Let's Raise a Couple of Digital Buddies! Let's Play Digimon 20th Ver.

LoakaMossi · November 12, 2019, 1:21am

In 2017, Bandai released an updated version of their original Digimon virtual pet toy. In July of this year, the toy was released in English in the U.S., the U.K., and Australia. It’s either a GameStop or EBGames exclusive, depending on the country.

I’ve always been fascinated by virtual pets, but I was slightly too young to remember their heyday. Since I have no experience raising a virtual pet, I thought we could raise one together!

To my knowledge, there’s no way to hook these things up to a capture card. As a result, I’ll just be taking pictures of my pet. There’s literally no other way to record it, so sorry.

And here’s our title screen! I’ll take this time to note: the backgrounds for my images are going to be inconsistent. I’m still in school, so my ability to control my surroundings is limited.

We only get four characters, so I’ll use the name of my first Tabletop Character.

And here’s our first egg, or “digitama,” depending on which translation you’re going with.

They’ll take a minute to hatch, so let’s go through those icons.

First up is Stats. This displays our digimon’s name, their age and weight, their hunger, strength, and effort, along with battle information which I’ll go into once we start fighting.

Here’s Food. This lets us feed our Digimon Meat and Vitamins. Meat refills their Hunger, Vitamins refills their Strength. Both increase our Digimon’s weight. If you want to lower it’s weight . . .

. . . you can go to Training. Training gets you a little minigame; again, I’ll explain more once we start training.

Next up we have the Coliseum whi- Oh!

Turns out, I can’t take nine pictures in a minute. I’ll introduce this guy in a bit, but I’ll just explain the remaining icons.

The fifth icon on top is Clean; your digimon will poop, and that button gets rid of that poop. If you get four turds on screen, your digimon will get sick.

First icon on the bottom is Bedtime; your digimon will go to sleep at night, and that button turns out the lights and gives them a blanket. If you don’t give your digimon their blanket within 10 minutes of their bedtime, you get a Care Mistake. I’ll explain those at the end of the post.

BTW, you can also give your digimon naps! If you give them their blanket before their bedtime, they’ll take a three hour nap. They’ll sleep through the night if you time it right; for instance, if your digimon takes a nap one hour before their bedtime, they’ll continue sleeping until the next morning.

The second icon on the bottom is Healing; your digimon can get injured during fights or get sick either randomly or through a dirty pen. The healing icon fixes them right up.

The third icon on the bottom is Album; this keeps track of a few things, but, most importantly, it tracks every digimon you’ve ever raised.

The fourth icon on the bottom is Connect; this allows you to fight with other digital pets. Amazingly, this has some pretty wide compatibility. It connect with both languages of the 20th Ver., the original release if you still have one of those, the pedometer digivices, and both the original release and the 20th Ver. release of the Digimon Pendulum, which will hopefully get a stateside release.

And finally, we have the Call icon. This is not an icon you select; rather, if it starts flashing, your digimon needs attention. Either they’re hungry, weak, or sleepy, and you gotta fix that.

And hi there, little buddy! This is Botamon. He’s the first baby digimon you’ll get on this toy, as well as the first released.

As you can see, he’s a little bit of a handful.

But he’s appreciative! Ain’t he cute?

Now, unlike the anime, digimon age based on time. So after ten minutes . . .

. . . we have a little Koromon! Although, he’s looking decidedly un-Koromon like.

Aww, but he’s happy to be here!

In this toy, Koromon is classified as a Baby II stage digimon. Because of their nature as virtual pets, the digimon toys use developmental stage based names instead of the experience based names the English dub of the anime uses. So instead of Baby and In-Traning, we just have Baby and Baby II.

He’s zero As old, and he weighs 18 Gigabytes.

Now that all that’s out of the way, I can talk about Care Mistakes. There are only three ways to get a Care Mistake in this version of the toy: Let your digimon’s Hunger stay at zero for ten minutes, letting their Strength stay at zero for ten minutes, or not giving them their blanket within ten minutes of bedtime. Care Mistakes reset at each stage, but if you get 20 of them in one stage, your digimon will die.

There are a few things that influence how your Digimon evolves. When going from Baby II -> Child, all that matters is Care Mistakes. If you get two or less, you get one type. If you get three or more, you get the other type. I’d like to let you all choose which type you want, but I think I’ve already gotten three Care Mistakes. I have classes and I’m a bad parent.

Because I can’t promise specific evolutions, I’m going to have you all participate in a different way. The 20th Ver. allows you to raise two digimon at once. You unlock the second slot when your first digimon reaches the Child stage. It takes six hours for a Baby II digimon to evolve, so little Koromon won’t evolve until 10:00 p.m. However, their bedtime’s at 9:00 p.m. and digimon don’t evolve in their sleep, so we won’t see their new form until tomorrow morning. In the mean time, I’d like you all to help me pick an egg so we can hatch a new sibling for them!

The first five eggs you get are based on the first five versions of the digimon toy, so here are our options:

Version 1
Version 2
Version 3
Version 4
Version 5

There are other eggs we’ll unlock later on, but for now, pick your favorite!

Version 1
Version 2
Version 3
Version 4
Version 5

0 voters

Also, if you want to name our little Koromon something, go right ahead! Just keep in mind, they’re going to change their appearance a lot.

