The Digimon fitness bracelet killed my COVID kilos. Then Bandai Namco killed it.
Your digidensity stops today
"I hope you die" is weak and basic.
"I hope your favorite series is owned by Bandai Namco" is real, frightening, and it can happen to anyone.
-Ancient Gamer Proverb (Source)
Fitness was never really something I concerned myself with much. I never really ‘needed’ it while I was younger because my hobbies were mostly indoors and less active. I think there was also a part of me that was a bit defeatist about it as well. I’d made nerdiness part of my identity due to a combination of my interests and the labels pushed onto me during school and so I didn’t really take pride in myself or my body. This would change as I grew up and started working, but mostly in the form of walking. I’d walk the dog every day and get an earlier commute to work so I could take a peaceful walk around the city to calm myself.
The biggest change I took on would be in 2019, when I started a martial arts class so I could start getting more serious about fitness and self-improvement. I was pretty good at it! I started off getting exhausted during the warm-downs, wondering how people could possibly do this, but before long I was keeping up with everyone. I slimmed down and put on a bit of muscle, and for the first time I really felt good about my body. I loved those classes, and started going in for more sessions each week - they were even where I met my girlfriend! I was on top of the world!
But I had picked the worst time to start getting fit, because we were all about to be locked indoors. The COVID pandemic affected everyone in different ways, but for me it made me a lot lazier and more hesitant to get out of the house. We bought an apartment closer to the city to make it easier to get to places like our martial arts classes, but even when restrictions eased up we found ourselves staying inside more often than not. I put on more weight than I ever had in my life and didn’t feel like myself anymore. I hated looking at photos of myself. I took on a busier job and we adopted a dog, making time and money more limited than they already were, and before long we’d cancelled our martial arts classes. It really hurt cutting out such a key part of our story, but we just couldn’t get in there anymore.
But I would lose that COVID weight. I would get more fit again. People laugh when I tell them how, but it really worked. I did it with a Digimon exercise toy - the Vital Bracelet. This article started as a sort-of review of the two models of Vital Bracelet that I had put time into, but gradually and gradually I realised that the story of how Bandai Namco handled this product line was bizarre. This company has always been weird about the Digimon franchise despite its popularity, and the Vital Bracelet was no different. So take a seat, because we’re going digital.
The Vital Bracelet released in 2021. Similar to the various V-Pet devices Bandai Namco has released over the years, they see you caring for a virtual character. You could use different memory cards called Digimon Identified Memory Cards or DIM Cards (sold separately, naturally) to install different packs of characters onto your device. While there were some crossovers with Ultraman and Kamen Rider, the bulk of these cards revolved around Digimon. The difference between the Vital Bracelet and a V-Pet is that with the Vital Bracelet you care for your Digimon by caring for yourself. Taking steps and exercising gives your Digimon ‘Vital Points’ which keep it alive and make it stronger in battles. You could also earn trophies by clearing goals like performing certain kinds of exercise, hitting step targets or winning battles.
Depending on your Digimon’s Vital Points, trophy count, and battle wins you would end up with a different Digimon when it digivolves to the next stage. The Digimon that the Vital Bracelet was revealed alongside was a clever tie-in with this idea of exercise-powered evolution - Pulsemon, a Digimon who gains power heartbeats detected in gym and hospital equipment. Pulsemon (who can be seen in the trailer above) has various evolutions based on different kinds of sports and exercise. Train it right and it will beef up into Bulkmon and eventually become a master of soul and mind in Kazuchimon. However, if you take things a bit too easy early on, it will become a lazy sloth called Namakemon who gets mad at you if you exercise it too much. It’s such a great concept for a Digimon line and the link between Digimon and exercise got me really excited to buy a Vital Bracelet for myself.
But naturally, because this is Bandai Namco we’re talking about, there were absolutely no details provided on an English release. Bamco is really weird about Digimon in the West - despite there being clear demand for it the products are rarely localised. And even when they are… they’re still not.
Instead, Bamco were treating the Vital Bracelet as a premium import product, making it available officially through their Bandai Premium service but otherwise leaving it to importers to resell it to overseas customers.
