Digimon Adventure 25th Anniversary Exhibition Lets You Relive Adventure 01 Yourself

If you have memories of waking up at 9am on Sundays watching NTV7, you'll want to stop by Incubase Arena at Farenheit88 for the Digimon Adventure 25th Anniversary Exhibition for your brief stopover in the Digital World. 

Available from now until March 23rd, fans can go experience an almost blow-for-blow recap of Digimon Adventure 01- the anime that set the tone for the Digital Monsters on the TV screen, with tickets available now. 

Reliving Digimon

If you've been to an Incubase Arena exhibition before, you'll be familiar with the amount of love they put into these things. The Digimon Adventure 25th Anniversary Exhibition kicks off with immaculate style, walking you through the start of the anime. There's some cool front-loading with the exhibition: at the entrance is a life-sized Agumon statue, alongside some physical displays of the Digivices, colored after all the members of the Chosen Children. 

Rather than just reliving through the entirety of 01, though, the exhibition instead builds on showing you cool moments from the show while also highlighting the beauty of making it. From turnarounds of the partner digimon to comments from the staff working on the show about all sorts of details, it's a fun way to be re-invited into the world of Digimon- as an adult who can appreciate the effort of a bunch of dudes in a room deciding how big Greymon is. 

Similarly, there's a lot of cool physical props on display, too. The case showing the 8 crests of the Digidestined is a particular highlight- considering they're not as prominent as devices like the Digivice, it's nice to see them again recreated almost perfectly how they are in the show. 

But the real magic of the Digimon Adventure 25th Anniversary Exhibition comes in the form of the highlights. Amid the swarm of production notes and cool videos of Digivolution sequences, the Digimon exhibition is bookmarked with these big spread out scenes, recreating shots from the anime. 

Sometimes covered in quotes and other times featuring cut out standees of characters, this feels like the biggest piece of fanservice there is. Seeing scenes like Wizardmon sacrificing its life to save Tailmon, or Taichi floating back into the Digital World, it's the kind of thing you head to these exhibitions for: Seeing the thing you love on the screen be presented to you in reality. 

It's interesting how the scenes are spread out specifically, though- I'm willing to put money on the Dark Masters not getting as big a spotlight due to just how grim that arc got. Similarly, Leomon, despite its numerical advantage has neither of its death scenes earn a similar diorama. That's not to say it steers clear of the darker subject matter though- rather, it's hard to say your exhibition welcomes kids wnen you can easily point to a frame of Whamon getting the Kennedy treatment. 

The final highlight might be the one of the coolest installations at one of these exhibits yet- three walls that let you experience the ending of Digimon Adventure 01 as if it was in a real space. On one end, you get to see the Chosen Children get on their train and leave the Digital World. On the other end, you see the Digimon running to catch up and say goodbye, before watching them eventually fade into the background. The third wall has Mimi's hat, frozen in the air like that goodbye. Combined with the production notes on how they explicitly wanted the goodbye to be the focus of the last episode, it's a lot of effort put into a genuinely touching moment- the end of Adventure 01. 

While the exhibition mainly focused on the events of the first Digimon anime series, its not like the others don't get a mention. The final area features model sheets and posters for all the different Digimon series, as well as a display of Digivices from those shows. I'm especially glad it has materials from the lesser-known Digimon OVA that got released with Our War Game in the US- it's my favorite take on Greymon, and has some of my favorite fights. 

Better yet, it's also the location of the crowning glory of the exhibition- a giant Omegamon, positioned for you to pretend to be riding on its back as it fights off Diaboromon.

 It also ends with one final, cool art drop: the illustrations from the second ED for Adventure 01, featuring all the Digimon evolutions as well as different expressions for the Chosen Children. Just like how that ED marked the end of this week's Digimon episode for so many kids, it's great to see it mark the end of the Digimon Adventure 25th Anniversary exhibition. 

The Digimon Adventure 25th Anniversary Exhibition is available from now until March 23rd, and I highly implore any Digimon fans to take a moment to check it out. Tickets are available from RM40 for single tickets, with Buddy Tickets for duos available at RM65, and last entry for each day is 9pm so you can even pop over after work if you're scared of weekend crowds. While it's a smaller hallspace than the usual Incubase Arena fair, it's still jam-packed with things to look at and do- heck, there's even merch available, like Digimon TCG Booster Packs as well as Virtual Pets.