I’ve been on a bit of a virtual pet kick again lately – I’m running 7 virtual pets and acting like it’s a completely normal thing to do. While some sprites are really accurate, I’ve noticed there are a few strange Digimon sprites that really do not match the Digimon it’s meant to represent.
I was able to easily find a huge list of strange Digimon sprites or sprites that somehow differ from their art, so I thought I’d share five of these now.
What are strange Digimon sprites?
I’m not including any Digimon who have strange, dumb, or other wise unusual designs, I have an ‘ABCs of…’ for those Digimon designs, this list is only for sprites that are strange in the way that they don’t necessarily match the actual Digimon’s art and are pretty much unrecognisable because of this. These aren’t in any order to these as they’re all pretty strange in their own way.
MarineAngemon
This one isn’t too bad until you consider its size – this sprite is as big as the sprite for Whamon and basically every other ‘full size sprite’. Meanwhile, in Tamers, it’s shown t o be small enough to fit in a human hand!
What makes this more bizarre is that smaller ‘high level’ Digimon have existed in sprite form before – the Mamemon family and Giromon and Pixiemon on the original virtual pets, to name a few, so why MarineAngemon wasn’t given the same treatment is pretty unusual.
Gotsumon
I shouldn’t include it in a list of strange Digimon sprites when this is clearly just Kirby that I’m looking at here – and a pretty sad/angry looking Kirby that!
Gotsumon’s art has a pretty surprising amount of detail and personality for a pet rock – his cracked smile, each individual rock stuck together to form a body, and his bright eyes – there’s a lot of life.
Meanwhile, his sprite is just Kirby. When I first raised him on a virtual pet I wasn’t exactly sure who I was looking at, he doesn’t look like he’s made of rocks, he looks like he’s just a slightly bigger Motimon made out of goo or marshmallow or Kirby.
It’s strange.
Gomamon
Gomamon’s sprite is actually the main reason that I created this list – his sprite has always been slightly funny and strange to me, mainly because it’s a MapleStory monster – Jr Seal.
I understand that it’s a small sprite on a small screen, so a lack of detail is inevitable, but it just looks so much like Jr Seal, what’s better, is that Ikakumon looks like the stronger seal MapleStory monster.
Pixiemon
Pixiemon I kind of feel sorry for – he’s just grouped together with all of the small size perfect level Digimon in the original Digital Monster, but he ends up just looking like another Mamemon.
You can barely see his wings – they look like spikes out of him – and his feet are larger than his wings. He doesn’t even have a weapon.
He looks just like a strange alien head.
Thankfully, his sprite in the Digimon Pendulum added wings and had him appear to be floating.
Floramon
Last in this list of strange Digimon sprites is Floramon, who looks like the artist gave up halfway. I appreciate the fact that the sprite has her hands, but I feel like that was all that this sprite has.
It just looks like a flower with a face, instead of the flower being around the head or neck, it looks like the flower is the head.
I love Floramon’s design, but her sprite just doesn’t look like her enough, in my opinion.
So how many strange Digimon sprites can you think of that don’t particularly match the actual Digimon’s design? Which of these five sprites do you think is the most unfitting? Let me know in the comments!
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I’ve always liked how Piemon’s sprite makes him look like a totally different kind of clown. With how iconic Kenji Watanabe’s artwork for these monsters is, looking at the original pixel art is just such a weird experience. It’s wild to think about how different some of these monsters might look if Watanabe had just interpreted them even a little differently.
Of these examples, I think MarineAngemon is my favorite. It looks even cuter in sprite form, I think, in large part because it looks like a Halloween ghost that got lost and wound up in St. Valentine’s Day.