LoakaMossi · November 12, 2019, 5:38pm

Day 2

Our little Koromon slept soundly through the night. But it’s time to wake up now!

It’s time for breakfast, little guy.

I though I would have enough time to get ready this morning, but just as I was making my own breakfast, Koromon started beeping and demanding my attention.

Say hello to Betamon! If you have two or fewer Care Mistakes, you get Agumon. But I screwed up a few too many times, so here we are with Betamon.

Most digimon smile as their idle animation, but Betamon knows he only exists because I screwed up, so he shouts at me instead. Or maybe he’s just yawning.

Our little guy is growing up big and strong! At one As old he now weighs 46 Gigabytes.

Evolving takes a lot of energy, so Betamon is hungry again. Now that we’re preparing for their Adult evolution, we have a few more variables to consider. Care Mistakes are still a factor, but we also have to consider Training and Overfeeding.

Since we’re already feeding him, let’s look at Overfeeding.

When your digimon is full, you can keep feeding them. Once they get so stuffed that they outright refuse more food, you’ve officially Overfed them.

Oh jeez, I made him put on 11 extra Gigabytes! Weight only matters once you’ve hit 99 Gigabytes; at that point, your digimon will start getting weaker. That being said, we also need to introduce Training!

Hitting the Training icon takes you to this screen. Your goal is to push the A button as many times as you can in a set time limit. But here’s the thing:

It’s hard to button mash when you’re focused on taking a good picture.

There we go!

You did it Betamon!

Training replenishes strength while reducing weight. Vitamins, if you recall, raise both strength and weight. You’re expected to rely on Vitamins more often than not, though, because training also affects evolution.

Speaking of which, let’s talk about Betamon’s future! They have five options; three of these are shared with Agumon while two are unique to Betamon. All of the eggs follow this pattern; seven Adult digimon, three of which are shared between the two children, four of which are split between the two children as exclusives.

Betamon’s five options are: Devimon, Airdramon, Meramon, Seadramon, and Numemon. Devimon, Meramon, and Numemon are shared between Agumon and Betamon. Betamon is the only one that can evolve into Airdramon and Seadramon, while Agumon is the only one that can evolve into Greymon and Tyrannomon. The requirments for each evolution can be a little hard to follow, but I’ll do my best.

If you get two or less Care Mistakes, Betamon will evolve to either Devimon or Meramon. If you train fifteen or fewer times, you’ll get Meramon. If you train sixteen or more times, you’ll get Devimon. Overfeeding is not taken into account here; you can overfeed Betamon zero times or a dozen times, it will not change anything for these two evolutions.

If you get three or more Care Mistakes, Betamon will evolve into Airdramon, Seadramon, or Numemon. If you train between eight and fifteen times, Betamon will either evolve into Airdramon or Seadramon. If you Overfeed Betamon two or less times, they’ll evolve into Airdramon. If you Overfeed them three or more time, they’ll evolve into Seadramon. If you fall outside of these requirements, you’ll get Numemon.

Yeesh, that’s a lot of things to take into account, isn’t it? I plan on training Betamon more than eight times, but less than fifteen. That will prevent us from getting Numemon, but it also prevents us from getting Devimon. I’m also trying to overfeed Betamon three times; we’ll either get Meramon or Seadramon depending on how many Care Mistakes I get.

This is how the toy expects you to keep track of your training, by the way. Each full heart represents four training session. It’s a little annoying, but the requirements are set up such that you can use it predict your evolutions.

I’m not going to pick an egg juuust yet. I’ll probably close the poll around 4:00 p.m. tonight, so if you want to see what’s in a specific egg, make sure to vote! I’ll also accept suggestions for names for any of our digimon. Right now, I’ve been calling Betamon “Little Guy,” but if you want a different name, please suggest it!

I meant to say this in the last post, but if you have a virtual pet like this, whether it’s another Digimon, a Tamagotchi, or even something like a Giga Pet, feel free to post pictures of it!

EDIT: I just remembered my class is from 4:30 to 6:30, so I’d need to hatch that egg around four, so I changed the poll closing time.

LoakaMossi · November 13, 2019, 5:17pm

Day 3

It’s time to raise a sibling for Little Guy! To select an egg, you first press the C button, which takes you to this screen.

You then push A and B at the same time to bring up the Egg Select menu. After that, A cycles through the eggs and B elects one.

Come to think of it, I never did explain the buttons on this thing, did I? From top to bottom, the buttons are A, B, and C. A cycles through options, B selects options, and C backs out of menus. Generally speaking, you can remember each button’s function through a simple mnemonic:

C for Cancel
A for Alternate
B for ick

One minute later, our new little buddy is born!

Say hello to Punimon!

Little Guy meets their new sibling. Either they’re bored, upset, or that’s just how they show enthusiasm

After ten minutes, Punimon evolves into Tsunomon!

He looks much more like Tsunomon than Koromon looked like Koromon.

I’m not going to let Tsunomon down like I did Little Guy. No Care Mistakes this time!

Pictured: Betamon realizing he’s not the favorite and taking it out on Tsunomon.

Tsunomon’s bed time is 9:00 p.m., so it’s off to dreamland.

Betamon’s bed time is 10:00 p.m., so he crawls into bed an hour later.

Just like yesterday, Tsunomon evolves shortly after I woke up. Meet Gabumon!

