**SPOILERS**

A complete and utter reboot and reliving of the franchise. The original Digidestined are truly back and better than ever before. I cannot even think of the right words to say about how incredible this was... Toei has completely and utterly outdone themselves with this.

The art and animation is phenomenal... All of the scenes, whether casual or intense, are drawn and animated beautifully. It's truly amazing to see everyone from Adventure in such top of the line animation, so different from the animation upon its original release.

The realistic relationships and friendships between the Digidestined and how they speak to one another is portrayed so realistically, something that many shows and movies fail to do. It feels as if I'm watching my own group of friends hang out and talk; everything feels so natural and it just makes the group seem just that much closer.

In addition, I found myself both laughing out loud and with my mouth gaping open at various scenes. The emotional dynamic was done fantastically, whether in the portrayal of an extremely intense or lighthearted moment.

Overall, there is no rating high enough for what I would give this, I am completely blown away by this. It was well worth the long, agonizing wait.

Some things I loved:
- The Tai, Matt, Sora Love Triangle is back! And it doesn't seem like Sora and Matt are dating?!? Did they make that part of 02 non-canon?!?? (I HOPE SO)
- Izzy and Mimi!
- The secret organization - Even though much of this is still a mystery, it's really adding another layer onto the story and is keeping us questioning what's going on.
- Tai's moral conflicts - When he said "I'm scared" and "I'm not who I used to be"... I was speechless. This adds so much more depth to his character and we see how he's been changing as he grows up. This also leads to the next thing which was my favorite thing so far...
- Tai and Matt's Friendship - Nothing hit me like this did. From the beginning where you just see them hanging out together and talking it is obvious that they are still best friends even years after everything. When Tai began to doubt himself, Matt was the one who felt it the most and it showed by the way he reacted to Tai's uncertainty. However, although he was harsh, he supported Tai and finally when Alphamon showed up there was the scene where they grabbed each other once more, like they did when they were young, and united once again. Obviously from the scene that came after the credits of the 4th episode, Tai is still going to be having these doubts in the future, but we'll have to see if their friendship can pull it together in the end. After all, like Matt said, they're the only ones who can save the world.

All in all, once again, I am speechless. In tears. Ecstatic.

Toei, you have outdone yourselves. From a true fan, I would like to personally say thank you.

Ima be real and keep it 100. For me this anime is an ex girl of mine. We dated back in middle school and things were alright, it was one of my first loves so I was super into it. Eventually I grew tired of her because I knew what to expect and it was just super boring. We broke up and we lost contact with each other but there were a lot of nice memories that came from our relationship.

Years go by and I see my ex girl but she's super pretty now. I notice and I approach her..we talk long enough for me to find out that she has a degree now. Her new interests as well as the directions she is taking in life suck me in and I find myself falling in love yet again.

I look forward to this anime bruhs.

A gritty and serious story, following the footsteps of the original animation series.The first 8 Digidestined reunites with their partner Digimons to deliver the comedy, drama, and impactful fighting scenes we all love. The animation and screenplay was high quality and fresh, especially for the Digimons. If you loved the Season 1 series and the movie sequels before this, then you will enjoy this 4 episodes OVA.

Not saying that this is perfect, because the pace does seem a bit rushed, but I give this a 5 star because it is seriously pretty, the story is substantial to the series, and it is so much more than just a fan-service.

For those new to Digimon: First of all let me start by addressing anyone new to Digimon. I'm sure you've heard of this show one way or another. Maybe you never got into it much because of the whole Pokemon craze or maybe you only remember watching a few episodes with a soft "meh". Do yourself a favor and go watch season 1 and season 2. I know it's alot to watch in preparation for this. But trust me, by the end of season 2 you will be happy you watched them. It's not a waste of time and you won't regret it! Digimon is a show that's as smart as it looks. All you need to do is take the journey.

To get straight to Digimon Adventure Tri. what can I say other than that it's a tremendous show. The animation is top notch and while the characters are drawn slightly different than their previous seasons, it's not overly difficult to tell who is who. Based on their pre-established features you can easily identify Tai and the gang. The fights are gigantic in scale and amazing to watch. With this season more than ever you get a sense of what it might be like to see giant monsters storming overhead in a climactic battle.

