If you think Digimon are a cheap Pokémon ripoff inspired by a virtual pet toy from the ’90s, you don’t know Digimon. From anime shows, webcomics, novels, an official trading card game, and now the buzzy new RPG out of Summer Game Fest, Digimon Story: Time Stranger, the Digimon franchise has expanded significantly since its introduction in 1997. Even so, its growth has always been followed by the shadow of Pokémon, with which everything Digimon-related is wrongly compared, scrutinized, and ignored.

Digimon Story: Time Stranger could change that. Or it should, even with Pokémon Legends: Z-A looming. Based on early gameplay and reveals, Bandai has at least aimed to produce a game for a wider audience that addresses past mistakes. From investing in making the world of Time Stranger feel alive with cities filled with digimon to giving a special attention when putting 450 creatures in the game by designing special animations for each of them, it’s also clear the company has never lost sight of how cool Digimon is.

I can’t blame anyone for seeing Digimon as a Pokémon knockoff; the first season of the Digimon anime aired in Brazil in July 2000, six months after Pokémon debuted, and I know we weren’t the only country that experienced the juxtaposition. Both shows had creatures who befriend kids and become stronger as they fight. But Pokémon made creature-taming part of the global zeitgeist. But the idea behind both couldn’t be more different; the games specifically play around with the idea that the real world and the DigiWorld exist in different instances. In some cases, humans are transported to the world of digimon, in others the digital leaks into the real.

In 1999, Bandai released the first game based on the creatures: Digimon World, a RPG in which we play as Mameo, a kid who finds himself in File Island and needs to help save the place from. Instead of a simple journey to........

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