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Digi-Update 01: STOP TALKING
Full disclosure: These first two updates, and the first half of the third, are almost entirely recycled from the old LP. This includes the filename jokes.
No surprises on the main menu. Wi-fi Connection allows you to trade eggs or battle with anyone else who's unfortunate enough to still be playing this game. Back is there in case, presumably, you realize what you're in for and want to get out while you can.
As tempting as it would be to make a female character and name her "Dawn", I think I have a bit more class than that.
And here, we're asked to choose our set of starting Digimon. Each pack includes two high-level, powerful mons, and our conspicuously unevolved signature Rookie. No points for guessing which one will be sticking around as-is.
I choose the Balance Pack, because Agumon is a bitch to get a hold of normally, and we'll want one as early as possible if we're ever going to meet the utterly absurd requirements for Omnimon. (This will probably never happen.)
Also, it's the only pack with two Ultimates, but that will matter for precisely one update.
Not only does our name have a five-character limit, but each of our mons is capped at eight. Because 
.
Coronamon gets the incredibly awesome and not at all obvious name Leo.
The other two come surprisingly easy.
Credit where credit is due, the music is pretty good.
We start the game with the tried and true JRPG protagonist tradition of being late. The kid with the bowl cut is Pulsa, one of our team members who starts off about as relevant and helpful as Krillin and gets worse from there. This will be a running theme.
The last time I LPed this game, I recorded every single line religiously. Word for word, typo for typo. I hope you don't mind if I give you the Cliff Notes version this time. If you do mind, then you're welcome to copy it all down yourself, and I'll happily add it back into the updates.
(This is not a facetious offer. If for some reason you either have access to or the sheer free time to recreate the game script, I wouldn't mind getting a hold of it.)
Pulsa fishes something out of his back pocket, and the top screen shows a pair of single-sprite Digimon moving back in forth in a dramatic, gripping battle that sets the tone of the game to come. The bottom screen spans up to a Megaman Battle Network completely original digital teleporter where we warp in.
Pulsa chides us for being late to the Group B Tournament, where we're representing Team Light Fang. Our rivals, Team Night Crow, have been kicking the everloving shit out of us, lead by someone named Sayo.
Trivia: Due to the peculiarities of how Japanese spells other languages' words, 'Crow' and 'Claw' are homonyms. It's probably supposed to be "Night Claw" to match "Light Fang", but the translation says "Crow", so we'll go with that.
Sayo is the female Player Character in Dusk, and were we playing that, we'd be trading places with the character we're playing now, whose canon name is Koh. Considering that we'd get at most one "Avatar: The Last Airbender" joke, and one "Give me your face" joke out of that before it got old, I think I made the right decision.
We turn with Pulsa to watch the top screen a big monitor overhead, and observe the fight, which has not changed from the same single-sprite back and forth since the conversation started. Exclamation points above our and Pulsa's heads! It looks like Monodramon has got Kokuwamon on the ropes! Piccolo is holding his own against Frieza!
Oh, wait, no, never mind, for the first of many, many, many times, the rest of our team is completely useless. People cheer, Pulsa's dialogue boxes open and close in weird places for seemingly no reason, good times all around.
We're then given the illusion of control, where we can walk around and talk to random NPCs, most of whom have nothing interesting to say. A few mentions are made of our leader, Glare, his partner Ophanimon, and Julia, leader of Night Crow, partnered with ChaosGallantmon.
Our three Digimon follow us around as we move, which is kind of cool. You may have noticed that every NPC has the same kind of sprite as our party. That's because if you can see a Digimon in the game, you can theoretically get one and add it to your party.
I say theoretically, because, for example, BantyoLeomon requires fusing two Ultimates, Grapleomon and Pandamon. Pandamon can only be obtained by fusing two Champions, Frigimon and MudFrigimon, but MudFrigimon can only be gotten from the Magnetic Quarry, a Dusk-exclusive zone, which means transfering over an egg that might contain MudFrigimon, and that's not even getting into the Species EXP and stat requirements and aaaaaaugh 
Blossomon here mentions that even low-stage Digimon can beat higher-stage ones, depending on the trainer, and he's... half-right, I guess. Baby Digimon (who aren't represented because they are almost completely incapable of combat) turn into In-Training, who turn into Rookies, who turn into Champions, who turn into Ultimates, who turn into Megas. A higher stage means higher level caps, and base stats, as well as more powerful attacks.
This can, however, be circumvented by, you guessed it, grinding. I won't go into the details just yet, but the trick is to get a mon up to the level cap, devolve it to the previous stage, then evolve it again, and max it out again, for a net gain in stats. So, if you're really, really attached to a certain mon, there is a (horrible, soul-crushing way) to make it stick around for a while longer, at least. Their level cap even rises slightly each time!