I should be wary of giving them a name based on how I think their evolution will go, but how does Jack sound? Gabumon seems to like the name!

I could overfeed him a couple of times, just in case I make a few Care Mistakes. But what’s life without a little risk?

The evolution I’m going for doesn’t need training, but I’ll train him anyway. Got to stay in shape, after all! He said, having never been in shape. . .

Gabumon is the evolution you get with two or fewer Care Mistakes. If you make three or more, you get Elecmon. I think Little Guy knows this.

Oh my God, Little Guy no! It’s not his fault! It’s not that I love Jack more, I just learned from the mistakes I made raising you!

OK, I’m just playing around; your digimon won’t actually start beating each other up. When you have two digimon, you unlock a new type of training that trains both of them at once! It sucks!

You press A or B; A attacks high, B attacks low. The digimon on the right attacks according to your button press, but the digimon on the left blocks randomly. So it’s just random. The training succeeds if you get three attacks in, but you don’t really have control over that!

Anyway, here’s Jack’s stats. At 39 gigabytes, he’s a pretty good weight.

Little Guy, though ironically named, is also at a pretty good weight. I overfed him a couple of times. I think I’ll be getting Seadramon, but you can’t track Care Mistakeds or Overfeeding on the toy itself, so I might get Meramon or Airdramon.

It takes a Child 24 hours to become an adult, but that counter only ticks down when the digimon is awake. So I think Little Guy will be evolving around 2:00 p.m.

Having two digimon also lets you feed both at once. You can do the same thing with vitamins.

For now, let’s talk about Jack. Jack, like all of the basic Child digimon, has five options for their Adult form: Kabuterimon, Angemon, Garurumon, Frigimon, and Veggiemon.

Bizarrely, Kabuterimon and Angemon are the “correct” evolutions here. If you get two or fewer Care Mistakes, you get one of them. If you trained fifteen or fewer times, you get Angemon. If you trained sixteen or more times, you get Kabuterimon. I’ll say it right now; I’m trying to get Angemon. This is just a record in case I screw up.

Garurumon and Frigimon are the 3+ Care Mistakes options. Both of them also require you to overfeed Gabumon three or more times. If you trained Gabumon five or more times, but also fifteen or fewer times, you’ll get Garurumon. If you train sixteen or more times, you’ll get Frigimon. Just in the course of writing this update, I’m changing my mind on overfeeding. I might overfeed Gabumon three times; that way, if I keep up on my training, Gabumon will evolve into either Garurumon or Angemon.

Veggiemon is your Junk Mon. If you don’t meet any of the other requirements, you’ll get a Veggiemon.

Jack will not evolve until tomorrow, and he’ll probably evolve around 2:00 p.m. I think my next update will be when both of our buddies are Adults.

I think my next poll will, unfortunately, be when both of our pets pass away. I’ll let y’all pick two eggs at once, and we’ll see how I do raising two babies at the same time.

In the mean time, let me know if you have a name suggestion for our pets! I’m partial to Little Guy and Jack, but I’m open to suggestions!

And, again, feel free to share your experience with digital pets of all kinds! I pretty much missed out on the whole craze, but I still love hearing about them.

Fefnir · November 13, 2019, 5:31pm

Name one of 'em Veggiemon. That’ll show 'em.

They can still be any of the evolutions that isn’t Veggiemon. They’re just named Veggie.

heyboots · November 14, 2019, 1:42am

I had a tamagotchi when they were the new hotness. I think I stuck with it for like two weeks.

LoakaMossi · November 14, 2019, 9:40pm

Day 4

Little Guy evolved in the middle of my last class yesterday! He evolved around 5:30 or so, so I was way off with my estimate.

He’s a Seadramon now, and he’s our first Adult digimon! I know I said I’d wait until we got two Adults, but there’s enough content here for an update.

Evolving to Seadramon required me to Overfeed Little Guy three times, so he’s put on a few extra gigabytes. They couldn’t lose weight through training because if I had trained more than fifteen times, he would have evolved into Numemon. Being at 99g makes a digimon weaker, which is going to be a problem because we have to start fighting now.

Thankfully, we’re free to train as much as we want as an Adult!

Little Guy is in better shape now, and he’s ready to start fighting.

This is our Digital Power. It’s a stamina meter; if it runs out, we can no longer fight. You can replenish the DP meter by letting your digimon rest for three hours, or you can give them vitamins.

Your Strength stat also affects your performance in battle. Each digimon has a base strength. Seadramon, for example, has 50. Each heart in Strength gives your digimon four extra points in strength. So Seadramon, at full power, has 66 strength. I make sure to fill up Little Guy’s Strength before every fight; we want every edge we can get.

Fighting is important now because it determines whether Little Guy can reach Perfect or not. There’s no more branching paths; your Adult digimon will always evolve into the same Perfect digimon every time. Of the seven adults in each egg, three can evolve into one Perfect, three can evolve into a different Perfect, and the Junk Adult can evolve into a Junk Perfect.

To reach Perfect, your Adult digimon has to fight fifteen battles. Battles fought as a different stage don’t count. After 36 hours, Little Guy will either evolve, or they won’t. Your percentage is determined by the percentage of victories you had in your last fifteen battles. The percentage does not translate directly; you need to win at least 40% of those battle to have any chance of evolving, and an 80% win rate will guarantee an evolution.