The Vital Bracelet went through three iterations - the original, bundled with a Pulsemon card, a special edition bundled with Veemon, and a version themed around the Digimon Ghost Game anime that was airing at the time, bundled with Gammamon and boasting a host of Quality of Life improvements. It wasn’t until July 2022, over a year after the initial release of the Vital Bracelet, that the localised version of the bracelet (dubbed the Vital Hero) would eventually launch. There were three available bundles, each using the updated firmware of the Gammamon Vital Bracelet. One of those was the traditional black bracelet bundled with Pulsemon, but the other two mashed bits and pieces of some of the Japanese cards to make a unique selection of Digimon. Since Ghost Game hadn’t been localised at the time (and probably never will be!), the English release went in on Digimon Adventure nostalgia instead with a blue model bundled with Gabumon and a red model bundled with Agumon that was exclusive to Walmart. Yes, the US-only retailer Walmart. As far as I can tell there wasn’t an official release of the Vital Hero outside of the US, with the availability being limited to Amazon and any local stores who decided to import them themselves; so it remained an import product even after localisation.
It was through the Vital Hero that I got onboard with the Vital Bracelet, because I wanted to wait for, and support, a localised release. The joke was on me though because I would discover that not only was there barely any text on the device anyway, but also that the companion app had been available in English the whole time for people who had imported a bracelet from Japan. So Bamco had gone through all that work only to put the burden of actually obtaining the damn things onto the customer. They are a very normal company who handles each of their powerhouse licenses very well.
I set up my bracelet and got paired with the Dokimon who would eventually become Bibimon, and then Pulsemon. It would be hard to not love the device right away, with its gorgeous pixel art evoking an evolution of the original Digimon Tamagotchi. Each card has its own unique background for the bracelet, and all of the Digimon have a surprising number of cute animations. They’ll walk when you walk and each one has its own exercising animation for when you’re working out. The complicated designs of some fully-evolved Digimon translate really well into the art style, with so many details shining through.
While I wasn’t getting as intense exercise as I would from a martial arts class, I could definitely feel a difference in my habits. I would set aside some time each day to ensure I hit all my missions by doing crunches, squats and more, and I would go on extra walks during the day beyond just walking my dog to ensure I was hitting step targets. One of the big motivators for this was the bracelet’s ‘Adventure Mode’. When in this mode, you would trigger increasingly difficult fights by hitting a certain number of steps, and if you won each of them then you would unlock a new evolution path for the current DIM Card. If I was coming back from a walk and was only at 2100 steps when the battle needed 2500, the walk would mysteriously add an additional destination to the end. I wasn’t just noticing a change in my habits, but I noticed a change in my appearance and fitness as well - I was gradually feeling better and losing a bit of that lockdown weight.
What really elevated the Vital Bracelet though was the companion app, called the Vital Bracelet Lab. It oozed with style and provided a lot of features to incentivise and aid with filling out your Digidex (yes, it was actually called that). By using the NFC capabilities of your phone, you could transfer the Digimon you’ve raised on your bracelet into the app. The transfer animation was synchronised so that the second the Digimon disappeared from your app they appeared on your phone, selling the illusion that this was a real digital being living within your phone.
Once the monster was transferred you could view stats like a count of how many trophies it has earned or a graph of its Vital Point gains and losses over the last week. Each evolution path that you had unlocked on the bracelet would be tracked within your Digidex, and filling it out would unlock items you could use within the app or transfer back to your bracelet in order to give your Digimon a boost. You could even transfer missions along with it which would provide trophies for triggering evolutions when completed.
While your Digimon were in the app, you could also pit them against other players’ Digimon in asynchronous battles. This was handy if your Digimon was stuggling in the automated battles on the bracelet, because you could use your points to buy in-app upgrades to make these battles easier. Your wins and losses would then count towards your Digimon’s evolution requirements. As an endgame activity, there were seasonal raids where you could team up with other players to take on iconic Digimon villains like Diaboromon and Cherubimon. These were tough, and would require you to train up a Mega-level Digimon with a type advantage against the boss in order to stand a chance.
The experience came together in an engaging gameplay loop where all the physical activity you did during the day would help you fill the Digidex and beat bosses in the app, which would in turn give you bonuses that would make raising Digimon on the bracelet easier. Over time you would unlock more storage space and more customisation options, and build up a collection of filled in Digidex pages and cleared Adventure Modes. This was always encouraging me to sneak in those extra few steps I wouldn’t normally get in order to help my Digimon research.