What impressed me most however was the character development involved. Particularly with my favorite character of the series Taichi. I'm not going to spoil anything but we really get a sense that he is growing up, becoming more mature, he's realizing the impact he has, not only on his friends, but the city as well. Like I said, I won't give it all away but it was great to see this kind of development as it is very different from his previous character.

If I had one complaint, it would probably be that the movie did feel a bit rushed at some points. However, the movie also knew when to take its time with it's characters which it did wonderfully. To put it bluntly, Digimon Adventure tri will satisfy any Digidestined who is thinking of watching it. The show is alot like its characters it's grown up, more mature, and even slightly dark at times. However, it can also be comical with it's light heartedness too. This is the Digimon series you've been waiting for.

The key to Digimon Adventure Tri, is spotting when the dream dies. Currently the highest rated review of Tri is a glowing positive review for the film series, but closer examination reveals it was posted in November of 2015, immediately after the very first movie. It is fairly representative of how fans reacted to the series on launch, a positive outpouring of support and affection. How is it considered now? Well now it's more complicated.

As the name suggests Digimon Adventure Tri. is meant to be a second sequel to the classic kids with monsters anime Digimon Adventure, and no discussion of Tri and its failings can be performed without a look back at its roots. The original Digimon Adventure is a classic for a reason, as cheap looking as it often was the series was a real gem of a series built on an exceedingly strong cast, a fabulous world, and legitimately powerful writing. Digimon Adventure was an important series for my childhood, it was smarter, sharper, more exciting, and a smidgen more mature than just about any other kid's show I'd ever seen. Digimon Adventure was followed up with Digimon Adventure 02, a broadly maligned sequel anime that was more than a bit of a mess. Over the years 02 grew an incredibly negative reputation, and so when Tri began making the media rounds the emphasis was solely on the return of the original cast. Set 3 years 02, Tri pitched itself as a glorious return to form with the original cast. The gang is all back, Taichi, Yamato, Sora, Koushirou, Mimi, Jyou, Takeru, and Hikari are all on hand in a brand new adventure. Tri wanted to be a grown-up adventure for its cast of grown up fans, one that cut the ballast of 02 and entered a new age of Digimon. Instead it shook out to be another 02, a hot, jumbled mess of dropped plot threads, stupid characters, bizarre motivations, and muddled theme.

The actual plotline of Tri involves the original Chosen Children reuniting with their Digimon partners and being called back into action in the face of strange dimensional distortions caused by a virus that is ravaging the digital world and driving digimon into fits of destructive violence. Moreover time has eroded something in the character of our heroes, Taichi is struck for the first time with his responsiblity, Yamato looks to the past, Jyou is trying to figure out his priorities, Mimi is facing the weight of culture, and at the center of the mess is Mochizuki Meiko and her partner, Meikuumon, who are more than they appear.

Then Movie 4 happens and it all falls apart. I mention the character arcs of only half the cast and that's because Tri totally drops the ball on doing character work after movie 3. I'll be honest, I was never big into Tri. Tri bugged me from minute one because it frankly wasn't the Digimon Adventure sequel I wanted it to be, but I also realized from minute one that that was entirely a personal problem. Tri didn't explore anyone or anything I particularly wanted to see more of, and I make no secret of that, but up until movie 4 I would and will give honest praise to Tri's knack for characters and plotting. I understand and even approve of what they did with all the characters. I thought Taichi's hesitation was actually a clever and interesting progression of the character. I thought the contrast he made with Yamato did something really interesting, a clever twist on their rivalry that's at once the same and different. I loved what they did with Mimi and Jyou, Takeru makes a mistake that's totally him, Koushirou is presented in a way that's always been there in the series but comes about in a brand new light. And then movie 4 happened and we got 90 minutes of Sora acting out of character and being dumb as hell. And then movie 5 happened and the really important character developments from movie 4 suddenly didn't exist anymore. And then movie 6 happened and it was a dreary, boring slog where the character developments from movie 4 suddenly happened when they were convenient but not really. There is a clear point late in movie 3 where it all falls apart, and it's kind of breathtaking how bad the back half of Tri becomes.

