While on its core Digimon Adventure can be seen as another of the many kid's shows with cool marketable monsters of the 90s-00s, it has many unique qualities that make it stand apart from similar shows. This is noticed on its very start. The Digimon Adventure anime starts not with the TV anime, but with a short movie aired a day before directed by nothing less than Mamoru Hosoda (The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, Wolf Children), being the work that would leverage his career to one of the great anime film directors on the years following. The short movie, memorable for the extensive use of Ravel's Bolero, already sets a distinctive tone for this series, adding a certain introspection and emotional weight to a type of series that usually boils down to appellative action scenes and one-dimensional kids and adults characters.
Digimon is not like that. The kids on Digimon are insecure, they miss their families, they act very selfish and get annoyed by things that would annoy any other 10-years old, they fight between themselves and often take bad decisions... just like normal, real kids - or adults. Digimon already sets itself apart for having nothing less than 7 main characters, plus 1 added through it, breaking by far the "standard trio" formula that many, maaaaaany of its rival shows have. These characters have unique personalities, which are surprisingly pretty grounded, and developed over many episodes. For a child's show, the fact that the kids have some self-awareness and aren't a bunch of one-dimensional Ash Ketchum-like characters is really refreshing and helps Digimon Adventure create an unique identity of its own.
Even being a show of the 2000's transitional era of anime to digital animation (which produced some of the ugliest, most half-assed animated shows of all time), and having some (few) scenes that are statically animated because of this, Digimon still manages to create some artistic identity of its own in the middle of the mess. While it's a minor thing, the backgrounds on the Digital World have some characteristic white "dots" - something simple and effective. But, of course, the most memorable artistic identity comes from the soundtrack, specially the most melancholic songs such as Matt's harmonica and "Boléro de Ravel" and, of course, the epic transformation theme "Brave Heart", which turned into one of the most memorable themes of anime of all time, and bound Wada Kouji to Digimon forever.
While I praised most of the things that positively set apart Digimon Adventure from other shows, it still, unfortunately, can be considered quite weak on its quality as a whole. Apart from bad animation sometimes, some episodes are straight-up badly directed. There's episodes that clearly had great potential, yet things happen in a really convoluted way that wastes all that potential. There's some power creeps here and there (notably when the last act begins - IMO the last arc was partially unnecessary) and villains are evil because yes of course they are, no explanation needed. Anyway, some of these things that are just plain common on average-quality kids or shounen shows as a whole.
But even so, I believe Digimon Adventure stands apart for having all those positive, unique characteristics I mentioned above, and people should pay attention to it as something more than just another one of the many "mon" shows of the same era.
* = title of a video from Canal do Sahgo, a YouTube channel I love.