You also have a choice of battle type; a single battle will only use one of your digimon while a tag battle uses both.

Because we’re doing a single battle, we have to pick which digimon we’re using.

The Coliseum has a set list of opponents. Start lets you start from the beginning while Next lets you continue down the list. There is no reward for reaching the end of the Coliseum.

The battle starts the same way as the training mini-game. You mash the A button to build up power, then the fight starts.

Our first foe is a Kunemon; a bug digimon that we haven’t had a chance to get yet.

The two battling digimon trade blows like this until either one digimon runs out of health, or six rounds pass. If the fight ends due to time, the digimon with the most health wins.

Most digimon have two projectile sprites, and can fire either one or two projectiles at once. This probably affects attack power, but who knows? These toys could be pretty obtuse at times.

Speaking of obtuse, there is a way to guarantee a critical hit at the start of each fight. Just press the A button exactly eleven times when you’re building up power for the fight.

Each hit can also either hit or miss, and that seems to be entirely up to luck.

At any rate, Little Guy eventually fights and wins fifteen battles! When the time comes, he’s guaranteed to evolve into a Perfect digimon.

Jack tuckered out around 9:00 p.m., so I put him to bed.

Little Guy joined him around 11:00.

I’ll be back tomorrow with an Adult Jack!

LoakaMossi · November 16, 2019, 12:07am

Day 5

Jack pulled through and evolved into Angemon!

Oh my God, he’s a muppet.

This LP was inspired by a Youtuber called Kakujo; he had run a few video series on digital pets where he uploaded a video every day chronicling their progress.

I’m mentioning him because he had a rule about digimon attack sprites that I’ve decided to adopt. They should either look cool, or they should look like a sock puppet. Given Angemon’s happy sprite, I’m hoping for a goofy sock puppet sprite!

. . . You stop that right now, young man.

I said Stop That.

At least he’s happy with his training.

It’s time to secure Jack’s Perfect evolution, so back to the Coliseum!

One of Angemon’s attack sprites is just a boxing glove, which kind of rules.

Here’s my attempt of capturing the dodge animation.

Here’s Jack’s first victory! He ultimately won fourteen of his fifteen battles. He got punked by a Gabumon, which gives me a chance to explain the Weapon Triangle of Digimon!

Digimon come in four types: Vaccine, Virus, Data, and Free. Vaccine beats Virus, Data beats Vaccine, and Virus beats Data. Free is outside of the Weapon Triangle; no advantage, no disadvantage.

Gabumon is a Data type digimon while Angemon is a Vaccine type. Even though Jack was an adult and his opponent was a child, the type advantage put them on more even playing ground. I also screwed up the Pre-Battle minigame, so Jack got his first loss against his old form.

You hear that, Little Guy? You have a better win record than your little sibling!

Hey! I know you don’t think you’re the favorite, but I swear, I love you both equally!

So, do you think you two can get along?

It’s time for a Team Building exercise! Tag Battles are battles involving both of your digimon. It’s a decent way to get to your Perfect requirement in a hurry. For now though, we’re not going to do many Tag Battles. There are eggs that only unlock upon winning battles, so I want to fight more, not less.

I Said Stop That.

The Tag Battle minigame is a little more complicated. First, you need to stop this triangle as it climbs up the screen. The closer it gets to the top without going over, the stronger your attacks are.

Then, it’s the same old button mashing minigame.

The next main mechanic is, as you probably expect, tagging out. Every time a digimon is hit, they swap with their partner.

You also have different health bars. These bars have 30 hit points instead of 10, and they’re shared between team mates.

Way to go, guys! Together, you showed the world what you could do! Now, are you two going to play nice?

OH NO!

I decided to give the Tag Training a few more tries, mainly to get a look at the sprites.

A successful training benefits both digimon, but it’s nice to give both of my pets a win.

oh god that angemon sprite is even worse

Well, at least they’re well fed.

Aww, Jack tuckered himself out.

Sleep well!

I’ll be back when Little Guy reaches their Perfect form!

LoakaMossi · November 16, 2019, 10:13pm

Day 6

Little Guy evolved late last night, which means they’re living up to their name! They’re a Mamemon now.

Did you know that you can’t clean the pen area while your digimon are sleeping? I found that out seconds before I took this picture.

As much as I love this sprite, this does lead me to a complaint I have about this version of the V-Pet.

The first five eggs you get, which I’ll call the Ver. Eggs, each have three types of Perfects you can get. There’s the Best Perfect, which you get from an Adult that requires few Care Mistakes. There’s the Junk Perfect, which you get from the Junk Adult. Then there’s the Middle Perfect, which you get from adults that require some care mistakes.

While the Best and Junk Perfects have some good variation, for some reason, the Middle Perfects all look more or less like this. Some are black, some are white, each looks a little different from the rest, but they’re all dots of some kind.

Don’t get me wrong; I love it when the small monsters end up being some of the strongest. The fact that Little Guy here is stronger now than they were as a Seadramon is really cool. I just wish that one-third of the Perfects didn’t look so similar.

While I’m complaining, I’m also not a fan of how the evolution trees look. For the Ver. Eggs, here’s the amount of digimon available for each stage:
Baby 1
Baby II 1
Child 2
Adult 7
Perfect 3
Ultimate 2

By the time you leave the Adult stage, there’s not a lot of variety. It’s part of why I really want the Pendulum versions to make it over here; their evolution trees are still oval shaped, but there’s a lot more variety in the Perfect and Ultimate stages. The evolutions also make a bit more sense design-wise.

