Animini: Digimon Adventure Episode 10 -The Steel Solid Super Evolution

I am back to my lovely Island Guests! After a short vacation to settle into my new town and home I am back with a vengeance! This post is the start of a new feature on my website called the Animini.. a “mini”  review of a single episode of an anime I happened to be watching. Basically.. It’s Saturday Anime Adventure torn to shreds and made into daily anime content with two more shows to follow! But to find out what those new shows are you will have to wait until the end of the week! Until then we pick up my old schedule!  Starting With Digimon Adventure Episode 10!

The Summary

Okay that was a really long intro unbefitting of a mini! But hey I had to tell you what it was all about! Speaking about telling you about things, let me discuss what Episode 10 of Digimon Adventure was all about! We pick up after the apparent death of Ogremon at the hand of Metaltyrannomon we saw in episode 9!  The group is facing an ultimate and that leaves them up a creek without a paddle.  There is no way they can face this behemoth .. yet there is no way to avoid him either.  So the group opts for a tactical retreat so they can come up with a plan of action. Koshiro’s laptop and analysis reveals information that leads them into discovering the headquarters that hold the holy digimon! Two major obstacles however remain in their way.

The first is of course Metaltyrannomon With all the Soundbirdmon..(those are the scanny/evil eye digimon that control other digimon for Devimon)  make escaping unseen rather impossible so Taichi decides to cause a distraction, using Kochiro’s battle data to find a weakness in the behemoth’s offence. Still failing quite bad!  To make matters worse, the rest of the group finds their escape route cut off by a large poisonous bog that you can only traverse if you are tainted by Devimon’s dark Miasma.  When the fight between the courageous boy and his digimon with the Ultimate monster draws close to them… he manages to surpass Greymon’s limit and we see MetalGreymon arriving through super evolution! This wipes the floor with their foe and the group now only has to deal with the bog. There are two ways around with no way to tell if one route is better than the others. They decide to split up.. and while figuring out who goes with who the episode cuts off.

The Positives

Overall we had another great episode, though I must say I was less entertained by it than some other episodes. What it did right once again was the pacing, the setting up things and the cause and effect that this show has going on. My favourite moment of this show was the conflict between Yamato and Taichi.. where Taichi manifests more as the standard Shonen hero that would die in a blaze of glory , Yamato takes a different stance. They are the chosen ones… one of them or all of them are the only thing that can stop the evil. If they die both worlds will suffer, so they can not go around and sacrifice themselves willy nilly It brings some stakes to the show, more than before. They can lose one member but not all. This is also why they split up the group in the end.If one route is easier or the right path.. they have to make sure they travel it.. which can be achieved by splitting up. This way all characters can still shine.

And shine they also do in this episode. Everyone save for Sora has a bit of a moment. Joe takes on the roll of group eldest and breaks apart fights, Mimi can’t deal with conflict as it bursts her little bubble thus highlighting the importance of working together, while also providing some comedy this episode needed in not caring for the property of others..tossing Joe’s books into acid to check out if it is really that acidic. Koshiro’s analysing abilities really shine and Yamato’s tactical prowess help flesh out the story and choices this series makes.

The Negatives

While the episode kept me very entertained, there also was a lot of “clunk” in this episode. The show does make a good point in why they should not attack the Ultimate head on but then the show Taichi and Greymon holding their own single handedly against the thing.. which makes you wonder, would the group not have had a chance?!  Maybe it’s a risk not worth taking.. but there seems something off about the balance of it all. They do provide a pretty sensible reason. But by stretching out the fight as much as they did.. they remove the intensity of the treat a bit, it doesn’t feel proportionate. It is a bit of a nitpick but it did bother me.

While most of the episode is animated properly there are some very weak moments in the fight. A lot of repeat animations as MetalTyrannomon seems to have a very strict attack pattern. This means a lot of the time we see Greymon dodge the same attack over and over again. The scale being on three levels, Taichi being tiny, Greymon being midsize and MetalTyrannomon being large results in the loss of many details on Taichi’s end which sometimes can be a bit obnoxious. The fight itself is pretty cool, with brains really coming into play over sheer brawn and post Super Evolution the animation has this Dragon Ball level of intensity…but some corners here have clearly been cut making it a bit rougher than it needed to be.

The Score

In terms of writing and feel the episode is easily on par with everything we have seen so far. However with some slip ups in the animation and a slight issue in power-scaling result in an episode that is not as good as it should have been.  The idea of not needing Crests or some sort of force  to go beyond is something I am very much on board with however. It brings things much closer to how they are in the Digimon World games or the equally excellent Cyber Sleuth games, this way there will be less hero gate-keeping and the show can introduce any ultimate whenever they want.

I am a big fan for the group splitting up and the whole.. “If at least some of us survive we may be able to save the world”  mentality. It will make it so easy to not offside any of the chosen ones.  The failure of this episode seems kinda inevitable.. they reached a bottleneck and something had to give , had they kept the foe stronger it was too strange that Taichi would have survived, had they had the group attack all at once they would immediately ignore and nullify their own strategy.. so they have written themselves in a bit of a corner here and the way it broke.. is the least annoying they could have chosen… that doesn’t make it any less noticeable though.. so I can’t in good faith call it as good as the rest.. it is still a sweet watch!