#demonoflight

So what are the “WonderSwan games”?

As you are probably likely to know already, Ryou originates from a series of Digimon games for the WonderSwan, Bandai’s handheld console that never left Asia but did have a pretty decent following in Japan (at least until it got wrecked by the Game Boy Advance).

Now, here’s the part I’m going to deliver in a way that probably sounds really cold, but please understand that understanding this context is really important to understanding what went on with Ryou here: while many Digimon games have fans who are Digimon fans (and they are no less valid for it), most of them are actually awful games by general video game standards. The writing is usually low-effort at best, and if anime canon characters from Adventure or whatnot appear in it, they’ll be horribly out of character with flanderized or just really off characterizations (even Re:Digitize, generally agreed to be one of the better games, is not immune to this). And this was especially the case back then, when the games Bandai was churning out were basically the equivalent of the kind of bargain bin game churned out to cash in on marketing value more than they were actually any good as video games. There are exceptions, but they’re few and far between, and that was especially the case back in the day when Bandai was obviously much better of a toy company than a game company. It’s only very recently, like “last decade” recently, that Digimon games have actually started putting any real effort into nuanced writing, and that’s probably mostly because of a certain former Tekken producer named Habu Kazumasa becoming a hardcore diehard Digimon fan who started actually pushing for better writing.

The WonderSwan games, which also are equally as guilty of completely destroying the anime characters’ canon characterization and generally being very bare bones, might have been completely tossed into the ether and remembered in history as more low-effort licensing cash-ins if not for Akiyama Ryou and Millenniummon and his whole entire surrounding saga. Not because the games were the pinnacle of the world’s greatest writing, and not because they really integrated all that well with anime canon (in fact, play the games or watch a Let’s Play and you’ll see timeline and characterization contradictions all over the place to degrees that make the anime’s awkward handling of the issue look masterful in comparison). But I think the best way to describe this is similar to how many people feel about the original Pokémon games for the Game Boy. The games themselves are riddled with bugs and sloppy programming to embarrassing degrees, and the writing is stilted, barely present, and at times borderline surreal...but at the same time the concept of it all was so strong that it captivated an entire generation with so little and kickstarted one of the world’s most profitable franchises. Those games actually didn’t have a lot of substance in themselves, but the concept was strong, and the gaps were just big enough for imaginative kids to fill in the blanks with their own creative ideas.

That’s basically also what went on here with Akiyama Ryou. Advertised as “the ninth Chosen Child” and featuring a post-Adventure side story where Ryou is called to save Taichi and his friends and teams up with and fights against familiar faces, eventually fighting the embodiment of a Y2K bug who eventually becomes his eternal rival, even if they didn’t really have much to it when actually put into practice on the WonderSwan (and to be fair, it was handheld hardware from the late nineties, it’s not like it probably could have particularly detailed writing), it’s just a lot of interesting concepts that make a kid inspired to fill in the details of what’s going on with Ryou’s adventures, especially since it’s (apparently) canon to the anime as well. You can’t deny there’s appeal in the idea of a Tamer who’s sent around to do odd, unusual jobs with “borrowed” partners and fighting against the embodiment of Y2K.

Thus, Ryou became a popular character, and in very much the same way Pokémon fans latch on to the idea of Red as the world’s most badass Trainer despite the fact we don’t know a single thing about him except the fact he apparently doesn’t talk much, many a Japanese Digimon fan became very attached to Ryou and the tale of how he became a “legendary Tamer”.

The many attempts to get Ryou into the anime

Digimon is what’s known as a “media mix”, meaning it’s a franchise that’s fundamentally planned as a multimedia outlet from the get-go. Ultimately, it’s more Bandai’s IP than Toei’s, which means that if they veto any idea the anime staff has, the anime staff can’t go with it, and if they demand something get put in the anime, the anime staff has to go along with it.

As I said earlier, Ryou’s games are far from the only games to have glaring contradictions with the anime, and since Ryou’s games are more about him than they are the Adventure or Tamers characters, that probably puts them in a better position than games that are ostensibly supposed to be anime tie-ins but aren’t great about it (trying to think too hard about how Digital Card Arena makes sense with the rest of 02 will make your head hurt). However, since Ryou was a popular character, Bandai and Toei started entering in talks to make Ryou relevant to the anime, too. The thing is, though, with the games already off the rails in regards to consistency with the anime in the first place, that basically left the anime staff at a complete loss as to how. Interviews with the anime staff on the matter have all graciously stated that this kind of thing is probably just inevitable when you have a media mix, and, putting Bandai’s known history of being completely unhelpful about this issue in every way imaginable aside, this is probably true to at least some extent (as long as two branches of a media mix are being planned simultaneously, it’s very unlikely they’ll be perfectly consistent with each other).