A theory I've seen bandied about with regards to Tri is that halfway through they got the go-ahead for a sequel and had to scrap the pacing and closure on the series. This explains an awful lot. It explains why movie 4 was a holding pattern, why a major plotline suddenly ends for no reason, why the back half of Tri suddenly inverts itself to dump in Digimon's most overused villain, it explains why certain characters have nonsensical motivations and do erratic random things, it explains why one antagonist is put on a bus and given no closure to their arc and why another antagonist merrily skips away at the end of the film series to sequel bait, it possibly explains the really really weird trajectory of the 02 cast and why everyone is apparently holding an idiot ball regarding them. What I'm trying to get across is that Tri is structurally unsound. The back half and the front half do not come into alignment. A great many plot threads which seemed to be going in one direction suddenly abruptly end or invert themselves or trail off. A lot of foreshadowing goes nowhere, and a lot of plot beats introduced later on make almost no sense in the whole context of the series.

Additional scorn must be given to Mochizuki Meiko AKA the death of hope. Meiko set off my cynicism alarm from minute one. I had no doubt that Meiko existed to resolve the tiresome Taichi/Yamato/Sora love triangle, but I'll give credit to the writers: I started to dislike her for completely unrelated reasons. Meiko is a horrible character, though I have some sympathy for her. It's not her fault she's the wrong sort of character used in the wrong sort of way in the wrong setting with the wrong story and given the wrong character arc. Meiko is mildly interesting early on because she's set up as a direct contrast to the main cast and she has some really great scenes with Mimi, but it turns out with the benefit of hindsight those scenes were great entirely because of Mimi (who is probably the only person to come out of Tri looking good). Meiko is meant to be much more ordinary and normal and in over her head than the rest of the cast, but unlike someone like Takato from Digimon Tamers in practice what this means is that she fails at everything and always makes the wrong choice. Meiko is boring, every time she tries she fails and the longer it goes on the less patience I had with her. Meiko manages to succeed exactly one time in the entire series, not without help and not without people pushing her to actually make the right choice, and then it's only to finally resolve the one piece of foreshadowing Tri actually kept all the way through.

Meiko's failure ties into Tri's other major failure: Tri is totally pants at keeping a consistent theme. As Tri progresses the series starts trying to put together a unifying theme, but it's very much in vain. Tri posits a theme about overcoming loss and how you can't go home again, but the series is remarkably maladroit at actually pulling through. One character is described as being driven mad by loss and this is meant to be in contrast to someone else, but we see so little of this person's real character that the parallel implied is a joke. A major thing happens in movie 4 with the message that everything will become different, but it isn't. "You can't go home again" says Tri, but it turns out that the place you go when you leave home is remarkably similar to your metaphorical home, and oh actually you can go home again. Wow, that was easy. At the very very end of Tri the characters start making noise to the effect that the theme is moving forward and creating a bright future, but that's only at the very last minute and if that's really the point they wanted to make it looks bad alongside Tri's downright bleak ending.

So how's the production work? Quite good actually. The animation is solid, not 100% of the time but solid enough that you can tell it had a good budget. I think most of the character designs are a little bit too same-y, but I've no deep issues with them and you can still definitely tell them apart. The digimon look a little off to me and I'm not a fan of the evolution sequences but that's all purely stylistic and it's not like they look bad. The OST is good, Butterfly remains a wonderful song, Brave Heart is still my least favorite evolution theme of all time but it's here as well as it probably should be. Cinematography is excellent and the battles are good. The action isn't Xros Wars or V-Tamers or Appmon levels of good but it's not bad either. The cast equip themselves well to the work, and all the new cast are real good ringers for the original characters. Tri is a pretty enough movie series to watch, it's too bad about the "listening" part of things.

The punchline to Tri is how bad it looks in comparison to the other Digimon media that came out during its lifespan. Tri wanted to tell a mature grown-up story about Digimon and dealing with regret and about the pains and virtues of growing up and moving forward, but it flubbed it. Fortunately there's Digimon Story Cyber Sleuth/Hacker's Memories which ACTUALLY told a story about all those things. Cyber Sleuth/Hacker's Memories effortlessly hits a lot of the mature storytelling beats Tri struggled to land. Similarly Tri wanted to be a forward looking Digimon series that would represent the franchise's strengths and lead the way into the future, but the show that actually did that was the excellent Digimon Universe Appli Monsters. Appmon is a fantastic show with the same mix of strong characters, powerful writing, and wonderful setting that turned Digimon Adventure into a hit almost 20 years ago. The ending of Tri and Appmon are almost mirror images of each other, except that Appmon earned its final moments whereas Tri just kept on flubbing it. Hell, Tri looks bad compared to all the good previous seasons of Digimon. Tri isn't as consistently good as Digimon Adventure, it hasn't got the maturity of Digimon Tamers, and it hasn't got the energy and passion of Digimon Savers. Tri is a drag, and mores the pity for it.

