‘Digimon Adventure tri’ Took 3 Years to Finish, and I Wish I Was Still Excited About It

As I finish binge-watching Digimon Adventure tri: Our Future and listening to the fantastic theme song that opens each episode, the music fades to voice clips of the different DigiDestined and Digimon. The screen fades to black and some legal information shows up on the bottom left-hand corner. This would seem like an insignificant detail, but I key in on the “© 2015,” and it strikes me: it took nearly three years to get here and as much as I love Digimon and as much as I kept hoping it would, Digimon Adventure tri never really came together to coalesce like the original Adventure 01 and 02 did for me. The original Digimon Adventures series coincided roughly with the Pokémon anime series, although since it did come out two years later it was chided as a rip off given its vaguely similar pocket monster designs. And while I was enthralled with Pokémon like most youngsters back then, I fell for the Digital Monsters much harder. The fact that the DigiDestined had one partner with their own personality and the ability to interact with them beyond the chirping of their own name was closer to how I was role-playing the Pokémon handhelds at time (although I probably wouldn’t have described it like that back then, but I was very set on making sure my Venusaur was the best member of my team by a significant amount of levels). The more vibrant set pieces of the Digital World felt more fantastical, and the vague references to digital terms like “Data/Vaccine/Virus type Digimon” and binar…