Oh boy, here we go. The main heroes of Digimon Frontier are kind of the reason this show wasn't well received at first, because it did away with the series staple of pairing human children with their own personal monster friends. Instead, the children become digimon, which is an interesting twist, I suppose, and I won't fault them for trying something new, but there's no replacement for the kind of fun, heartfelt dynamic we've always gotten between our human and nonhuman protagonists.

As for this one's design, well, you get a very predictable "ugh" out of me. The only point of interest are that the horns and the hands are clearly inspired by Hellboy. Otherwise it's just an incredibly forgettable, spiky haired anime boy with some vaguely animal-like characteristics. It's actually supposed to be what happens when a human takes on the power of Ancientgreymon, but shouldn't that make him part dinosaur? Not...lion? Or whatever the hell this is? The entire design principle here is just not pleasant. I'd say it was hard to believe this is an official digimon and not something hastily concocted for the cover of an unauthorized video game walkthrough, but unfortunately we're kind of well past the point where almost no digimon can be tacky enough to look fake.

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Flamemon evolves, also predictably, into a big burning action figure man, and that's pretty much the running motif for all of our main characters, so I'm just going to have to get used to it for now. Seriously though; while previous digimon leaned more on the "kaiju" side, this series is going for more of a "tokusatsu" homage, so of course our good guys look like power rangers. In fact, before they were retconned as "adult" stages, these power ranger fellas were just supposed to be "human fragments" of each of the Ten Warriors.

I may not really like anything about this kind of design, but I guess I gotta be fair and at least give it a two as the baseline of this series.

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So now he's looking a little more like a dragon guy, because the Ten Warriors were all split into both "human" souls and "beast" souls, giving each of our main characters two alternate forms. The detail in this design is impressive, sure, with lots of nice little shapes fitting together rather smoothly. It's not for me but I can recognize the artistic effort on display here. I can also promise you that I will not be saying the same exact thing about every single stage of every single character. I'll certainly be thinking it a lot, but there's definitely some action figure people coming up that I have some new and different feelings about...and once we get to the villains, some concepts I can get outright excited for again!

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Judging strictly by the standards of the things on this page, the final stage actually IS the coolest looking. I do actually like that these fire dragon knight guys focus on their wild hair, that isn't something I see a whole lot in dragon guys. The darker cherry red here is also a whole lot more pleasing than Vritramon's ketchup-colored armor.

These Ultimate stages, however, are supposed to be the fusions of our "human" and "beast" forms. Most of them, unfortunately, just look more like the human forms.

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