But considering Bandai is trying to clear inventory on these things, I doubt the Pendulum Ver. 20th will be exported to the U.S.

Mamemon’s attack sprites are the boxing glove, shown here, and a cartoon fuse bomb, which I couldn’t get a good picture of.

This was the best I could do, unfortunately.

I took Little Guy back to the Coliseum. They don’t need to fight to evolve anymore, but “battling is an essential part of every digimon’s life,” according to the manual. More importantly, fighting unlocks two of the secret eggs! You get one at 50 victories and the second at 100 victories. I’ll try to unlock both during this run.

Speaking of evolving, evolving from Perfect to Ultimate is simple: just don’t get more than two Care Mistakes for 36 waking hours. That does mean it will be quite some time before we get to see Little Guys Ultimate form.

I mentioned earlier that each Ver. Egg only had two Ultimates. That doesn’t mean that two of the Perfects evolve into the same Ultimate, that means that one of the Perfects just doesn’t evolve.

Thankfully, both of our pets are going to reach the Ultimate level. In the first two eggs, only the Junk Perfect was unable to evolve. But starting in Ver. 3, the Junk Perfects got their own Ultimates, and it was the Middle Perfects that could no longer evolve.

Ultimately (heh) I think that was a bad decision. It’s cool that screwing up during the Child stage no longer bars me from the Ultimate stage, but we’ve gone from “Six of the seven Adults can reach the Ultimate stage” to “Only four of the seven Adults can reach the Ultimate stage.” Again, I think the Pendulum release had a much more sensible and balanced evolution tree. Or at the very least, I can’t see such a glaring flaw just from looking at the tree itself.

Ugh, I don’t want to just beat up on this toy. I genuinely like it! Taking care of two digital pets is surprisingly fun! If this LP has piqued your curiosity, I highly recommend picking one up; some GameStops and EBGames still have inventory left, but your best bet is probably online shopping. V-Pets tend to be targeted by scalpers, but the Ver. 20th English release is still reasonably priced.

Jack should evolve either late tonight or early tomorrow morning. Either way, I’m excited to show you what they look like!

Jenner · November 16, 2019, 11:52pm

You know, this is also a tabletop LP when you really think about it.

heyboots · November 17, 2019, 2:22pm

jenner why

LoakaMossi · November 17, 2019, 11:23pm

Day 7

Jack didn’t evolve last night; I had to wait until early this morning. But now, I can reveal Jack’s Perfect form, which will explain why I named them Jack!

Boys and girls of every fate

Here’s a reference that’s out of date

Read my post and you will see

This reference made past Halloween!

This ain’t Halloween!

October passed, now the joke is dead!

This ain’t Halloween!

Now it’s time for Thanksgiving!

The candy’s gone, now it’s only turkey you’ll be fed!

Ahem, that’s enough of that. Say hello to Jack the SkullGreymon!

Yeah, Angemon evolved into SkullGreymon in the original toy. Weird, right? Even weirder, SkullGreymon is the strongest Perfect you can get from the Ver. 2 egg. It eventually became a symbol for rushed evolution and bad digimon raising, but it was originally a reward.

SkullGreymon is also just cute? Look at 'em!

: Hey. Hey Jack. Look at me.

: . . . bitch.

I also put Jack back to the coliseum.

I also do a few Tag Battles. I kind of like the animations more, plus you get more sprites. It’s neat!

I’ve also unlocked the first secret egg! Maybe! Some people reported this egg being glitched and not unlocking until you win 55 battles instead of 50! I’m going to try to get to 100 battles before we pick our next eggs.

Neither Little Guy nor Jack will be evolving tomorrow, so instead, I’ll be doing a comparison of the LCD Sprites to the concept art. Jenner, who is allowed to make bad posts here because she is one of my friends, suggested that I post some official artwork so we would have a better idea of what the sprites are supposed to look like. I didn’t want to do that right away because (1) these updates were crammed full of info as it was, and (2) obviously a full color illustration was going to look better than an LCD sprite no matter how good of a sprite artist you are and I didn’t want to detract from the really cute sprite work.

Anyways, I’ll be back tomorrow to talk about art!

LoakaMossi · November 18, 2019, 5:42pm

Day 8

These two aren’t going to get up to anything today, so let’s talk about sprite work and art work!

It’s really easy to take pot-shots at the sprites on the toy, but I don’t really think that’s fair. Of course the sprites on the black and white LCD screen are going to be less detailed than the full color artwork, so comparing the two is just nonsense. That being said, I do think it’s neat to see how much detail the sprite artists were able to cram in to their little sprites. So let’s go through the digimon we’ve seen and see how their sprites measure up!

BOTAMON

The babies tend to have the most accurate sprites. They’re both black blobs, and that’s about it!

PUNIMON

Punimon does show one of the main problems; color. Punimon looks very different from Botamon in their artwork, but the sprites look almost identical.

That being said, I like how different the two sprites look. They’re similar, but they’re definitely different.

KOROMON

The Koromon sprite is cute, but it’s missing the ears! Koromon’s most distinct features are it’s ears, and the Koromon sprite barely has ears at all!