As a result, the anime staff started making repeated attempts to find a way to fit Ryou in the plot somehow, but the problem is that the games themselves didn’t really give them a lot to work with, and Ryou didn’t even have much of what you could call a characterization in said games (again, it’s all in the realm of where you’re supposed to be filling in the blanks imagining what he’s like). The first known appearance is Ryou (in Turkey, for some reason) sending an email to Taichi and Koushirou in the Diablomon fight in Our War Game! (This was probably just intended as a “cute reference” at the time, but starts posing problems for Tag Tamers later; see below.)

After that, the staff started discussing making Ryou the central character of the summer 02 movie, presumably because the “self-contained” nature of a movie would allow for them to explore Ryou without interfering with the main series too much, and it would have also given them the opportunity to expand on his relation to Ken’s backstory -- but the plotline of the movie ended up rejected for being too depressing for a summer movie, we ended up getting Hurricane Touchdown instead, and Ryou ended up only getting his short 02 cameos in episodes 23 and 43. (Amusingly, if the original plan for the movie with Ryou had gone through, Ryou would have likely been Terriermon’s partner instead of Wallace.)

It does seem that, as part of planning, the anime staff and Bandai had firmly agreed that Ken’s backstory would be related to a game tie-in, so that part was non-negotiable even if the movie with Ryou was scrapped. In fact, in real life, the game in question, Tag Tamers, was released right before 02 episode 21 aired -- meaning audiences would get a taste of the knowledge that Ken was, indeed, originally a good-natured and kind young child who fell victim to dark forces before it was formally revealed in the anime. So when the relevant scene in 02 episode 23 aired, the kids could point at the screen and go “I remember that!!”, and they’d have extra information about Millenniummon’s role in Ken’s downfall to work with as the plot went on. As you can imagine, very fun for the kids.

However, if you look into it closely, despite it apparently being important for Ken’s backstory, Tag Tamers...doesn’t make sense with the anime, and despite what a lot of people like to claim about it being “necessary” to understand what was going on with Ken, it actually makes it even more confusing:

According to the game, Ken and Ryou were sucked into the Digital World after witnessing the Diablomon incident together, but this contradicts Ryou’s depiction in Our War Game!, Ken getting depicted as going in and out of the Digital World alone in the 02 episode 23 flashback, and Ken’s statement that his encounter with Digimon was in August 2000 (long after the Diablomon incident in March 2000!) in 02 episode 33.

Ken is characterized in ways that would make the emotional backdrop of his backstory in 02 completely fall apart. The game has him recognized as as “boy genius” even at that point in time (the fact that Osamu was and Ken wasn’t is vital to backstory), his room is full of toys and sports equipment when Ken and Osamu’s room conspicuously lacking anything that allowed them to be “normal kids” informs their characters, Wormmon doesn’t even call Ken “Ken-chan” despite that being vital to their relationship...

Ken is a year older in the game than he was during his initial Digital World trip in the 02 episode 23 flashback, and considering Ken coming back to the real world alone and clearly not gravely ill is a major plot point, him making only one trip to the Digital World doesn’t quite make sense.

The epilogue of the game depicts Ken clearly remembering Millenniummon when declaring himself the Digimon Kaiser, but that would open up a huge can of worms regarding the Kaiser’s depiction in 02.

One game later, in D-1 Tamers, the young Ken has an almost naively chipper attitude towards Ryou apparently vanishing off the face of the planet, and he tells Gennai to “cheer up” because Ryou will definitely come back, in such an insensitive manner that a Japanese Let’s Player called the game’s Ken “irresponsible”.

To be blunt about it, it seems the only information Bandai and Toei had in common was that Ken was a good kid in the past who met Wormmon in the Digital World and fell into darkness after a piece of Millenniummon lodged into him, and everything else is contradictory!

Ryou in Tamers

Nevertheless, Ryou didn’t really show up in 02, so there was still a stake on Bandai’s part (and by extension, on the part of anime producer Seki Hiromi, whose job description also involved representing Bandai’s wishes for the anime staff) to actually get him in the anime this time, so when things rolled around to Tamers the attempt was made again. The problem was, Tamers was not in the same universe in Adventure, and so far, Ryou had only appeared in games that were (ostensibly) in the Adventure universe.

The full details of the story behind how Ryou ended up the way he was portrayed in Tamers came from a blog post by Konaka from 2021 (which I will not be linking here for various reasons, but savvy people can probably find the post themselves). The events went as follows:

Seki decided to have Ryou appear in the Digital World arc, feeling it would be best to have him in the Digital World due to Tamers being, in her words, "a meta-Adventure" (basically, she felt the Digital World arc would be a better place to put a meta element like Ryou rather than one of the real world parts of the story)

Konaka agreed to it at first, knowing he was working with a media mix franchise and this came with the territory (and Ryou’s presence in Tamers was determined before he even joined the staff), but later learned about what the games entailed and realized this risked having to connect with the Adventure universe when the whole point was that they weren’t the same universe

Konaka decided to avoid the topic of bringing in his history with Ken since that would (rather understandably) make things overcomplicated

...so basically, the decision on how to address Ryou’s presence in the Tamers universe on the part of the anime staff was just to not deal with it at all.

