Gekomon

...And here's one now! This is also where things get slightly strange with this line. The sixth pet featured Shellnumemon as a "failure" adult when you make too many care mistakes, but if you simply didn't meet the criteria for any other evolutions, you wound up with Gekomon here, still treated as another kind of "failure" digimon, but the first one to not be associated in any way with poop or garbage. It's pretty unusual that a "failure" would be the actual truest evolution of an otherwise ordinary child stage, but I guess the idea here is that a tadpole is going to turn into a frog by default anyway, and it just takes extra care - or gross neglect - to end up with anything else.

So, as a design, Gekomon has that same "90's American Comedy Cartoon" style as most of the other "loser" digimon, and that's already my favorite aesthetic we ever see in these here digital monsters, but I daresay Gekomon perfects, and this newer illustration really drives that home. Gekomon's crazed, irregular eyeballs, wild teeth, lanky body, three-pronged tongue and absurdly built-in trombone all make for one of the zaniest, most endearing, most criminally under-appreciated designs in the whole series, and you know I mean it when we're not even talking about a bug or a slug or a trash pile this time.

Gekomon may not be one of my personal, must-have favorites as a concept, no, but for real, no joke, I genuinely think this bonkers frog might actually be, in my eyes, the best any Digimon can ever possibly look. You may not like it, but this is the ideal Digimon body. This is what peak digivolution looks like.

Digivolves from

 * 1) Otamamon

Digivolves to

 * 1) ShogunGekomon