Digimon

Digimon arrived alongside Pokemon and has spent decades being dismissed as the imitator, which sells short a franchise that is darker, more serialized and far stranger. It launched in 1999 as two things at once: the anime Digimon: Digital Monsters and the survival-tinged RPG Digimon World. The television side then splintered into a string of standalone continuities, from Adventure and Tamers to Frontier, Data Squad and Fusion, each with its own children, monsters and tone.

Tamers is the artistic peak, a melancholy deconstruction that takes the premise seriously, while the Adventure tri. films and Last Evolution Kizuna age the original kids into adulthood. On the game side the Digimon World line and the Cyber Sleuth-era Story RPGs carry the interactive legacy. Across television, film and games, this is a property whose continuity is a tangle by design, every branch its own argument about what the idea means.

The Digimon franchise spans 9 series, 8 games, 17 films in the CrossBinge catalog.