yugioh, manga card game, got it. pokemon, video game anime, got it. digimon... tamagotchi anime?
yugioh monsters, projections of cards. pocket monsters, attack pets. digital monsters, like, from what I hear they've got essentially human-levels of intelligence?
I genuinely am having trouble discerning where the hook-on point for this, weird multimedia blob is? It's the anime, right? Because from the outside of having literally no interaction with the franchise over my life outside of like stray mentions in the context of specific contrast to pokemon, it looks like it's a franchise that kinda had a neat little toy, got an anime that hit, and then bumbled into literally every other industry that collectibles do and did them all in a way that made essentially zero cultural impact outside of unlimited contrarianism against pokemon by kids who had a chip on their shoulder about it.
all power to those kids in retrospect, good bit if that was the case, but it's something that's confounded me for a bit: have I been fucking hermetically-sealed off from a major cultural phenomenon? is this like an ozymandias situation where it's all ash in the present? is this just contrarian's pokemon as I thought it was when I was 12? I'm looking at the wikipedia page and my eyes are glazing over, it's like it's designed to be the most unintuitive thing for people who want to get a handle on it.
I don't get it 
the funniest thing about digimon is how a little creature that looks like a dinosaur or lion or whatever can evolve into either a giant cool monster, a giant disgusting monster, a mech, or a woman with almost no clothes on
Ackshually, they digivolve.
Didn't the Charizard-looking one at some point just turn into a big scary skeleton too?
Just looked it up, skull graymon did exist. The whole phenomenon feels like a fever dream, where I vaguely heard of this and saw random episodes in my youth, but had no fuckin clue what was happening. Every time it comes up in conversation online, I remember some weird shit about it, look it up, and am always surprised that it really was real.
They needed to make up for totally phoning it in with his other form, where the dinosaur transforms into a larger dinosaur but with missile launchers strapped to it.
That episode was really good.