Anime: Digimon Frontier

Art & Animation
I like the design of most of the new digimon. The 3D design of spirits is really cool, together with evolution scenes. I absolutely adore the scenery, background and vividness of colors. Digicode also looks pretty interesting. I'll just point out that some of the enemies could have been designed better, but I don't really have complaints regarding this.

Sound
-Opening and ending themes are pretty decent, same as for the previous seasons.
-Soundtrack consists of new soundtrack plus some of the soundtrack from the 1st 2 seasons (possibly even 1 or 2 from the 3rd season). The new soundtrack has a good impact on me, you can really feel the strength of some situations thanks to it. Sadly, some of the tunes are used pretty rarely. As for the old soundtrack mixed into this season, some tunes blend good with the situations, but I would definitely prefer Frontier to have its completely new soundtrack, for all kinds of situations, to make it more original and special. I'm pretty satisfied with the soundtrack though.
-Voice acting was decent, even though I would change Junpei's, Kouji's, Mercuremon's and LordKnightmon's voice actors. The latter 2 characters sounded annoying and/or gayish.
*- I would also like to note that Wada Kouji sings the OP song, both ED songs and the first evolution song. What on Earth happened with other artists? 1 artist covering this (too) many songs for 1 entire season adds the repetitive syndrom. Wada Kouji sings most of the songs good, but the evolution songs could use a singer with stronger voice, like Miyazaki Ayumi.

Story
-First of all, I must say that I adore the concept of digital world in Frontier. Partially broken planet with railways all over it, going even into the skies gives such a great feeling to me, some good mystery. The way of travelling between Digital World and Human World is well thought, although it could be better. Now, even though I like the concept of the hollow planet, the ability of scenery being able to turn into digicode ruins the experience a bit at the same time. Let's call it a double edged sword.
-As for the legendary 10 warriors... I didn't quite enjoy the fact that each warrior has 2 spirits, which seem pretty equal, even though we are tricked into believing that the beast spirit is stronger at first. Both of the spirit types were equally strong, so instead of imagining stronger evolutions, progress, maturing, we were presented with 20 different monsters, all equally strong, more or less. This seems like a pile of characters, rather than ladders, so that's a drawback. I prefer the good old ladder evolving, combined with "something new, special" that led up the ladder. The main characters here didn't "need" beast spirits, they simply obtained them for more evolutions.
-Also, Takuya and Kouji evolve too much advancedly from others. They have 3 different evolutions that rest of the team doesn't. That's a huge unneeded gap in my opinion. Not to mention how hyper spirit evolution influences the rest of the team's evolution abilities. In the 1st season, Agumon and Gabumon had "only" 1 evolution unobtainable to others. All in all, too many spirits, same level evolutions and combinations of spirits. A mess, somewhat.
-Lucemon's plan was pretty good, well made and I liked it. Other enemies' actions before that were pretty dull and repetitive. Too much dragging with the evil legendary warriors, who constantly had the same objectives during the whole time. Cherubimon could have been done better. Inbetween fight with Cherubimon, for some reason they decided to kick in a non-related, dull, unimportant and out-of-context enemy, IceDevimon, in that 1 episode. What a lameass filler was that..
-Our heroes' objectives were constantly obtaining new spirits and finding Seraphimon and Ophanimon. All that happened with that were new shining evolutions for only 2 characters, and *a certain destiny* that awaited Seraphimon and Ophanimon. This was pretty poor.
-Our heroes' background stories were given too little to no attention! I got the feeling that they were just kicked in because of the formula of success animes need. In Tamers, main characters were portrayed really great, and they were truly maturing and fighting their own doubts throughout the whole season. The 1st 2 seasons also had pretty good portrayal. Frontier failed here.
*-Oh not to forget... KaiserGreymon and MagnaGarurumon? People, leave Greymon and Garurumon in peace already. If we add the soundtrack from the first 2 seasons, I just ask myself "why? why?"... Frontier lacks some originality and dinamics.

