SPOILER: TWIST ENDING

So I was recently watching some random junk on YouTube, as one does, and came across this animated not-quite-short*:



And I'll be frank, while I wasn't hugely emotionally invested in it (I eventually warmed up to the main character, but mostly because he was pretty upset about being a walking disaster area), I was pretty ticked off by the ending, which you can see for yourself around 20:45-around then is when the protagonist is seemingly mortally wounded.

Then he wakes up (WUT) and isn't even the character we've been watching (WUUT?), because he's a human kid, not a robot (WHUUUUUT?)

I hate twist endings.

Well, no, I don't hate twist endings. I hate "twist endings," where we're thrown a cliched end result that doesn't really match the buildup to it. It's so disconnected and has nothing to do with the rest of it, even if it makes sense in context.

*I was probably led to it by the fact that I was re-watching Fireball, the best thing about two people repeatedly having conversations ever. Or at least, the best thing about two people repeatedly having conversations I've ever seen. This is considering it's dense with puns that someone who isn't very well-versed in Japanese wouldn't get without having them pointed out.

If you're not familiar with Fireball, unwilling to travel to TVTropesland, and are wondering why Fireball might have a connection to the embedded short: The two main characters of Fireball are a pair of rather loopy robots.

Who apparently are the inheritors of a world conqueror and may or may not technically be ruling humanity with an iron fist and a giant iron pincher.

-Signing off.

Game Reviews: 400 Years

400 Years* is a game about waiting.

Hold up, hold up, it actually makes waiting interesting.

(Recommended listening: Some manner of loop of Fall Out Boy's "Immortals." This includes while playing the game. It's actually astoundingly appropriate.)

If you come into the game blind, it looks kind of like a standard platformer where you play as a rather Moai-esque stone being. There's one key difference, though:

You CANNOT. JUMP. EVER. Instead, you must use patience, the changes of the seasons, and the passage of time to overcome the obstacles that face you. Case in point: You frequently must pass water by waiting for winter.

Yeah, you cross water by waiting for it to turn to ice. It gets better: If you're in the water when it freezes over, it (usually) causes you to freeze too.

(Exceptions occur in certain places where you're sufficiently deep; if you're sorta deep, you just get sorta stuck; if you're really deep, you can actually, in the game's only bug I really found, phase through the ice to the surface magically.)

If you press the space bar briefly, it only moves time forward a little bit, but if you hold it down, time passes super fast and the screen has a neat effect.

Also pictured above: You can wait for trees to grow. You can even plant chestnuts so that new trees grow. And then you can climb them. It's pretty neat, and it's not even the only form of time and effort investment that gives you the ability to pass difficult obstacles. (There are also non-useful trees that grow, die, and are replaced with new trees. And the seasons change the trees. There's a lot of nice little touches.)

But, as the title suggests, you "only" have four hundred years, because the whole reason this stone guy got rolling (...sorry) in the first place is because he foresaw a cataclysm that would happen in that length of time, and he's set out to stop it.

If you wait for a full four hundred years...

EVERYBODY DIES. Except probably the stone guy; he seems pretty tough, a lot like Great Ag and Ob, right down to the waiting around forever for stuff to happen, though he also seems a lot less interested in conquest. (Kudos to my sister for insisting on this, although I'd have gotten around to it myself. She was the one that held the space bar down for it, though.)

So what do you need to do to finish the game? Well, honestly, it's not especially hard; even on my first playthrough it took me "only" 202 years to reach the end (and I definitely made a few significant mistakes), and the volcano that the stone man plugs with his body to prevent the world-ending eruption. (Slightly relevant: Volcano-plugging from a Golden Age comic.)

And if you wait, you discover that apparently, the stone man's journey started in about 1613, because when you press space to wait while plugging the volcano, it takes you to this ending sequence with a jet plane inexplicably peacefully flying peacefully past.

This is arguably a case of self-sacrifice (although actually plugging a volcano is the silliest idea), but let's be realistic here. He's an earth elemental who's calming it with his powers. Or an indestructible stone alien like Ag and Ob (who are, if you didn't bother reading the old post, only stunned by nukes). He's probably fine.

Anyway, this is a neat little game and quite a bit more fun than you'd expect waiting around to be.

*I've unfortunately seen this game be mislabeled "Time Stands Still" by the Tumblr of a game site that reposted it; even though this is where I first saw the game, I went back to the original ArmorGames posting because the site's interface is about five times friendlier.