According to Konaka, while Ryou’s Tamers characterization isn’t necessarily meant to contradict the WonderSwan games, he still focused on making Ryou a character more for Tamers than anything else. Ryou’s status as a “legendary Tamer” is obviously a wink and a nod to the games (and, of course, a way to appease all the fans who would murder if Ryou were portrayed as anything less, kind of like how Pokémon fans would also murder if you insinuate that Red is anything less than the world’s coolest badass), but it also comes from Konaka himself -- he was apparently inspired by the character of Tuttle from the movie Brazil, in that he showed up in the Digital World before them and was a super awesome senior who showed everyone up by being badass. As for Ryou’s characterization, Konaka let Yoshimura Genki (the writer for his first episode) basically handle his entire characterization, which was also heavily inspired by his voice actor Kanemaru Junichi having a similar “refreshing” personality. The part about his antagonistic relationship with Ruki apparently came from simple logical inference that if he were an accomplished Tamer, he must have met Ruki at some point, and they probably wouldn’t get along, and so on and so forth.

So as you can see, the Tamers writing staff really wrote Ryou as a Tamers character more than they did a character from the WonderSwan games, but they also deliberately left enough doors open so they wouldn’t incur a direct contradiction. And, again, you can tell that Bandai never really gave them a Ryou characterization to work with in the first place -- it’s apparent Ryou would have had different characterization if he’d been in the 02 summer movie as originally planned, or not voiced by Kanemaru.

True to form, Bandai’s next two games sort of seemed to explain how Ryou jumped universes; D-1 Tamers depicts Ryou getting recruited into a fake tournament by the (uncharacteristically jerkass-like) Adventure kids and set to fight against Millenniummon again, which blows them through the multiverse. One game later, in Brave Tamer, an amnesiac Ryou engages in a battle with Millenniummon across the multiverse (including the Tamers universe) and even partners up with a Monodramon, who forces a Jogress between himself and Millenniummon to end the battle once and for all, the idea being that he’ll counter Millenniummon’s endless hate for his rival Ryou with his own love for Ryou, resulting in an egg that we’re probably supposed to assume will eventually hatch into Tamers!Cyberdramon. (Contrary to popular English-speaking fandom rumor, there is no indication Millenniummon was ever Ryou’s partner besides in this way.) So that explains everything, right?

...Not really.

Brave Tamer ends in a cliffhanger of sorts. It doesn’t explain whether Ryou ever gets his memories back. It doesn’t explain where Ryou goes after that. It definitely does not explain how this is supposed to lead up to Ryou having a dad in Fukuoka or a multiple-year career in the Digimon card game, nor the fact that the backstory for Ryou and Cyberdramon in Message in the Packet doesn’t match the above at all...I mean, it’s probably theoretically possible to come with an explanation, but it will definitely make your head hurt. And then to make things worse, in 2002 V-Tamer had a crossover chapter with Ryou, and his personality is in stark contradiction with the Tamers version (in that he’s portrayed as an argumentative hot-blooded protagonist type), probably because, again, the games never actually gave Ryou a characterization, and Yabuno and Izawa were probably just using their own interpretation of what he must have been like in the games.

So are all of these versions of Ryou the same character?

The official stance is technically yes, but...

In an (extremely infamous) interview from 2002, Seki confirmed that 02 and Tamers Ryou are indeed intended to be taken as the same character. The thing is, almost everyone on the Japanese end, and by that I mean including Adventure/02 and Tamers staff, has called bullshit on this, or has at least been really shocked that this is apparently supposed to be the case (for example, Kakudou himself saying in 2003 that he was still shocked about that). The Japanese wiki article for Ryou on Pixiv immediately follows Seki’s statement up with the observation that this doesn’t make sense. However, vague wording from staff since then has also hinted at the real reason Seki said this: because she has to represent Bandai’s wishes for the anime staff (and vice versa), she probably had no other choice, because Bandai made D-1 Tamers and Brave Tamer under the obvious premise they’re supposed to be the same character, so she has to deliver their viewpoint regardless of how much sense that makes or not. (Otherwise, she’d be basically telling the public that the games are wrong, and Bandai would obviously not be happy with that.) In the aforementioned 2021 blog post, Konaka admitted that his choice to dodge the topic of Ken in the course of Ryou’s Tamers portrayal probably contributed to forcing Seki to give that very forced explanation.

Although the Japanese fanbase still likes Ryou and the games, most people on that end generally don’t really treat them as the same character, and the aforementioned Pixiv wiki’s suggestion is that you treat them like different timeline possibilities of the same character akin to Ultraman’s “parallel isotopes”. Ryou is still clearly canon to 02, and canon to Tamers, and nobody disputes that, but the part that's more uncertain is whether the events of the WonderSwan games themselves are canon to Adventure/02/Tamers or whether it's more of a "broad strokes" thing (or in other words, something mostly resembling what happened in the games is canon to Adventure, 02, and Tamers, but it can’t be precisely the same way with the exact same presentation because there would be massive logical contradictions).