×
  • remind me tomorrow
  • remind me next week
  • never remind me
Subscribe to the ANN Newsletter • Wake up every Sunday to a curated list of ANN's most interesting posts of the week. read more

Digimon Ghost Game
Episode 13

by MrAJCosplay/Cartoon Cipher,

How would you rate episode 13 of
Digimon Ghost Game ?
Community score: 4.7

Well this episode certainly didn't waste a single second of its screentime. While I have complained before that some episodes of Digimon Ghost Game meandered a bit or exhibited conflicting overall messages, this episode gets straight to the point, paying off foreshadowing established since episode one and leaving a lot of questions about the future. The show has always straddled the line of violence and horror, often looking for workarounds to not explicitly show anything gruesome on-screen while still leaving things horrifically uncomfortable through sheer implication—there are a handful of scenes that genuinely would have terrified me if I were to watch the show as a kid.

But this episode just rips that line out of the ground and skips rope with it because our opening scene is literally a Digimon getting stabbed between the eyes. There's no big moral conundrum or change of heart to be established with this Digimon threat here: They're just a straight-up assassin that is obsessed with killing for the sake of getting a body count. If this episode was ever going to air on western television, I do not envy those in charge of the localization. I can see why this episode was trending online for a bit and why it has seemingly grabbed the attention of a lot of people who otherwise were just watching this show passively, because it's arguably the darkest the franchise has gotten for years. At the same time, it surprisingly doesn't feel too out of place with the overall horror tone that the show had established since episode one.

But as it turns out, that inciting incident isn't the main focal point of the episode; by the second half, it felt more like an excuse in order to generate a rather surprising twist. It would've been nice if this Digimon assassin was better foreshadowed or if he had more to do overall, but in any case, the outcome of his involvement with our main cast ended up leading to some very interesting and shocking revelations revolving around Gammamon. After witnessing a Digimon that took care of him extensively die right in front of him, our precious cinnamon bun who barely counted as a character previously goes into a full-on rage. The idea of dark digivolution has been a concept since the very first Digimon series, but unlike previous dark evolutions which usually involve our cute and lovable companions turning into a raging beast, Gammamon undergoes a slightly different change. Not only does he have all of his wits about him, but he seems the most comprehensive he's ever been, which just makes some of the things that he's finally talking about while he literally murders the assassin right in front of everybody all the more bone-chilling. We went from a small baby that can barely pronounce words to a sadistic maniac, and I was hanging on to every single thing that he was saying.

The way he forces the assassin to reveal his intentions seemingly to make a point in front of everybody. The way he asks Hiro if he understands the situation, almost like he wants him to call the kill and gets visibly disappointed when Hiro tries to resist. The way he talks about their time together and how it seemed to mean nothing to them. It's all really interesting and it sort of gave me the final hook from the show I feel like I've been missing since its earliest inception. I don't know how long it'll be until we revisit this concept again, but for now, I am not only satisfied but also excited for things to come at a time when I was starting to wonder if there was still room for me to feel that way.

Rating:

Digimon Ghost Game is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.


discuss this in the forum (35 posts) |
bookmark/share with: short url

back to Digimon Ghost Game
Episode Review homepage / archives