-Signing off.

The Greatest Comic Series That's Pretty Unlikely To Happen

Death's Head, experienced multiversal traveler and Freelance Peacekeeping Agent.

Lobo, general nuisance, plague on the universe, and low-down no-good bounty hunter.

Together, they fight crime try to make a living killing people with stupidly large guns, being darkly comedic, and probably hating each other rather a lot.

-Signing off.

Dub Renames Have Come A Long Way

Y'know, I watched the dub of Getter Robo G as a kid (thanks to a video rental store with a really eclectic collection), and one thing about it that I never remembered was how bizarre the characters' names really were.



I mean, we have badguys with names like Emperor Ramzorch and Colonel Fuhrer*. That's not really so weird. Not really.

But then we get to the protagonists. There's Doctor Copernicus, whose children are named Ceres and Joey. Think about that: These characters are named Ceres Copernicus and Joey Copernicus. (Also, Ceres has such an old lady voice it's amazing.)

Hayato is renamed Paladin, which seems odd unless you connect it to his habit of carrying a crucifix, and even then it's a stretch.

Then there's Benkei's name, which I can't quite figure out but which sounds like Foul Tip. Okay, he's a baseball player. I guess, guys.

Ryoma, though. Ryoma's dub name kills me. His name is apparently Tricky Hummer.

Tricky. Hummer.

Somebody strung those words together and decided it would be a decent name for a character.

What amazes me beyond that is that, despite a lot of editing and censorship (plus awful voice acting), the spirit of the dialogue often seems to remain fairly intact, such as retention of phrases like "switch on" to represent the combination sequence command; they even added a bunch of attack calls to the first enemy robot that weren't there in the original version.

Also, while it's removed for painfully obvious reasons (they didn't dub the first Getter Robo anime), it's kind of a shame that American audiences didn't get to see the amazing memorial service that was held for Musashi, the recently deceased third team member from the first series, and also their first robot.

Yeah, they made a funeral pyre out of their old robot. Which is particularly odd when one considers that it just kind of had a missing arm and, like, its ears were broken off. Even if that thing was your weaker, old-model robot, was utterly junking it really the best course of action? Rebuild that thing into a support unit or something, fools.

*Yeah, that's what the guy who looks like Hitler is named; it's subtler than his Japanese name (Hidler) is, though.

-Signing off.

[Random Title]

[Random description of a video embed.]



[Reason I like the video that may not be obvious.]

-Signing off.

TMNT Is Always Weird, However

One of those old games that was pretty weird that sticks out in my mind was the first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles NES game.



While it did have Foot Soldiers, Mousers, Bebop and Rocksteady, something resembling Metalhead (though it isn't actually), the Technodrome, and Shredder as enemies, as well as beings that could be interpreted as Rock Soldiers*, it also had various giant bugs, boomerang-throwing jumping guys, vaguely ED-209-like robots, chainsaw-wielding guys, frog-men, bomb-dropping mini-balloons (with the Foot symbol on them), killer seaweed, jetpack soldiers, and a few other things I'm sure I've forgotten (they're odd, but even though these particular things clearly aren't based on any particular things in TMNT, they're not especially weird by the standards of the setting), and then also had guys on fire** who shoot fireballs that turn into what I've never been able to see as anything but hopping legs made of fire, odd pink pillbug men, flying jellyfish, running and jumping quill-firing porcupine things, armless robot kangaroos, firebreathing robots with heads that detach and fly around when you kill them, eyeballs with legs, dudes who split into up to four smaller dudes when you hit them***, and a few other really weird things.

And making things weirder is that in some environments, the groups of enemies in an area will randomly change while you're still in it during moments where there's no enemies "on camera," meaning you can go from fighting firebreathing robots, bomb balloons, and giant fleas to fighting guys on fire, dive-bombing miniplane things, and eyeballs with legs.

Making something that's still pretty weird by the standards of the franchise that came up with the weirdest place/set of places to be called Dimension X is an achievement.

*There are beings who shoot some sort of crescent-shaped projectile and spend most of their time in an invulnerable curled up form. This doesn't actually resemble the Rock Soldiers very strongly, but I've seen other people interpret them that way, and it's a logical enough comparison to make.

**They're actually described as being "ex-pyromaniacs" who have managed to somehow survive setting themselves on fire. Ex-pyromaniacs?

