I Surrender.

No, I'm not quitting this blog in favor of my creature one. I still have plenty of card game love left in me, as my eBay watch list will attest. Speaking of, I need to ask WTF happened with my Digimon card game decks...

But I digress. I have bitched long enough about how Pokemon has been mooching Digimon's designs since Gen III (as well as, perhaps, YGO's since Gen II), about how Bakugan mooches from everybody, and so on. Corporations mooch off of each other all the time, no matter how shamelessly.

I surrender. I'm going to stop complaining about that. Digimon, though cool, is all but dead. What made it better than Pokemon originally has been all but lost; the new Digimon seem almost like Transformers or Megazords. Pokemon has won by appealing to the lowest common denominator. Deal with it. (Plus, Bandai fails hard at marketing.)

Similarly, I actually like how Bakugan mooches, sometimes. For example, Skyress looks an awful lot like Magic Knight Rayearth's Windam. The two are similar down to the color. No other monster series had ever tried to base something off of a monster from a shoujo manga (and a rather famous one at that!) that had been made YEARS before. This could grant CLAMP some extra revenue should people dig deep enough. That's not a bad thing.

There will, however, still be times when I bitch at copying...especially when it's done poorly. YGO, although based off of Magic:the Gathering itself, is EXTREMELY prone to being copied. Duel Masters is the most notorious copy of BOTH games, no matter how unique people claim that it is. That I will pick up on like no tomorrow.

No more bitching about the designs. Franchises evolve. They are just using what works.

Holy **ck, Bandai!

Bandai may not be as incompetent as I thought. They have just released a Digimon MMO:

"Digimon RPG is a free to play micro-transaction supported MMORPG in a setting based on that of the Digimon media franchise, specifically the Digimon Tamers anime. It is currently only available to play in South Korea, but fan-created English and Spanish translation patches exist. In addition Bandai and Digitalic are working on an official English version of the game that is planned for Global launch in March 2010 by WeMade Entertainment."

The game is based off of the Digimon Tamers series, and shows up in a lot of the same places that regular MMO ads do. Currently, the site is offering free beta testing. This looks great; I'd nab it if I didn't need to rid my comp of all PREVIOUS MMO stuff. Still, I do encourage you all to try it if you have the hard drive space. :D

My Sentiments Exactly.

I did, eventually, ask Splash - a super Digimon fangirl and awesome person in general- about card translations. Basically, since no one has paid her, they have not been done. I also asked her about the various Digivices (specifically, a Gallantmon Crimson Mode D-Power); she said that the one I linked her to was likely a fake, but...

"well even if they're not official I always think Bandai could take a leaf (or several hundred leaves) from the fan ideas and actually put more effort into marketing Digimon. They basically kill off their own franchise by not doing anything while Pokemon just puts out more and more like a crazy franchise :<"

Thank you SO much, Splash! You concisely wrapped up all my thoughts about Bandai there! There were more, similar things stated by one user on the Animesuki Digimon thread. I wish he (I think) did not use such poor spelling, but it's the internet, and he does make a few good points. Have a sample or two:

"It's over guys! Namco-Bandai has simply run out of vision! The steamroller has finally run out of steam, and stopped at the middle of the tracks. I have said it before and i will say it again;they need AMERICAN gaming expertees to lift them up from the swamp there currently in. In my personal opinion some outsider coming to offer them "help" is hower a bad idea. Your kind of rewaring them for failure. That is not a good idea at all! Instead they should SELL both the Gundam and Digimon brands away, since they are both "80's relics" They have proven to have no vision and passion what so ever towards there "legacy brands" They should not be rewardet for there screwups. I would advice the fans to boycot any new DS game, that brings nothing new to the table wich we havent already seen with Dusk and Dawn. I am really sorry for Toei, as all the fantastic work they have done endet up being for nothing! Hower Bandai-Namco should NOT be rewardet for failure!" <- Actually, Bandai HAS taken some American gamers' advice. "Battle Spirits" was created by someone who was definitely not Japanese, but you don't see it on shelves alongside YGO and Pokémon, do you?

"I think the major problem with just saying something like let an American company bring in outside help is mainly what can America bring to the table? It's not strictly a matter of expertize, because that's why companies hire consultants and other experts from outside their company. What exactly can an American company bring to the table that still fits with the whole concept behind the series? America's created it's own slew of bad games and failed series, so it's not like it's some sort of cure all for the franchise. What sort of direction do you think they would be able to take the series that would be refreshingly new?" <- Counter-argument. Thank you.

"Markets breed money. Money breeds EVERYTHING! With money you can hire people to do stuff." <-True.

And for those of you thinking that you could handle Digimon better than Bandai...a quote from another guy:

"Selling the franchise will almost certainly not be in the cards, so the best bet is that they might sub out a game to a third party company like how Activision runs the Call of Duty franchise off two completely different development studios.

Even in the one in a billion chance that someone is able to buy the franchise (and you'd actually need prospective buyers for that in the first place), what can they do with the franchise? Not to rail on MMOs too much, but so many fail rather quickly after launching that it would be a really risky gamble for any company. Someone might be able to kick it up with a free MMO with a cash shop, but I'm not sure how well that style of MMO does outside of the Asian countries. And the only other style game that I can see the franchise really supporting is your standard fare linear RPG which they already produce."

Bandai is sitting on a gold mine that they do not know what to do with. I trust Bandai when it comes to making solid, functional games, but not when it comes to marketing them. They have become far too timid to compete with the likes of Konami and Nintendo. That needs to change; they have some very nice oranges, but have yet to get the maximum amount of juice.