Tri is bad. It's not bad from the beginning, but it's quite bad by the end. Tri is also an excellent case study for why it's important to reserve judgment. I saw so many people completely on board with Tri giving rave reviews of the first movie in a six movie franchise, and unfortunately those people gave a definitive evaluation far too early. It was fascinating to watch how Tri moved the fanbase, rave reviews gave away to profound disgust and disappointment and finally, and most damning, into silence. Still, Tri made a boatload of money for Toei and so we're getting a sequel. Heck, maybe it'll even be good. Hope for the best, be ready for the worst, that's the Digimon Adventure Tri way.

But man, oh man, the more I watch the worse it seems to get.

There are definitely some hard-hitting emotional scenes, and the nostalgia game is strong, but we spend a frankly ridiculous amount of time sitting around talking. It's frustrating listening to everyone act like Mei has it worse than any other Chosen Child in history before her. Literally EVERY goggle-boy in the franchise has had to deal with the "I pushed too hard and my partner digivolved into something uncontrollably violent oh god how do i stop this" problem that is at the core of Mei's issues. Somehow Taichi has zero advice for her?? Idk he forgot about that Skullgreymon episode in 01, I guess. The digibattles take a hit due to the budgeting constraints, and that makes me so sad because we finally get to see everyone's Mega stage on the screen, and it often feels like a waste because we get there and it's never enough power to deal with Meicoomon. We muddle around a lot and I'm not sure what the theme is supposed to be: "being an adult is hard and involves feeling really ineffectual all the time"? "Learn to let go"?

The ending is also really disappointing. We do finally mention the 02 kids, but we never see them (with the exception of the fake!Kaiser, Takeru, and Hikari). Omegamon gets a sweet mode change in the last ep, but it wasn't really clear to me how we unlocked that (I'm guessing it was somehow vaguely connected to all the Digimon getting their memories back and the Chosen Children avoiding the Reboot). Koji Wada's music throughout is super fab, and everyone sings Butterfly during the end credits, though, and it was beautiful and really tugged at my heartstrings. Like, I'm glad tri exists if only for how sweet the image album will be once I find it, but I don't really know how to feel about the actual anime itself, y'know?

Having just finished the last episode I feel exhausted. It was a bumpy ride for sure; inconsitend quality in animation, dialog & storytelling, but damn it, am I glad this exists. Blame it on nostalgia but something always kept me watching, or at least rewinding when I drowsed off after another painfully long or needlessly vague and confusing scene. I could go more into detail, however, quite fankly, I don't want to. I dont regret the watch, I don't even regret the wait between parts, so long you could easily forget tri was still a thing.
Finally, maybe this wasn't satisfing in the way many would have hoped for. And most definitly could this project have benifited from stronger direction. But a younger me found bits and pieces he always wanted to see or wondered about and an older me was amused to see which other parts of pop cultre influenced the final confrontation.
I guess, I really wanted to remember this addition to the series fondly that tought so many kids of my generation that it is okay to be a dreamer, essential to chase your dreams and important to stand for what you believe in.
I will always have a soft spot for Digimon Adventure and tri didn't change that in the slightest.

One of my biggest peeves is Meiko and Meicoomon. Why are both of their names so similar???? It just annoys the heck out of me. Also Meicoomon's character design is way off from the other digimon, stands out like a sore thumb.

This series started out really exciting, and getting to see all the original characters grown up. I truly struggled getting through the Coexistence episodes. It feels like everyone involved in this project stopped caring half way through.

I'm sure most of those 5 star reviews are based 100% on nostalgia.

The show definitely had my hopes set high in the first few episodes, but then it slowly kind of fell flat due to the way that the plot progressed. It was as if more time and energy was spent developing the beginning and not so much on the ending.

Having the characters that I grew up with come back was just fantastic to me! Seeing them grow up and how they changed was a fun journey. Getting to see new relationships build was fun as well. (small spoilers ahead)

The final battle was the most anti-climatic thing I have seen in a long time. It was just so boring and plan, and wasn't even fun visually to watch. There also didn't feel like a lot of payoff for the characters themselves like they didn't grow or change much. There was too much time spent on the Digimon's evolutions that there was no screen time left to add any depth to the characters or at least, that is how it felt.