***They're among the weirdest and toughest enemies in the game, incidentally, because it takes one hit to split them in two, then you have to hit each half to split them again, and each smaller variation is faster and better at jumping, plus, if I recall correctly, each small guy normally takes about four hits to kill. Plus they're so fast and good at jumping that they actually don't jump right (the engine doesn't seem very good at handling enemy jumping), and sometimes just kind of float around erratically. Since it takes about nineteen hits to kill these guys and they divide into such fast, erratic enemies, it's really good to have the cannon secondary weapon, which wipes out most enemies in one hit, and bypasses the death spawning actions of enemies such as that one. Plus the cannon also has a huge area it covers, so smaller/erratic enemies have a hard time dodging it. Plus, once you reach the third stage, you have the opportunity to gather well upwards of sixty shots of cannon fire thanks to some quirks of the level design. The lesson is that you should always go for the cannon.

Incidentally, the dividing guys also look rather like they're naked.

-Signing off.

One of the Weirder Tie-Ins

(Another birthday come and gone. Eh, whatever*.)

Sergeant Slaughter's old toy commercial sure plays him up, like a lot of individualized toy commercials play up the characters they're representing.



Funny as that is, I think my favorite part of it is that his cartoon appearance was more over the top.



Like, the BATs (Cobra robot soldiers) there are being presented as pretty much impervious to serious machinegun fire. That gun Roadblock's got would knock most people trying to use it down, and the BATs are just shrugging it off.

And Sergeant Slaughter is wrecking them dozens at a time with his bare hands.

*I don't recall if I've mentioned that I don't particularly care for birthdays, but I'm pretty sure I've mentioned I really don't care for holidays. My birthday is like a holiday dedicated to me, but everybody else is in charge of how it gets celebrated. (Though Mom's been good enough to ask me what I want on the menu, even if it's pizza and my favorite kind of cake nearly every year.)

One of these years, I'm gonna manage to convince everybody to stop frickin' singing so we can skip to the darned cake.

-Signing off.

Not Exactly Nostalgia

(Bit random today.)

One of my favorite things about the Internet is learning randomly about things that one didn't have any other way to learn about them. Case in point:



I'd seen the main spaceship from this movie* before, but only as a cheap bootleg eraser sort of thing. (This was also my introduction to a number of Gundam mecha designs, plus a couple of much more obscure mecha.) Still haven't figured out what the last couple of those erasers were, though (but I've got suspicions).

But that's what the Internet is for.

*The movie's an obvious Star Wars cash-in that I'm pretty sure was produced in Japan (and filmed in Japanese) and probably is a certain brand of ludicrous fun.

-Signing off.

That's Dangerous

If you randomly find the guy with square glasses familiar, that's because he's well-known for asking "is this a pigeon?" (As explained in the link, people mistakenly believe it's a case of bad subtitles, but rest assured-he in fact doesn't know a butterfly from a pigeon*, and there's a sensical reason for that**.)

Anyway, having finished the Brave Robots series Might Gaine, I've been poking around, and found a bit of an older Brave series, Fighbird. And the main thing that stands out to me about this one is the amount of fish-out-of-water/big-fish-in-little-pond (to mix some metaphors) humor.

Case in point (since the subtitles are a bit small, I'll provide a transcription/descriptive bit):

(Greaser punk: Now that you've heard our plans, join us.)

(Greaser punk: Or else... [produces knife])

(Glasses guy wears a surprised expression as the knife is waved at him.)

(Glasses guy grabs greaser punk's knife hand...)

(...and uses one finger to bend the knife's blade.)

(Greaser punk's shades fall down in shock.)

(Glasses guy: It's dangerous to point sharp objects at people.)

What I love about this exchange is that he's actually genuinely just being informative-he may actually be concerned that these guys don't know that sharp objects can hurt people, but it also sounds like a threat after what he just did.

*As I know just enough Japanese to be dangerous (to myself), I happened to recognize the spoken word for "pigeon," hatto.

**That reason being that he's an energy being from space possessing an android. Don't ask me why his android brain doesn't have a useful pre-programmed database...

***Relevant link.

-Signing off.

Mad Troll Logic

So I've been in the process of trying to watch the Brave Robot series Might Gaine, because I found it on YouTube and it's been talked about as the "best-written" Brave Robot series, and I'm pretty much on board for Brave Robots in general.