The 20th Ver. releases have two eggs that hatch into more Anime Accurate versions of Agumon and Gabumon. Despite Koromon popping out of the Agumon egg, it still has the same sprite. So no long-eared Koromon here.

TSUNOMON

In contrast, Tsunomon looks completely accurate. If I’m being nitpicky, I think the sprite horn is facing the opposite direction from the horn in the concept art?

It’s a good thing you reach the Baby II stage so quickly; the sprites start to have a lot more character here. I love the Baby sprites, but the Baby II sprites are a real step up.

BETAMON

Next up is my child that will move away one day and never speak to me again. I really like the Betamon sprite! It’s not traditionally cute, but it’s still pretty cute! It’s a shame you have to be a bad caretaker to get one.

GABUMON

Gabumon’s sprite is cute, but the more I look at it, the more oddities I find. The biggest oddity I noticed is that it’s not at all clear that Gabumon is wearing a pelt. The ears make me thing “This animal has fur,” but you can’t tell that it’s wearing something else’s fur.

The Child sprites are, generally speaking, the last sprites that are meant to be cute. That doesn’t prevent the other sprites from being cute, but it’s harder to tell if it’s on purpose or not.

SEADRAMON

Not much to say here. They’re both definitely sea serpents. I guess you can’t tell that Seadramon’s head is supposed to be armored just from looking at the sprite, but , that’s not something I particularly care about.

ANGEMON

The Angemon sprite really gets to me. The main reason is it’s head; the art version is clearly a humanoid head, but the sprite acts more like a muppet head. Instead of having a mouth, the top half of the head just swings open and shut.

The Adult level is when you have to fight, so Bandai probably wanted to make the Adult sprites look combat-ready. But I prefer cute V-Pets!

Mamemon, despite just being a black circle in it’s sprite, is pretty accurate to it’s art! I love this type of monster in monster-battling games; looks small and cute, but can still clean house.

It’s still odd to me that SkullGreymon is not a bad evolution in this toy. The sprite is missing the back-mounted rocket launcher, but otherwise it looks like a skeletal dragon/dinosaur, which is cool.

The Perfect sprites are purely rewards; you’re always guaranteed to reach the Adult level as long as you don’t kill your digimon, but the Perfect level requires you to actively work towards it. It’s still baffling that 1/3 of them look almost exactly the same, but I appreciate them nonetheless.

And there’s a look at the official artwork! I really do like the sprites on this toy. Tamagotchis have been in color for a while now, so it’s odd that Digimon v-pets are still black and white. Even the Digimon X toys, which were made and released this year, have no color sprites.

I’ll be back when we get our first Ultimate digimon! I think that will happen tomorrow, but we’ll see!

LoakaMossi · November 19, 2019, 4:38pm

Day 9

I was a little off regarding Little Guy’s next evolution.

But thankfully, he evolved early this morning! Say hello to BanchoMamemon!

The word “Bancho” has two meanings: (1) an archaic word referring to a type of Government official, or (2) the leader of a group of delinquents.

Here’s BanchoMamemon’s official artwork. I’ll let you decide which definition we’re going with.

We’ve got our first Ultimate digimon! Almost every ultimate in this toy has the same requirement of getting two or fewer Care Mistakes during the Perfect stage.

There are two that require you to get at least three Care Mistakes, then fight 100 battles during the Perfect stage.

Now that Little Guy is an Ultimate digimon, the next part of his life is, unfortunately, death. We need to take advantage of their strength while they’re still around!

I manage to get to 50 Single Victories. We’re about 40 victories away from unlocking our second egg.

BTW, we also unlocked an egg when we recorded five different digimon. I think Tsunomon was our fifth digimon, so we unlocked it all the way back then. We unlock another egg at 25 digimon, but that’s gonna be a while off.

Alright you two, it’s time for some Tag Battles! The egg unlocks only need battles; they don’t care whether the Single, Tag, Coliseum, or Connect battles, but I’d like to get a few more Tag Battles in anyways.

We’re up against two Adults, but we’ve got an Ultimate and a Perfect, so I think we’re good.

So, remember how Tag Battles have two ways to build up power? You start by stopping the triangle, then you mash the A button?

That triangle gets faster on each successive digimon stage. So now that Little Guy is an Ultimate, that triangle is really fast.

I kind of botched this fight as a result.

It’s BanchoMamemon’s Tag Battle debut, and Jack has to spend the whole fight covering for them.

Thankfully, Jack pulled through for us.

That does it for today’s update. I’ll be back once Jack evolves to Ultimate!

LoakaMossi · November 21, 2019, 12:25am

Day 10

Jack evolved early this morning! Say hello to SkullMammothmon!

You know, I think the SkullMammothmon sprite is actually bipedal while the OA is quadrupedal? I’m not sure.

I’m still not used to how cute the skeletal digimon are in this V-Pet.

SkullMammothmon is technically the stronger of the two Ultimates could have evolved to, but Jack’s other option, CresGarurumon, is one of the eight digimon on this V-Pet that can evolve past Ultimate.

The Pendulum Device introduced Jogress Evolution, which is known as DNA Digivolution in the States. It allowed two digimon to fuse in order to create a second, more powerful digimon. The 20th Ver. integrated Jogress Evolution into the original V-Pet. While Pendulum allows you to fuse any digimon in the Adult stage or older with restrictions based on attribute, the 20th Ver. only allows you to fuse four specific pairs of Ultimates.

