Saturday, September 24, 2016

Digimon Adventure Tri Part 3: Confession Review - You Know Nothing!

Written by Shiggins

Part 1 Review: CLICK HERE

Part 2 Review: CLICK HERE

It's finally here and we've now officially reached the halfway point of the Tri movie series, in which your childhood engage in many conversations, meet new characters and possibly begin the relationships with each other that we've all been shipping since we were like 8. Unfortunately however, "Confession" is by far the weakest of the series so far and is really showing the disadvantage of only releasing a sixth of it's story every few months.

That evil Digimon has boobs by the way. Digimon are "genderless" supposedly, but I've seen Lilithmon and this with boobs. LadyDevimon exists but...!
Note: This review is mostly SPOILER-FREE.

If you would like my thoughts on spoilers or specific things in the Tri series, please ask in comments below!

For those of you who can't remember, Part 2 ended with the mysterious re-appearance of the Digimon Emperor from Adventure 2, who disappeared after the defeat of an evil Imperialdramon after Joe and Mimi finally stopped complaining and had their Digimon kick awesome ass in Mega forms, and then new protagonist Meiko's Digimon partner Meicoomon becomes hostile and kills beloved comrade Leomon before escaping as well. Also, Part 1 made me ship Tai with Matt, and Izzy with Mimi, while my childhood made me ship T.K with Kairi.

In that paragraph alone, you already have quite a few lines to follow and the possibility of mysteries being answered is what drove me to this movie so quickly. Sadly, the series would rather do what every Hollywood film does these days and focus on answering the questions in the future, while also adding even more along the way. The result is a movie that's far too clustered and has me worried if Tri is going to collapse under all the pressure.

I apologise if I use the dub names when I should use the sub names and this annoys you. It's a part of my childhood that my present self is trying to overcome.
I'll start by complimenting the film and saying the animation is back up to the highest tier like in Part 1. Part 2 had some decline, but Part 3 almost never drops from start to finish. The voicework seems good, although Gatomon's amazingly mature voice still freaks me out, and the music... oh, the music has gotten wonderful. It was mostly forgettable in Parts 1 and 2, but Confession has some of the best scores you'll hear in anime this year.

If you're a fan of the new characters in Tri, you'll be happy to know they get plenty of time in this... In fact, I'd argue they get far too much. Meiko has established herself as a very likeable and interesting character, but Confession seems devoted to making sure you feel nothing but sorrow for her. She spends every five minutes in this movie crying or needing cheered up, as if she's a baby. She's not the strongest character out there, and I assume in the future she'll do something great, but right now it's almost unbearable how often we needed to see someone comfort and coddle her. It doesn't help that we waited literally months to see her again, and all we got was her being like this.

Does this count as a cameo? Because my childhood already squee'd!
The other two new characters also go on for far too long. Maki Himekawa is obviously being built up as a future villain, but she and her associate, the innocent homeroom teacher Daigo Nishijima, don't do anything worth noting except one smiles evilly when nobody sees her and the other is worried about the Digidestined. If you wrote them out the story, you'd miss nothing.

Speaking of the Digidestined, Izzy isn't developing like I expected him to. By which I mean, he's not really developing. He's easily the most helpful member of this chapter, working hard at his computer to the point of exhaustion and frustration while time is running out. The downside of this though is that he's the exact same at the start as he is at the beginning, which begs the question; Why couldn't they have him do something to further his character as well?

In my Part 2 review, I mentioned how the Digimon feel like side-characters and for the first half of this movie, that's still the case. I can't believe I'm saying this but I really started to hate Agumon, who's voice and bad jokes pissed me off to the extent where I just wanted to drown him. Thankfully, the second half really fixes that and gives the 8 Digimon the attention they deserve.

This is pretty much the only contribution they make for the first half of the movie.
When the Digimon do start to go through their own drama, it's amazing. After a fairly awful info dump that I'll explain in a moment, the Digimon all just spend time with their partners in sweet but almost heartbreaking ways. This is one of the best scenes of the series, and I won't dare spoil it. You have to see it. That's how amazing it is.

As for the info dump scene, it's pretty bad. The one who explains this comes out of nowhere, literally, and drops absolutely tons of exposition and mystery on you without a pause for breath. Mentioning things like "God" and "reboots", it's really troubling to suddenly see in a series that's already filled with too many mysteries as it is.

You'll notice this review doesn't talk about the 8 of them that much. That's because, unfortunately, there is so much exposition and time with the new characters that they barely do anything worth noting down... except T.K but we'll get to him.
One scene that isn't bad however is the climax, which is just wonderful. As you can tell by the poster, Tentomon is the true star here and he absolutely shines in this entire chapter, with the climax being his best moment. The appearance of HerculesKabuterimon is fantastic, the words he speaks are beautiful, the animation, the violence, the tension... Oh I want to cheer so much over this. Tentomon, you're the star of Part 3.

The true golden boy of Part 3.
The ending itself is interesting, although causes hesitation. It's an ending that opens up a lot of possibilities, good and bad, but could also end up being a pointless side-route to create cheap drama in the long run. Right now, I really like this ending but future movies could ruin it if they go down a certain path.

On a final note, don't get excited for an actual "confession". With all the romances that are building up and all the unexplained phenomenon going on, the confession itself is a disappointment. It's T.K who confesses, but it's to something he did in this episode alone and that was nothing short of a dumb decision. I was screaming at T.K during this entire chapter to reverse the choices he was making involving Patamon, but he never listened. When I realised that this was the confession, I felt disappointment. 

If my friends saw my butt glitching (and they watch my butt a lot!), then they'd know what to do! For some reason, T.K does not.
To sum up, Confession is not the step forward I was hoping for at this point, and the fact that this is not a weekly series only makes it hurt more. It's too interested in adding more mysteries instead of answering past ones, and the pacing is absolutely killed by the new characters taking up space that should be given to others. Thankfully, the climax and the previously mentioned scene involving the Digimon with their partners save the day. Let's just hope the next episode "Loss" doesn't take a bad path...

Manga Rating: 2.5/5

Character of the Movie: Tentomon, for his support with Izzy and the beautiful climax.

Best Part: HerculesKabuterimon! 

Worst Part: Meiko...

The creators made this! They did this! It's brilliant! I love it!
Shiggins:[Admin]   .
Born under the stars of the Dark Gods, Shiggins owns the power of the Great Eye and is utterly magnificent in his omniscience. If you dare to discover more about someone as great as him, then go ahead. And to all my friends and family members, YOU are wrong and I should be disappointed! Not the other way round!,. You can find out about him or ask him stuff on ask.fm/shigginsishere or go to his tumblr page http://otakugajeel.tumblr.com/

3 comments:

  1. I think for Japanese audiences confessions had a different meaning than what you were probably expecting such as Meiko confessing that she knew Meicoomon was always different compared to other digimon.

    for Izzy it's not a lack of anything it's just to show that for the first in his smart life he's struggling with trying to figure this mystery out and as Tentomon said to him he's lost that passion he had for learning new things and enjoyed having fun learning new stuff. part 3 being the half way point I feel sets the point of where they all had personal hardships to learn on what will happen to their partners here. so for right now I say it's going at a decent enough pace to set the story of what happens next

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    1. I suppose so, but even with that title out of the equation, I still spent a lot of time disappointed in this section. I do think this episode set up quite a lot of interesting things, especially that ending, but there's so much to get through and we're already halfway done. I'm worried, but I hope I don't have reason to be.

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    2. I think it's one of those time will tell things since with 3 parts left that are roughly near 2 hours long they have the time to take this slowly before doing reveals and explanations on what's what.

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