(Pictured: One of the series' three recurring "standard speeches." I posted a video of this some while ago, but it was removed long ago, so the old post is half pointless. Other than the part where I explain what the heck "standard speech" means. EDIT: Hey, apparently it went back up. That's a pleasant surprise.)

I've been enjoying the show despite the fact that the subtitles took a nosedive after about ten episodes*, though I also must say that so far, I've been much less impressed with the writing than I was with J-Decker.

Admittedly, at least part of Might Gaine's problem is that when it gets silly, it gets really silly, to a degree that's a bit ludicrous. (Admittedly, J-Decker also gets really silly, but it happily wears it on its sleeve, whereas Might Gaine feels more like it's trying to be serious much of the time, and it really has a reputation for seriousness.)

Most of the show's silliness is linked to two specific villains, Shogun Mifune** and Catherine Vuitton. The following quote is a response to one of the latter's plots.

(Obviously, that's supposed to be "in order to attain your personal gains," or perhaps less oddly, "in order to achieve your personal gains," not "person gains." Whatever the heck that might mean.)

(Also, it should probably be "Nouvelle" Tokyo, as in "new" Tokyo, as opposed to "Nobel" Tokyo. The rest of it, though? Yeah, he just said "you turned [whatever] Tokyo into a city full of pumpkins, you sinner!" Probably has some oddities in the translation, but probably also still pretty close in spirit to the original meaning.)

Yes, she filled a city with pumpkins. Giant, hostile pumpkins that were crushing buildings. Never mind how she did it (there's no actual explanation), she did it because she wanted to build a pumpkin carriage because she had a dream about being Cinderella.

*Because the original subtitling group only did about ten episodes; after that, the subtitles have been not only bad but... really strange. Like, they get characters' names really wrong, and not even in a consistent or logical way. Current champ of bad names is translating "Ace no Joe" (which would be legitimately translated as "Joe of Ace" or less idiosyncratically as "Joe the Ace" or "Ace Joe") as "Driving King Kyo" and then suddenly changing it to "Wanyo" after a while.

Although a fairly close second is calling "Horn Bomber," a robot who is also a train and also also a Triceratops, first "Bull Express" and then "Cow Express."

**Shogun Mifune, since I didn't bring him up again, is a parodic Japanese patriot who wants to return the country to its pre-Western influenced social structure, with him as the boss. Aside from the fact that this means he uses lots and lots of ninjas, it seems from context that 1) he only superficially understands traditional Japanese culture (hinted at by the fact that both he and his minions are bad at reading and writing kanji in one episode), and 2) he may actually be an amusement park owner with delusions of grandeur (though I admit this is partly me reading between the lines, the park in question did in fact seem to be his organization's primary source of income). Despite these things, for the first half of the series he's treated as one of the relatively more formidable villains. Unlike Catherine Vuitton, who frankly can be pretty... bizarre and offensive at times (the pumpkin thing is one of her better plots), Shogun Mifune has a tendency to be funny while still being possible to take slightly seriously, so he's actually among my favorite villains from the series.

-Signing off.

KILLER SPACE JELLYFISH

I'm a bit tired of doing image posts lately, so here's a random video embed of a clip from a kaiju movie that features a giant space jellyfish.



While the person who posted the video was rather derisive of it, I quite liked it, not least because the monster, which was apparently "animated" primarily with a puppet that was underwater, actually looks quite eerie and interesting.

Never mind that the filmmakers had it need a diet of carbon to justify it attacking places to devour diamonds. (There are lots of better sources of carbon in the world, guys, not least because diamonds would be much harder to digest than most of them. Heck, if you want carbon so bad, do what plants do and take it out of the air.)

-Signing off.

Comedy Routines

The "Young Hunters" portion of Xros Wars, as I've intimated, isn't really as good as the main part of Xros Wars (what I've cheekily referred to as the part that's important because I care about it), because the show is suddenly about a character that it's extremely difficult to find interesting. (Considering that the extended bit was thrown in because the first part had only meh television ratings but moved a lot of toys*, it's ultimately unsurprising that a retool would screw things up at least a bit, though as previously noted it used some great formulas that could have made it a great episodic show.) In fact, the first few episodes could honestly be a bit of a slog; it wasn't until something like halfway through that things picked up and it really started engaging me.