Characters
-Pretty much shallow, even though they do support each other a lot. None of them were given proper background development.
-The number of main heroes is decent, but the number of same level evolved characters is choking.
-The main characters did work as a team, and fought with their might, so I wasn't really bothered by the absence of "human and partner digimon" setting. Although it did feel a bit empty at times, because in the previous seasons, there would be doubt, trust, believing and connection between partners.
-Enemy digimons could have used more variation. Same objectives and a 1 time set of 5 enemies during a long times is boring. Adventure and Tamers had good gradations of enemies and their levels.
-But of course, I have to mention that the main characters are good natured, and likeable.

Value
If only the plot x characters was developed on a much deeper level, I feel that this season could have been appreciated a lot, despite the lack of the partners setting. There was lack of originality in soundtrack, lack of variety in theme songs and lack of strong development of characters and the plot. It's tolerable but much more thought and care could have been invested into Frontier. However, it doesn't step away drastically from the whole digimon series concept, so I still value it as a true digimon season, only not developed enough.

Enjoyment
There were some things pissing me off. Too many evolutions per episode, and characters always shouting their names one by one. This got annoying real fast. The lack of vividness in the fights against Royal Knights, and huge abscence of emotions in main characters regarding this seemed pretty fake and underdeveloped at the same time. There were some times that I enjoyed, thanks to good culimination of events, but usually everything seemed like "just another hero-of-the-day" episode. Several times I was stalling watching Frontier because of the uninteresting events. Only a few times I remember that I was dying to see what happens next. All in all, the weakest of the first 5 seasons in my opinion, but it still delivers that something esentially good, that makes me loving it for some reason.

This is the fourth Digimon season and its second spin-off. Most of its elements have remained the same so please read my review on the earlier seasons before reading this one. I will only be mentioning the differences amongst them.

The production values are of the same quality as the third, although they are far more bright and cheery, thus missing a lot in imposing atmosphere. I also didn’t like the new music score much.

So once again we have a whole new cast of heroes. The scriptwriters tried to go back to the basics by trying to repeat the overall plot of the first season instead of going for another dark version like the third. The reason is that they received rather negative feedback by the target audience who found dark and tragic stories to be out of their league. As much as I liked Tamers, I must admit that it was not for the average little kid who wants cool action and monsters. And so we get a slight variation of the original arc, with the kids roaming alone the Digiworld.

The thing is, the scriptwriters didn’t only try to tribute the original but also to simplify it even further. This is apparent early on by the fact the kids are actively aware that they have a destiny to fulfill and a bunch of legendary monsters to gather in order to do that. They are not very scared of being stranded on an alien world since they have a reassurance of sorts. This also holds back a lot from an emotional conflict that could have led to some interesting character development. Meaning, they remain as nothing but boring stereotypes in an already stereotypical scenario that was further dumbed down to the point you don’t care.

To understand how bad it felt, imagine that most allied Digimons are treated as nothing but spirits that appear only in battle. Not only they don’t have a personality but also don’t even travel alongside the kids to further help us sympathize with them. And it’s not like the kids needed all the spirits in order to win; most of them were of the same strength regardless of how hard it was to find them. They just waste most of the episodes looking for them just because a stupid prophesy said so and for only purpose to further weaken the importance of the initial Digimons. As for those who are alongside them all the time, they can be quite annoying. Especially the bookworm Digimon and its stupid friend were amongst the ugliest and lamest choices for supporting characters.

As for the way they travel from one area to another, they always use ugly looking trains to get there, which is a stupid idea after awhile. Why don’t the villains just blow up the railways to stomp their progress? Why don’t they ambush them in the train stops if they know trains follow linear routes? This was not an issue in the earlier seasons where the journey was done mostly by walking or flying.

They also went overboard with the Judeo-Christian references, since the Digimons are now modeled mostly out of lame manihaistic angels and demons. And the plot twist is supposed to be the major villain being able to use both light and darkness techniques; owwww how interesting… not.

In all, a very passable season altogether and the weakest one up to the time it came out.