I showed this to my six year old daughter in order to ease her Pokemon mania a bit (after being tired of hearing two hours monologues about the different pokemons). What striked me when watching this is how mature the story is, it's almost like Lost (the famous american drama about a group of people stuck on a deserted island) in the way the poor protagonists deal with being stuck in the Digi-world. It's seriously frightening, and for a kids show it depicts the traumas these kids go through fairly realistically. Also, if this wasnt enough, the protagonists also have to deal with their own back stories, fairly advanced stuff for a kids show, which both adds a warmth and realism to it. One can totally understand if the author of Bokurano (a seinen manga/anime with a similar story about dying kids stuck in various mecha-circumstances) used this as inspiration.
It's hard to rate this since it's a kids show that I watched together with my daughter and did not watch it when I was a kid, thus no emotional attachment to it. Even with the darker plot it's still a kids show from the 90's, and it should be rated as one even if I have to say that it have aged well. I used the digivolvement scenes to practice katakana with my daughter, so it wasnt totally waste either ;)
Bottom line is, if you've got kids of your own, this is not exchangeable with Pokemon, it is lots of scary stuff going on and for my daughter, she was too young for it. So we'll be having a Sailor Moon marathon instead!
