English Dub Review: Digimon Beatbreak Episodes 11-15

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Tomoro and Gekkomon have a fight but come together to strengthen their friendship and their power. Later, the Five Stars, the top five strongest Cleaners, discuss the increasing frequency of Digimon attacks, and send a small elite team called Tactics against Glowing Dawn. Oh, and some minor villains come back and learn a lesson about friendship.

OUR TAKE

The third batch of Beatbreak episodes is upon us, bringing the first appearance of Gekkomon’s champion digivolution: Armalizamon! As awesome as it looks and as gratifying as it was to see Tomoro and Gekkomon become friends again after such a tough fight (mainly owing to Tomoro still missing his comatose brother and being frustrated with raising a little brother of his own), it is astonishing how long it took to get here for the main protagonist. Typically in a Digimon series, the central character is the FIRST to get their Champion level of the main group. Only one other time has this happened to my recollection, the third season (Tamers), but this time here would probably be the more emotionally fulfilling of the two examples. Tomoro’s hesitancy to truly be a part of this team and accept his place in the group has been at odds as he’s also worried about and grieved his brother, but finally putting some of that aside to truly bond with Gekkomon has helped them grow stronger together, which is quintessential to what Digivolutions are meant to represent across this franchise. We still haven’t seen what the next stage, Ultimate, will look like for these main three kids, but considering where things are in the sub, something tells me we’ll see some soon enough.

While that takes up the first two episodes of this batch, the next two focus on setting up the major threats to come. The last one is a self-contained story about some minor villains from early on which is overall fine, but not much to talk about, so we’ll just focus on thirteen and fourteen for the remainder of this review. We get properly introduced to the Five Stars, the top dogs of the Cleaner world, of which Kyo used to be a member before growing disillusioned. He has particular history with one of the current Stars, Kaito, who is bound to be a major obstacle later on, but another one, Klay, oversees his own group of Cleaners known as Tactics, with the youngest among them, Team 7, now the recurring antagonists for the next few episodes. Assuming we get the sixteenth through twentieth episodes next month, we’ll get plenty to talk about regarding them, so I’ll save that for next time. But to sum it up, things are escalating in an awesome way for this show, so I would really recommend starting it if you haven’t already. It is only going to get more exciting and dramatic from this point on, doing stuff that has never quite been done in this franchise, and doing others better than most. Keep watching.