Partly because the plots and pacing got better, but in large part because the show got a lot funnier around then. (Too bad about Tagiru still being pretty uninteresting.) For instance, this routine from episode 70, which starts with several of the protagonists entering an apparently haunted building and running to investigate, when somebody else shows up:

For clarity's sake, this girl has been harrassing Yuu there for a while; her not-at-all-subtextual approach to her interest in him is initially couched in her wanting to make him her "underling," because she's a minor antagonist and has a tendency to hold the villain ball, being portrayed as a "mean girl." (One of the things that is related to her "mean girl" nature, incidentally, is that she builds traps. Yeah, they made the pretty girl's skillset building traps. One of the big issues with the later bits of Xros Wars I don't believe I've specifically brought up is that Xros Wars' track record when it came to sexism wasn't really great, but when Young Hunters started they ramped up the problems a lot, cutting the female cast down to characters who appeared essentially as cameos. And this girl was basically the closest thing to a new regular female character.) And while I don't appreciate her overall position in the cast, I thought this was a pretty funny routine.

Funnier than that, though, was basically the entirety of episode 71, where the whole episode is spent chasing this guy:

For reference, Omegamon (aka Omnimon) is one of the all-time most powerful Digimon, in one piece of media depicted as being able to force-restart the entire Digital World with a single attack, on another occasion defeating roughly millions of enemies at roughly the most powerful stage of Digimon development, and basically being a metaphor for invincibility within Digimon media (for instance, there was a Digimon movie where the piece's villain Digimon was being chased by an Omegamon who couldn't follow him into the human world; said villain Digimon started as Apocalymon, essentially the final boss of Adventure 01, and Omegamon basically beat him within an inch of his life without apparent effort before he escaped to the human world). If this guy had actually been an Omegamon, these guys would have been in a pretty fair bit of trouble. But no, he was actually a Digimon who was based on a cosplayer (yes, really) that gains the ability to perform other Digimon's attacks by wearing costumes based on them. Not that this was actually very effective.

Did a hilarious DarkKnightmon impression, though.

*I don't see this as remotely a condemnation of the show; Kamen Rider Fourze has a lot of fans and is seen as a pretty good Kamen Rider series, but had crummy TV ratings and was mostly seen as "successful" for moving products. "Bad TV ratings" in such media actually often translates to "didn't attract the technical target audience," in this case young Japanese boys.

-Signing off.

DigiQuartz Logic

At some point, I'm probably going to go back and talk a bit more about the important bits of Xros Wars (i.e. the parts that I like), but I've not got the energy or proper time to do the large-scale post in question. Instead, here's a bit from the "Young Hunters in Time" or whatever part, where the characters are in the human world and take short trips into a weird shadow world to hunt Digimon who are using the shadow world to steal emotional energy from humans, with the intent that this theft will power them up the same way protagonist Digimon are powered up*.

Incidentally, the Digimon who is "a gorgeous man" is named SuperStarmon, and he's after celebrities because of their "star power." Like, that isn't even a joke, he's literally powering himself up by kidnapping celebrities**.

*The part of this that bothers me the most is that the "DigiQuartz" part of Xros Wars actually takes two of the best "formula show" setups I've seen ("mysterious monsters attack from a shadow world" and "emotions, feelings, and desires have real power [beyond what they can cause people to do]") and mashes them together. Unfortunately, its primary protagonist is the most boring protagonist in the history of the franchise, bar none. Basically, it's got the problems of Adventure 02 without that particular sequel series' charm***.

**Celebrities that seemingly included Marilyn Monroe, the Beatles in their heyday, Shaquille O'Neal, and Barack Obama. That begs some serious questions, particularly what some of these people were doing in what appeared to be a pretty new hotel.

***Adventure 02's problems included Davis/Daisuke (who is boring and a clear inspiration for Tagiru, the even more boring character from Young Hunters), the fact that it shoved several previously prominent characters into the background and forgot their characterization (the big one was T.K./Takeru, though one could argue that the entire 01 cast got the same treatment-and this hit Xros Wars way harder), and [expletive deleted] Myotismon (like, we were already tired of Myotismon at the end of his run in 01, we didn't need to find out he was the man behind the man behind the man lady Digimon behind the man, okay? ...the story surrounding the sole remaining villain of Xros Wars [who it is technically is a notable spoiler, though I probably would have guessed who it was if I'd been watching the show without spoiling myself] that comes from before the format change is actually something I really like, even if I don't know that I think it's handled well-though I've not yet seen all of the DigiQuartz plot for myself).

