With the turn of the decade, the Digimon franchise is celebrating its continued success with multiple new projects. With a new movie on the horizon and a new video game in development, Digimon fans have much to look forward to this year. In addition, a reboot of both the original anime series, Digimon Adventure, and the new card game have also been announced. To celebrate the ongoing developments of the Digimon franchise, Bandai Namco have released a trailer celebrating all aspects of Digimon‘s history.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPvzjkxVl5U
Shot in a way that combines CGI Digimon and live-action human actors, the trailer features humans and Digimon living and playing together while also showcasing every major part of the Digimon franchise. This style of trailer is very similar to the original Pokémon GO! trailers that also feature human and CGI monsters in the real world.
Fifty seconds in, the trailer shows a quick glimpse of the new rebooted Digital Monsters card game, with a younger player summoning fan-favorite martyr Leomon against an older player. The Digital Monsters trading card game, known officially as Hyper Colosseum, has been supported since 1997 in Japan. The game had less than stellar success in the West, with its support dropped only one year after release. Bandai Namco will be releasing a brand new card game, simply called Digimon Card Game separate from Hyper Colosseum with its own new cards and mechanics. The cards feature much more detailed artwork compared to its predecessor game and, where Hyper Colosseum mainly focused on 1v1 battles, the Digimon Card Game much more closely resembles other contemporary card games. Players take turns summoning Digimon, stacking cards on top of each other to bring them to higher levels and new forms while gaining new abilities that the player can mix and max depending on the situation. More information can be found on the official Japanese website for the game.
After the scene with the card game, the trailer then shows a montage of various Digimon video games, specifically emphasizing the very well received Cyber Sleuth series of RPGs. It then shows two high school students battling with the original Digital Monster virtual pets. These virtual pets were originally released in 1997 as a spinoff of the original Tamagotchi virtual pets and can be seen as the origin of the Digimon franchise.
The rest of the trailer seems to mainly be fanservice for fans of the original anime, with scenes such as a kid Digivolving Agumon into WarGreymon and the final scene of Omnimon overlooking Tokyo Tower. While the appearances of these Digimon in the trailer will certainly be appreciated by fans of the anime, a reboot of the original Digimon Adventure anime is also in the works. From information on the official website, the show will be a full reboot featuring the original characters but a new story.
The show takes place in 2020, where digital networks are an integral part of day to day life. Suddenly, large scale network failures start occurring in Tokyo, with cyber terrorism being the initial explanation. Fifth grader Taichi Yagami (better known to the West as “Tai”), who is alone preparing for summer camp, finds out his mother and sister Hikari (Kari in the English localization) are trapped on a runaway train. As he rushes to their rescue, a strange phenomenon occurs where he and other children are teleported into the Digital World where they meet their partner Digimon.
Both the Digimon Adventure reboot and the Digimon Card Game are set to launch this April. Along with other projects this year, such as Last Evolution Kizuna and Digimon Survive, it seems like the franchise will have much to look forward to in the future.