The Pendulum version of Jogress allows you to fuse digimon across devices; which, after looking at the evolution tree, kind of seems necessary if you want to reach Ultimate. The 20th Ver. Original V-Pet only allows you to fuse your own two digimon, and it’s treated more as a secret unlockable than a standard feature.

Instead of just clicking “Jogress” in a menu, like you do on Pendulum devices, you have to fight five Tag Battles with compatible digimon to Jogress.

As I implied earlier, BanchoMamemon and SkullMammothmon are not a compatible Jogress pair.

But with 50 Tag Victories and 50 Single Victories, we’ve unlocked another egg!

Since there’s not going to be much to report on until these two, unfortunately, pass on, I think it makes sense to pick the next pair of eggs now, so I’ll be ready to raise them as soon as I can.

For the sake of variety, I’m not going to put the Ver. 1 or Ver. 2 eggs on the docket.

As another warning, of the eggs I have unlocked and available, only one of them can result in a Jogress pair. If we pick that, I’m definitely going to aim for the Jogress evolution. Otherwise, feel free to suggest what evolution line you want me to take for the eggs you pick!

I’ll be back when we’re ready to start again with two new digimon!

Here are the options, along with their unlock requirements if applicable:

Version 3
Version 4
Version 5
Zuba (50 Battle Egg)
Hack (100 Battle Egg)
Slayerdra (5 Digimon Egg)

Select the two eggs you want me to raise next!

Version 3
Version 4
Version 5
Zuba
Hack
Slayerdra

0 voters

Fefnir · November 22, 2019, 6:14pm

Just going by the egg design, Version 4 will most likely spawn a tax evader.

LoakaMossi · November 25, 2019, 12:33am

End of Little Guy and Jack

I believe I mentioned this, but I never actually showed it off. Poop eventually makes your digimon sick. If you get four turds on screen, as shows here, your digimon will get ill.

Illness isn’t so bad. There’s just a button on the menu that will cure them.

The medicine must taste awful though.

Your digimon can also get injured by losing fights. That happened a couple of times, but I never recorded it. Injuries and illnesses are two ways for your digimon to die; if you get twenty illnesses or twenty injuries in one stage of life, your digimon will die.

Generally, your digimon will poop less as they age. The baby stages, for instance, poop fairly frequently, but I never had to worry once they reached the Adult stage. This changes, I think, after they’ve spent some time in the Ultimate stage.

A change that I know for sure is that, once your digimon has been an Ultimate for a while, their Hunger and Strength stats will start to deplete faster. Additionally, five Care Mistakes will now kill your digimon. Twenty Care Mistakes in any single stage will cause death, but five is all it takes at the Perfect and Ultimate stages.

By the way, did you know that the V-Pet played a song upon your digimon’s death? And by “song” I mean it plays every note in its register, starting with the highest and working its way down? It’s like someone turned the phrase “YOUR FAULT” into a jingle. It made me feel like a monster!

In the English releases of the original V-Pets, you didn’t get a gravestone. Instead, you got a bunch of faux binary code. The implication was that your digimon had re-entered the data stream, and was ready to be reborn. Incidentally, I think that part is in both the Japanese and English versions of the canon. It’s just that the Japanese version had a grave marker while the English version tried to be more delicate.

In this version, though, it’s all grave markers.

If you raised your digimon “well,” (and I have no idea how the toy measures that) you get what’s called a Traited Egg. Essentially, the next time you hatch that digimon’s egg, they have a better chance of evolving from Adult to Perfect. It also means your last image of your digimon is of them smiling and thanking you for doing a good job raising them. It takes the sting out, but it’s honestly a bit more devastating over all.

I didn’t know that was going to happen, so I don’t have any pictures of it. Whoops!

Rest in Peace, Little Guy and Jack.

So, you ever have an idea in your head that seems really funny, but it relies on treating something absurd with a lot of reverence, sadness, and respect, so once you do it, it just becomes genuinely a little sad?

That happened to me, but I’m going to share my work anyways:
A slideshow that was supposed to be ridiculous, but still made me kind of sad
My desperate attempt to make it funnier

Our Next Two Buddies

We already have a problem; there’s a three way tie. Normally, I would have to pick Version 5, then decide between Zuba and Hack. However, Version 4 and Version 5 are Jogress Partners. The three pairs of Jogress eggs are those two, Version 1 and Version 2, which we’ve already seen, and Slayerdra and Breakdra, which we’re unlikely to unlock by the next run.

Therefore, I’ve decided to run Zuba and Hack this time, and I’ll run Version 4 and Version 5 next time, and I’ll end with a Jogress. After that, I’ll likely close the thread. I’m considering moving this LP to a dedicated twitter account. I think Twitter kind of lends itself to a V-Pet let’s play.

I do feel bad because three people voted for Version 5, while only two people (not including myself) voted for Zuba and Hack, but this way we can see everything with no repeats.

But enough hemming and hawwing! Let’s hatch a Zuba egg!

I couldn’t catch the actual moment of hatching due to auto-focus issues, but meet Sakumon!

He’s pretty dead on to his official art, don’t you think?

It’s nice to have another Baby digimon. They’re really cute!

It’ll take ten minutes for Sakumon to evolve, so let’s hatch that Hack egg!

