE anything, they just painted by numbers so fast that it lost all meaning. Given that they barely fit it into 5 volumes as-is, maybe they just needed a lot more space. I don't know I would've done much differently if I *had* to fit 52 episodes into 5 books, but...why did we have to? It coulda been fine at 10 books I think. Maybe it's the publisher's fault? The artist/writer didn't seem incompetent, unless the dumb humor at inappropriate times WASN'T from the localization like with the dub.

Discussion question: What's the biggest pacing issue you've encountered?
Up next: Digimon 02 and Tamers- I don't have as much love for them as for Adventure, and it seems I only got a volume each of those. Maybe I was tired of this adaptation, maybe I never found further volumes...we'll find out, sorta!
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