Charms included the Digimon Emperor/Ken, Arukenimon/Arachnemon, frickin' BlackWarGreymon, and the late Bob Papenbrook's performance as Daemon (if TVTropes is to believed, Daemon was generic and boring in the original Japanese version, but Papenbrook did such a good job hamming things up that the character still sticks out in my mind as a high point, despite him only showing up for, like, maybe three episodes at most, and only really fighting and being a character in one of those).

-Signing off.

Suddenly, the End of the World

And now, back to me nattering on about Digimon Xros Wars. (Sorry about the massive number of images; I've gone a little wild over the fact that the image uploader works so much better than the old one, which is silly because I've barely used the new uploader until recently.)

One of the reasons I like Xros Wars is because the villains show signs of serious competence. Late on, it's revealed that one of the major villains, DarkKnightmon, is the reason that the heroes' power exist at all-because he was interested in obtaining power through the human ability to enhance Digimon. (More on this another day.)

And then there's Bagramon*.

He comes across as a bit lazy, because he doesn't do much through the course of the series... until he suddenly intervenes about halfway through to capture the MacGuffins that the heroes have been collecting and send a group of them back to the human world. He does this with nearly no warning, from the equivalent of half a world away. In other words, the heroes gathering said MacGuffins made things easier for him, because he could grab them all in one fell swoop.

And it turns out that it didn't matter to him that they defeated the generals he'd set up to harvest negative energy (created through the suffering of Digimon), either-defeating them apparently gave him as much or more negative energy than he got without. So it's kind of justified laziness-it didn't matter what he did, he was still going to get what he wanted.

He's so unafraid of the protagonists that he starts giving them a speech when they show up. Their response (well, the lead Digimon, Shoutmon's response) is to come at him with everything they've got immediately. Unfortunately...

...that doesn't end well, and he knocks the protagonist Digimon out of their strongest combined form essentially by just squeezing their face. (The casual attitude with which he does this, by the way, immediately sold me on him as a character. "Eh, be quiet, I'm talking!")

You see, he's never once felt threatened by the protagonists, because he can rip holes in space virtually at will with his "superdimensional" powers. This is how he so casually defeated them in their last "encounter," after all.

The whole reason he didn't bother directly intervening in their approach on his headquarters? Because he figured that their ability to defeat his minions meant they were worthy to watch him bring about the end of the world. One character realizes, because they hadn't before, that Bagramon had personally been responsible for the theft of their MacGuffins and banishment to the human world, and his observation leads to this:

Boom. Just like that, Bagramon initiates a world-ending attack on the human world.

*In the Xros Wars manga, Bagramon is essentially an expy of the Paradise Lost version of Lucifer, rebelling against a god that he sees as unjust. (Which is kinda funny, because his name comes from a goofy anagram of "Gabriel.") Part of the reason for this is because he didn't understand why some Digimon, such as his brother DarkKnightmon, were born evil. Now, the manga isn't in the same continuity as the anime-in fact, one character's little brother is replaced with a little sister who seems unconnected storywise to the brother for some reason**-but it actually feels like its characterization of Bagramon is mostly consistent (from what I've read of it-I know the manga only through reference sites). Which is interesting and a bit strange, because it's one of the few cases where characterization is consistent between the two. The reason it feels consistent? Because of the relationship between Bagramon and DarkKnightmon. But more on that another day...

**The only character traits this character has in common with the character she replaced are 1) being the younger sibling of one of the protagonists, and 2) having the strongest power to fuse Digimon, which doesn't actually seem to mean very much most of the time, and being kidnapped by DarkKnightmon because of it... and incidentally using the younger sibling as a hostage to manipulate Nene, the older sister. Oh, and she apparently steals her sister's Digimon partner, whereas the brother she replaced had an interesting story about believing he was in a video game and thus cutting loose, because he had never been able to stand hurting people, and ended up killing numerous Digimon in the process, smiling the whole time because he believed they were essentially imaginary. And then he finds out the truth, and then his Digimon best friend dies. Ouch. His cross-universe sister who replaced him? She's got quirky hair. You guys could have at least given her elements of his story (or even, I don't know, given her a new story) instead of just writing those out. Sheesh.

-Signing off.