This time I do manage to catch the moment of hatching and . . . wait.

We get . . . a second Sakumon?

Congratulations, everyone! We got twins, I guess!

Babies are needier than the other stages, so we need to feed them a lot.

After ten minutes, we get Sakuttomon!

Still cute, while getting a little bit cooler. I like it!

Hopefully, Hack!Sakumon will evolve into something different so-

Oh. Well, never mind then.

Since I kiiiiind of subverted the poll to raise these two, I should probably be a little more transparent. These two are not the exact same digimon, thankfully. In the pendulum devices, you can get a Zuba egg that hatches as a Sakumon, but branches out into different evolutions. But in this device, you get two different eggs that don’t branch in their evolutions. That means that the only requirements we need to worry about are getting 15 battles in as an Adult and getting two or fewer Care Mistakes during the Perfect stage.

These two won’t evolve tonight, but we should see their child forms tomorrow!

Thank you to everyone who participated in the poll, and everyone who’s been following this thread!

LoakaMossi · November 25, 2019, 4:46pm

Run 2, Day 2

Our older twin just finished evolving! Say hello to Zubamon!

In terms of accuracy, Zubamon has one of the worst sprites. The sprite looks like Agumon with a sword-nose, but the official art looks completely different!

The sprite is still cute though!

Well, since the Zuba egg evolved into Zubamon, you’ve probably guessed that the Hack egg evolved into . . . Huckmon??

Bandai. Bandai you didn’t.

So, “a” and “u” sounds are a little difficult to translate or transliterate from Japanese sometimes. This is why you see a lot of arguments anytime something is called Crush or Crash. But this is pretty obviously a mistake! They even got the Egg name right!

It’s funny, looking at the art, Huckmon looks like the goofier of the two, but the sprites make Zubamon look goofier. Strange, isn’t it?

I guess Huckmon is going to be our edgy child this time, which is ironic because I’m probably going to name him Huckleberry.

They get along, at least.

Anyways, let’s look at some training sprites!

Zubamon, holy shit!

I prefer the sock puppet attack sprites, but turning into a sword is a pretty close second. It’s also earned them the name Hanzo, as far as I’m concerned.

Huckleberry has a much more standard attack sprite.

I took them to the Tag Coliseum purely so I could have Huckleberry wield their sibling as a weapon.

Because these eggs do not branch, there are no requirements to meet for their Adult evolutions. In 24 hours, these two will be Adults, and I will check in then!

LoakaMossi · November 27, 2019, 3:19am

Run 2, Day 3

The kids didn’t evolve until around 6:00 p.m. today, but evolve they did!

Hanzo has become ZubaEagermon!

His sprite is much closer to his OA than the Zubamon sprite was.

And because we’re raising twins this time . . .

Huckleberry became even edgier! Say hello to BaoHuckmon!

I may no longer be a teenage boy, but I still appreciate designs like this.

I really appreciate how all of the sprites are really cute, not matter how “cool” the OA is supposed to be.

They still get along, and they’re still cute together!

I put them through a quick training session. Hanzo’s sword sprite has gotten even cooler, so that’s nice.

Meal time! A reward for a good training session!

Now it’s time to put that training to use!

These two need to hit fifteen battles within the next 36 hours if they want to reach Perfect. So far, they haven’t lost a single match!

I’ll be back when we have two Perfect digimon!

LoakaMossi · November 30, 2019, 1:53am

Run 2, Day 4

After spending Thanksgiving day relaxing, our twins have celebrated Black Friday by evolving! Hanzo here evolved into Duramon!

The dissonance between sprite and art isn’t too bad until your digimon hit the Perfect stage, and that’s especially true for digimon that were introduced later, like the Zuba lines. Duramon does not have a bobble head like his sprite does, unfortunately.

Hanzo, despite his considerably more complicated sprite, he’s still pretty cute. But is he still cool?

This sword can’t keep adding stuff like this.

Hanzo’s doing pretty well in his new form. Let’s check in on Huckleberry!

Huckleberry evolved into SaviorHuckmon and finally learned to be a biped!

Not much to say about the official art. It’s cool!

Raising a non-branching digimon like this is a little odd. There’s only one part that needs active participation, and we’re past that part. We still need to get two or fewer Care Mistakes for the next 48 hours, but this feels a lot less involved than the other eggs we’ve raised.

It’s also weird raising these two as “twins.” Offsetting the two eggs ensured that some evolved at least once every day until we had two Ultimates. That’s not the case this go around.

Even though it’s not required for anything right now, I still like doing battles from time to time.

And that does it for today! I’ll check back in once we have a pair of Ultimates!

LoakaMossi · December 3, 2019, 3:27pm

Run 2, Day 4

Say hello to Hanzo’s new form: Durandamon!

Even setting aside technical limitations, I’m really distracted by the size of the sprite’s head. The sprites tend to use large heads, but I’m not sure how well it works here.

Hanzo seems to be having fun. Let’s check in on Huckleberry.

Huckleberry has evolved into Jesmon! He looks a lot like Hanzo here, doesn’t he?

That’s kind of unfortunate, because the OA looks completely different! I think this is a consequence of creating a V-Pet sprite for a later design. The early designs had the V-Pet in mind, so they tend to be roughly similar. But for digimon like this, the differences are really jarring.