Some interesting ones, some less interesting ones.
I started reading the One shots with my phone held to the screen with a translator app, but that was just too much of a bother after a while, so I'm mostly just going by the overall vibes, art and such.
Naturally that adds a bit of a twist to critiquing them. Say your are reading something without understanding the dialogue but you can still follow the story; Was that because the visual storytelling was
that strong, or because the story was just
that predictable? I think both of those cases happened at various points.
Digimon Bloom
The big winner, or at least the biggest winner announced so far. And while it wouldn't have been my first choice but it's clearly very competent.
As would be expected, many of the artists have good, polished skills when it comes to drawing anime people but clearly not much experience with monsters so the Digimon look off.
Digimon Bloom is a good example of this, the art for Lila is very consistent and expressive but many of the Digimon show struggles with details or even just proportions.
Overall Bloom is... interesting. Very much shoujo-esque, from the quirky teen girl main character to the general emphasis of emotion and personal relationships over physical conflicts. And why not? It is perhaps an environment where the notion of Digimon partners as their own independent characters would come more naturally. Overall it's a good showing and the idea of game servers shutting down equating to a digital world apocalypse is definitely a highlight.
20 Year Samurai
Out of all the higher placing entries this is clearly the
strangest. I appreciate the more low key approach, the exploration of the mundane with a guy just having a Digimon sticking around for decades without a big adventure. But towards the second half it just seems to derail into the standard Shounen cliche of "fighting with my partner omg". I expected something more idiosyncratic to capitalize on the unique setup. Just okay overall.
DIGITAL MONSTER CHILDREN:CODE
So about the point of the Digimon art sometimes looking off... in this one both humans and Digimon don't look too good. Easily the weakest looking entry visually, not just in terms of detail but also other aspects of execution; The humans just look like stock anime designs, facial expressions are stiff and limited, poses look awkward and the panels don't flow well.
Are there any interesting concepts story wise? Doesn't really look like it. In fact the story seems mostly like a random cyber sleuth side quest and the final confrontation is ripping off the Adventure movie wholesale.
So honestly I don't see how this one got placed this high, with how bad it looks and how generally derivative it is.
Digimon Variants
Looks okay but feels like fanfiction and that's not a compliment.
By featuring a V-pet Champion protagonist, a cast mostly consisting "underutilized" Digimon, the standard "getting the weakling into shape" plot culminating in avenging conveniently killed off friends,
Variants spends just a bit too much time pandering and not enough time innovating.
It's not that featuring a few Digimon species that are not frequently used which is inherently bad, in fact just by itself it's good... but when the story doesn't do anything with them that wasn't already done before, it comes off as wanting to cruise on the nerd cred alone. The only twist that
Variants adds to the classic underdog story is featuring a dead Data Jogress at the end, which feels like something that would normally be a dark evolution but in this story works out quite alright.
Compared to the other manga this one seems very text heavy or perhaps that's just due to the placement of speech bubbles and the mostly uninteresting backgrounds.
The art is a mixed bag, but veering towards good. Human characters look great, Digimon tend to look really nice in close ups and the big money shots but when it comes to anything from medium to long distance there are clear issues with proportions or just perspective in general. The design for the human bad guy character is
wild, he probably has more monstrous fangs than many Digimon. That's interesting at least.
On to the "Final choices" because the two that I was able to track down were just straight up more interesting and novel than the bigger prize winners. So much so that when I first looked at the digimon.net page I thought it was counting
down to the best.
COLD OPEN - Digimon Another Story
This one is my absolute favorite.
Thicker lines, deep shadows, heavy use of cross hatching and a general looser look that tends to avoid angular designs. It reminds me of the style of Youichi Abe and I really like his works. The panel layout is dense, varied and dynamic. It's not too action focused but for the action there is, it has a good sense of flow.
And to unique artwork we can add a good sense of atmosphere and a setting that sets it apart from the rest. It really needed to because, some interesting art and characters aside, the other settings limply fluctuate between "generic modern day Japan" and "generic modern day Japan with mainstream Digimon battles". Cold Open on the other hand is Post-apocalyptic, with flashes of a human vs Digimon military conflict, something
actually memorable.
As a side note, I am normally not a big fan of the rounded moe style for people but it works for me in
Cold Open as a contrast to the heavy atmosphere (a good comparison for this would be Shoujo Shuumatsu Ryokou).
For something I was reading without translation I was impressed how engaging the story was to follow just from what was conveyed by the art. Needless to say I'm particularly hoping for a translation for this one.
Also besides generally being good quality, what makes
Cold Open stand out to me the most is that its particular style with its deliberate roughness and high contrast shading is a fairly close approximation of the "classic" Kenji Watanabe style of Digimon artwork. Not quite as detailed, but for a serialized work that is to be expected, but with the same grungy feel and for that reason alone I wish it had won. It presents an opportunity, a style that Digimon is already associated with but in terms of Manga unlike anything the franchise ever tried.
It's also generally far removed from what most Shounen series are going for, which might have made it too "experimental" for Bandai.
Digimon Daybreaker
Another really good one. The overall feel of the art is very
traditional. Many of the other entries are drawn in full digital style and I am not saying that this is inherently a negative but they do have a very different aesthetic to them, with their distinct textures and their more smooth and glossy shading enabled by native grayscale. Here we can see the distinct screen toner patterns in every shaded surface, and with different brightness levels using different patterns this really adds an additional layer of detail to the style, and while of course all of the toner patterns can and (and probably were) drawn digitally the analog style really enriches the artwork.
Aside from that the art is sleek and expressive. Kariku Kiichi showcases a decent variety of face types for his characters and the emotional range he gets out of Digimon is great too, especially for Bakemon. Like Tenya Yabuno, he sometimes integrates a chibi style to add additional emotion and it is done skillfully enough to not break the overall tone which is, like
Cold Open, a bit more on the intense side. I'm not exactly sure what is happening but the main character himself seems a bit unhinged at times.
There's some obvious Tamers inspiration going on, both in the design of the main tamer character as well as the use of cards (this time around from the modern card game naturally). Action panels look impressive and special attacks are portrayed impressively flashy.
The last few pages rack up a decent amount of tension before finishing with a perhaps a little too fanservice-y cliffhanger. Really good general impressions though.
Candy Shop Kogaya
The first of two one-shots that is not fully available to read yet, so there's not much I can say about it. It didn't look too interesting at first but The artist did
post a few pages on twitter, and they look really good (and there's some really nice action artwork on twitter and pixiv too); For some reason bandai chose to use on of the most underwhelming looking panels for the preview. Hopefully the full version gets posted soon.
Alien Reincarnation Zyuuger
The meme entry and I'm honestly not too excited. Partly because "Leomon dying" hasn't been funny for years, partly because the whole genre of repetitive Isekai that banks on using self awareness of being cliched as a poor substitute for actual novelty is so annoying that I wouldn't want Digimon associated with it even for a joke.
Once again, there are
some further pages posted on twitter, although the full manga is still not available.
I have to say it
looks really nice so I hope we'll see it fully released for the art alone.
Also one interesting aspect from the twitter pages is that the manga seems to have
skirted the rules of the contest a bit, as one of the pages shows the sprite of Ohakadamon meaning it technically features a Digimon that is not yet in the DRB.
So that's all and in the end I can see why Bandai went with
Digimon Bloom as the winner; It's something new, but fairly safe because it's a genre that Digimon has not heavily utilized but which is clearly established in general.
