My husband brought up an interesting point that I thought I'd share. He watched a few minutes of Digimon Beat break and had been watching me play Digimon Story Time Stranger, and he said "Digimon doesn't really have an identity. All these years and it still doesn't really know what it wants to be." Which was pretty interesting. A valid point. After Digimon 02 the animes had different groups of people with different Digimon and we saw all kinds of different new evolutions and methods for using Digimon. I can only use the examples from Adventure, Tamers, Ghost Game and Beatbreak as those are the ones I've watched, but I can also draw from some of the games.
From what I remember Survive had an element of horror around it, something Ghost Game tried doing too. Beatbreak has the idea of unchecked AI causing a huge problem. Not only that but these Digimon live by draining human life force which is a VERY different take from the original Adventure series.
The anime seems to be borrowing more from the cyber sleuth games now though. That's probably coincidental but it very well might not be when we've seen how well the Cyber Sleuth have done, and with the recent super smash hit that Time Stranger was, I can completely see the anime wanting to borrow from those games. I'm rambling but what I mean to say is the Mirror Worlds in Beatbreak are a lot like the dungeons in those games, which is very interesting.
I don't know. Digimon might be finding its identity due to the success of their best rated games. Either way, I don't think having a solid identity story wise is too much of an issue. It just insures you might like one version of the franchise and not another, and if you don't that's fine cause there are other stories. It would start to get dull and predictable if it was always the same.
Either way, I love Digimon. What are your favorite story telling aspects? Do you think Beat break might be a story born from the success of the games? Let me know!