Trivia: If I were properly translating the Japanese terms, those stages would be "Baby 1, Baby 2, Child, Adult, Perfect, and Ultimate". These names are much more befitting of the symbolism, as Digimon partners changing from Children to Adults serves as a perfect metaphor for the characters growing as people and ahahaha no I don't actually give a shit.
The main menu's music replaces whatever's playing for the zone, and resets said music to the beginning when you unpause, I suspect because it was easier to code that way. Just one of many reasons you will get very used to hearing the first five seconds of a song, but we'll get into that later.
I save, so I don't have to go through all that bullshit again. Quests and Tamer Info show us info about what we're supposed to do and what we've already done (useless for the moment), and we don't have any items yet, which means the only useful screen right now is Digimon.
I'll have a proper Mechanics update eventually, but for a crash course, you have three of your up-to-six Digimon set up on a five-square line, fighting your opponents' mons. Digimon who are close together give each other bonuses, while mons who are farther apart are harder to hit all at once with area attacks (usually).
Raph and Mikey's stats. Appreciate those high numbers while they last, they won't be here long.
With nothing else to do in this room except 
some more, we move on to the Light Fang waiting area, and hopefully some actual gameplay.
Glare is counting on us, the last member of the team, to win three fights in a row, but no pressure! Tonpei joins us to get chewed out for being useless, which puts everyone in one room, just in time for a cast rolecall.
We've already met Pulsa. He uses a lot of exclamation points and takes everything way too seriously.
Cheetah looks like he escaped from another anime, and tries to act like it, too. Unfortunately, he's exactly as competent as everyone else here.
Cosplaying Tristan and half as relevant is Tonpei. Together with Cheetah, these two are responsible for almost all of the "our friends are in trouble and we have to go save them" nonsense in this game.
Komachi tries to be the big sister of the group. She's like Joe from the first season, except without Gomamon to act as a foil, and therefore the most boring character in an entire cast of boring characters.
Rounding out the gang is Kenpa. I think she's supposed to be "moe", or whatever you kids are calling it these days.
Glare is in charge because he's actually competent.
His partner is Ophanimon, who likes to inject gameplay tips into casual conversations. I can only imagine that she and Peppy Hare would get along like a Digi-house on Digi-fire.
Glare tries to reassure everyone that they fought their hardest and that's really what matters, before shooing us out to clean up their mess by actually winning.
Our first opponent is Weevil Underwood Newton. I'd say he's way too smug for such an obvious mook, but considering he apparently clean-swept everyone else on our team, it's hard to really blame him.
The top screen displays mon status, turn order, and the battlefield as a whole, while the bottom screen shows the current mon, your battle options, and the attacks actually happening.
As expected of a tutorial battle, this is going to be a complete curbstomp. Our opponent is Kokuwamon. Later, when we have an appropriately-strengthed team, it'll be one of the more annoying Rookies to fight. Here, it barely survives Raph's first attack, and Mikey finishes it off with a tremendous amount of overkill.
Winning a battle gets you Bits, the currency, and Species EXP. Evolving certain Digimon requires not just grinding for levels, but grinding for levels against the right kinds of chaff. Greymon, for example, requires Agumon have 280 Dragon EXP. It's like EV Training in Pokemon, except mandatory.
Everyone cheers for us in perfectly synchronized one-fist hops. The animation-recycling makes sense on the humans, but even the Digimon do it, too. It's a little weird. Newton curses us, saying that even if we beat him, the rest of Night Crow is even stronger than him.
The weakest member of Night Crow handily beat everyone else on our team. Let the implications of that sink in for a moment.
Ponch is equally indignant about someone in Light Fang being decent.
MameTyramon is an Ultimate, and he's even at a decent level, but unfortunately, he's still a tutorial enemy, and barely gets one attack off before he's crushed into the ground.
Gabumon doesn't even get a turn. 
Two down and one to go. Last is Gutts, who says that we can't beat, quote, "the super cool me!". This game chooses the weirdest things to translate literally. 
Trivia: It's likely that Gutts was using the first-person pronoun, "ore-sama", which comes out to something like "my lordly, badass self". Characters who use ore-sama include Vegeta from DBZ, Kamina from TTGL, and Beezlemon from Digimon Tamers.
This time, it's Volcanomon, Golemon, and Mushroomon. A fight we could lose, if we tried. Progress! But, once again, two-thirds of their team is dead before they get a turn. Golemon does get one attack off, but he does minimum damage to everyone but Leo.
And with that, we've won the tutorial. We're amazing, Komachi gets what's probably supposed to be a sick burn on Pulsa, everyone laughs, fade to black.
Next Digi-Update: They're hacking our internets!