Digimon Beatbreak – Episode 1

What’s it about? Tenma Tomoro has a quirk that makes his touch disable the AI “eggs” that run the world. This quirk could be quite powerful in the wrong hands, and he needs to watch out–there is a group out to get him. If things weren’t bad enough, his own egg seems to have hatched into…a Gekkomon?

Digimon was my first anime, and my introduction to thematically rich storytelling. At its best, Digimon could take a story about cute monsters fighting each other and use it to weave thoughtful stories about grief, mental illness, technology, and community care. It was also terrifying, and the terror always had a thematic purpose. The cosmic horror elements of Tamers‘ last few episodes, lovingly borrowed as they arguably were from Sailor Moon S, explored how we can’t abandon somebody to their grief. Similarly, in Adventure, the transformation of Agumon into a zombified agent of death will always be what my mind goes to when it thinks of the corrupting power of anger.

Suffice to say, Digimon series in general have a lot to live up to for me, and none of them have captured for me anything like the depth of Konaka Chiaki’s contribution to the Digimon universe in Tamers. I was hopeful that Beatbreak might finally give us a worthy successor, coming as it does from the pen of Yamaguchi Ryota, whose main prior credits include the notoriously strange Nanami episodes of Utena. More than anything, I was hoping it would be timely, given we live in an era of extremely fast advances in so-called “AI,” where ChatGPT can pass the Turing Test and AI is being weaponized for state and imperial violence.

What we got so far, however, is honestly a bit frustrating. The in media res opening action sequence, featuring characters we don’t know apparently fighting a robbery in digispace, was not compelling. We don’t see those characters again at all in the episode. If it was supposed to make me wonder “who are they?”, it fails largely because we never get much of a sense of their personalities. It also takes up a third of the episode.

Once it is over, we are introduced to what seems at first glance like a relatably clumsy female protagonist, complete with a “oh no I’m late!” sequence straight out of Yamaguchi’s other major project, Sailor Moon. Then she disappears halfway through the episode, replaced by the man who broke her AI Alexa Egg. What’s worse is that it is implied that she is fridged—having been taken out in the place of our Chosen One protagonist Tomoro Tenma, who is being hunted by…somebody. I generally don’t love the false, fridged, female protagonist trope, even when it is done by series that do it well, and I find it annoying here. Find another way to make the male protagonist a sadboy.

There’s multiple ways our false female protagonist could go—her disappearance could be one of the mysteries of the season, to be solved down the line. This is undermined by the seeming lack of care that the protagonist seems to show to her death, as well as the series’ lack of effort in endearing her to the audience enough to care where she is. (She is not in the opening at all.) For that matter, the series itself seems to attach little to her disappearance, instead focusing our emotions on the on-screen death of the protagonist’s brother, who, like her, had far too little development to justify us caring about his death. In general, this premiere does very little to make me care about the characters. 

The worldbuilding is fairly bog standard near-future cyberpunk adjacent worldbuilding. Tenma lives in what is pretty clearly the ghetto of the world, though that is mostly communicated through environmental storytelling. I am not sure to what extent this series will explore the ideas it seems to be hinting at, but time will tell. I will likely not be there to see it.