Digimon Ghost Game

Episode 9

There is actually a lot about this episode that I liked, most of which can be found in the first two-thirds. For one, this is probably the first episode since the beginning that actually shows Hiro being capable of exhibiting the same amounts of fear and terror that all of our other characters are. That isn't to say he was never scared of anything that was happening up until now, but he did seem to have this attitude of immediately trying to rationalize and calmly address things like a natural problem solver. Here, however, we actually see him getting a bit unhinged and off-put with all of the strange things happening around him. Even though we as an audience already have a good idea of what's going on since the show doesn't really hide it from the very beginning, the concept of your time of being manipulated and stolen away from you is rather interesting.

We find out about how Digimon are able to hide amongst the general public and how there seem to be different tiers to their ability to conceal themselves. It's something that comes naturally to some while for others it almost feels like a skill they need to practice, and a lot of that ties into the emotions the digimon take on, which is a recurring element of the entire franchise. We find out that a lot of the Digimon are in this world against their will after being sucked in through some kind of gate—perhaps it is similar to the one that we saw at the end of the last episode? But what opened this gate in the first place and why? What does it have to do with Hiro's father who seems to be in the digital world just being super happy-go-lucky? I like that it was established that Gammamon seems to not be a normal Digimon, both subtly in the way that others admit they haven't seen anyone like him before, and overtly in the dark shadow around him making a reappearance from episode one. (Come to think about it, there sure are a lot of callbacks to that episode.)

I didn't go back to rewatch all the previous episodes and attempt to see if some of the lore was consistent with what we had before, but I could see it going either way honestly. I've noticed that children's shows tend to have a habit of establishing rules on an episode-by-episode basis rather than planning out and making sure everything stays consistent until those rules are properly laid out to the audience. However, the fact that I can't immediately think of anything that contradicted these rules is probably a good sign. At the very least, I do appreciate how the show makes it explicitly clear that everyday people don't see most Digimon, only the effects they are having on the environment. I will be paying attention to how well and consistent the rules are moving forward though. Just because this is a kid show doesn't mean it is exempt from any form of scrutiny.

My least favorite part of this episode was probably the ending, where I think was the first time in the show so far where we just kind of help someone that we know almost murdered a bunch of people. This may be one of those instances where the target audience for the show might be influencing certain story elements, because I was not expecting everyone to 100% be on board with helping clockmon not disintegrate into nothingness when him doing that to other kids was literally how he was introduced. The fact that he just becomes good at the end after he was shown mercy feels a little bit lazy to me. Other Digimon situations have been cases where they were just misunderstanding the world that they were in, so being talked out of things sort of made sense, but clockmon was actually going out of his way to attack people and held an explicit grudge with our main character. So yeah, I can't help but knock a few points off the episode because of that. It's not enough to ruin the episode as I think there is still a lot of great lore and foreshadowing here, but I just hope that the payoff for this setup isn't as disappointing as the climax for this episode.

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Digimon Ghost Game is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.