Anime Pilgrimage RTT

Digimon Savers – episode 2

April 18, 2006 on 11:49 pm | In Digimon Savers | Comments Off on Digimon Savers – episode 2

“Burn, Digisoul of Anger! Flymon, lurking in the darkness!”

This second episode of Digimon Savers had just about the longest cold opening I’ve ever seen in anything. Clocking in at six minutes, it’s a wonder that they bothered with the OP at all this time around!
Anyway, the program seems like it’s been hit with sordid, under-the-table sorts of deals and its heroes have hardly the most noble causes in mind. It’s a bit simplistic, but it works for the most part.

Masaru sneaks Agumon home, but his mother and sister find out about the fellow before too long. Strangely, after a few seconds of concern, they accept the digimon as one of the family. Plus Yoshino stays the night for whatever reason.
The next day, chickens at Masaru’s sister’s school have gone missing! The culprit? I can’t remember his name, but he evolves into Flymon. It’s time for a definitive arse kicking, dished out by none other than GeoGreymon.

The style of the battles in this show is nothing to be impressed by, because all of the effort goes into bringing the Digimon into the right situation for evolution. Once you’ve cracked out your GeoGreymon, one mega flame takes your opponent down. It’s not really cool, and it means that all sorts of contrived situations will have to be formulated to prevent evolution from taking place.
This does not mean that the situation will always be so – some of the digimon are going to need more power, or there are going to be team situations, and so far there simply aren’t enough digimon for there to be one or two super powered specimens that render every other digimon in the party useless (remember the Greymon and Garurumon evolutions? Sure. What about the others? Not on your life!). I hold hope.
Plus we might get one of those awesome Skullgreymon situations going on.

The amazing thing about this show is that they chose to put Raramon in a prime position. I was watching this, and the damn thing barely needs animation at all! Its mouth doesn’t even move when it talks, possibly due to its resemblance to an organic haniwa. It’s really lazy, though, and her voice is simply flat in places. It’s like this is the character that they just threw into the mix for completeness’ sake. That said, SunFlowmon is pretty cool and has the best “what just happened?” look on her face ever.

As for the morality of this situation, it’s nice to see that Masaru doesn’t really care about relations between the digital and real (analog?) worlds: he agrees to join DATS so that he can fight all sorts of digimon with Agumon. Next episode we even have snooty Japanese/European nobility for him to square against, and the three heroes of legend – the “digidestined”, if you will – shall ride!

This is fun stuff, the thing that Digimon always does before it goes angsty. You’ll learn things about kettles that will blow your mind!

Question: does it ever concern anyone that all of these secret societies have such effective memory erasing techniques? And that they entrust teenaged girls with said techniques? The world could be a dangerous place under the command of one such organisation, and no one would ever know because of these foul methods!