English Dub Review: Digimon Beatbreak Episodes 6-10

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Tomoro continues his new life with the Glowing Dawn, protecting a Digimon nursery from a rampaging intruder, rescuing missing kids taken by a Digimon driven by its partner’s jealousy, and fighting a father-daughter team of bounty hunters who target a teammate’s Digimon partner for capture.

OUR TAKE

After the initial five episode drop last month, I honestly thought that Digimon Beatbreak would be going into regular single weekly releases. But then a week past with no new dub release, and then another, and another, and five weeks later, we have another sudden drop of five more dub episodes, so it seems like that will be the pattern going forward. As much as I would have liked to talk about each of these episodes individually, I honestly can’t complain about cutting through the fat that plenty of them have and mainly just going over the highlights. It was a bit of a surprise to start the sixth episode in the middle of a battle, but then I remembered that the fifth episode, which was the last of the first batch put out and the end of last year, ended on a bit of a cliffhanger, and we’re only now wrapping that fight up here. The following episode, focusing on the team finding and protecting a Digimon nursery secretly run by their team leader Kyo, was also surprisingly heartfelt, and shines some light on potentially dangerous lives of the Digimon in this series, where they need human energy, the E-Pulse, to survive, but some are so kind natured that they have to choose between hurting others or their own deaths. And the eighth episode is a pretty typical self-contained story about a Digimon driven to harm others by its owner’s jealousy, but interestingly shows how dangerous Digimon are handled as glitches to be erased by this seemingly pristine society.

Though the real highlight of this batch is the two part story for the ninth and tenth episodes, focusing mainly on one of the other members of Glowing Dawn, Makoto and his tiny bat partner Chiropmon. The team runs into, as mentioned, a father and daughter who have been shunned from Shangri La Egg, the egg shaped high society section of the city, and have turned to hunting Digimon for money. The daughter knows Makoto and has been jealous of him for awhile, and when their next buyer tasks them with taking Chiropmon, she’s more than happy to do so with her Shademon, which can possess people and Digimon. Luckily they are able to beat her in the tenth episode, as well as help her understand that her father has been using her to get his status back, and Chiropmon even gets his Champion form, digivolving to NightChiropmon. And with Reina and Kyo already having theirs (Kyo’s even having their Ultimate, the following stage), that just leaves Tomoro and Gekkomon the only ones without a digivolution, which I suppose makes sense considering their the newest members and Gekkomon is the youngest. So, now we presumably wait until the end of this month for the next batch of five, which I can already tell you are just as good as these.