But there were some issues with the Vital Hero. For one, despite the price they were quite cheaply built. The wristband would regularly unlatch itself, causing the bracelet to fling off during exercise, and within a year one of the buttons on mine gave out and I had to get a replacement. The main issue for me, though, was that for a device designed to get you exerising there were more rewards for battling your Digimon than for actually exercising. You could only do each exercise that granted evolution trophies once per day. Not once per day per Digimon; once per day, full stop. Most of the special missions that could be transferred from the app either required battling, or could be completed easier by battling rather than exercising. So while I was definitely increasing my step count and getting exercise that way, the more full-on exercise encouraged by the app could be condensed to just a few minutes each day. I mean, I could keep going with more exercise beyond that, but what’s the point if it’s not unlocking new Digimon?
The handling of the Vital Hero was bizarre, even putting aside how long it took for it to release in the first place. Like I touched on before, it doesn’t seem to have gotten an official release on shelves outside of the US. I’ve seen listings for some smaller Australian stores, but given that they aren’t big chains I got the impression these were special imports from America. That’s not good for a toy marketed towards children! You need those on shelves! Although that touches on another weird aspect of the marketing - the Japanese advertising positions it as an exercise-related game for teenagers and young adults, whereas the English marketing goes hard on it being a toy for children. It’s kinda weird when I would wager that the bulk of the Digimon fanbase in the West is aging millennials (in no small part due to Bamco’s failure to keep the franchise relevant outside of Japan).
The bulk of the English marketing was handled by a mostly-automated Twitter account that would tweet the same few ads on a loop. Sometimes a human would take over, but most of the time when this happened things would get… weird. For one, when people would ask if the Japanese DIM Cards would eventually get released, they would respond telling them more were on the way.
They would release no new DIM Cards for the life of the Vital Hero. Well… technically they did. But that’s a can of worms we’ll save for later.
Then there was the time they said a big announcement was going to be on Good Day LA, providing no details on when to actually watch it. Nor did they follow up on this afterwards at all on their feed.
To this day I have no idea what this supposed announcement actually was. I tracked down the Vital Hero segment from the show and, while there is no announcement there, it is fascinating. It has a single blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment where the word ‘Digimon’ is actually used. There’s footage of the special edition Veemon bracelet using the Wormmon DIM Card - neither of which were ever released in English. It’s capped off by one of the hosts saying “It’s like Pokémon!” Fascinating, fascinating stuff.
Things would somehow get weirder than this, but for now we need to get back on course and discuss what happened next with the Vital Bracelet line. In June 2022, Bamco announced a new model of the Vital Bracelet - the Vital Bracelet BE.
For the most part, the BE was a huge improvement over the original Vital Bracelet. For one, it was a lot sturdier (and splash-proof!) and the new BE Memories it used in place of DIM Cards could fit more Digimon, with more complex evolution paths. Some of these paths had to be unlocked through the improved Adventure Mode, which unlocked multiple Digimon at different points rather than a single one at the end. You could choose to take on the Adventure Mode for any of the cards you had stored on your card at the time rather than just the active one, which added a level of strategy where you could load up Digimon with a type advantage against the target.
The BEMs available had a wide range of Digimon available. While there was some re-use of Digimon from DIM Cards there were plenty more new faces, and some cards featured tie-ins with other Digimon media like Ghost Game, Digimon Adventure 02: The Beginning and Digimon Seekers (the webcomic released for the anniversary of the franchise which, naturally, used machine translation to predictable results). One card even had Gundramon! GUNDRAMON! You know how rarely this thing actually pops up despite being one of the best/worst designs ever?
The biggest improvement in the BE was related to the exercise tracking - unlike the base Vital Bracelet, there were no limits to how many times you could trigger the exercise missions on the bracelet. Evolution trophies were linked to the number of squat reps you had done with this Digimon, while the other exercises would each buff a different stat so that your Digimon would be stronger in battles. There was a drawback to this, however, in that each Digimon had a 100-hour training timer and once this depleted you could no longer exercise with that Digimon. It was designed to balance the stat boosts in PvP in the app, but it led to people getting anxious about keeping their favourite Digimon active out of fear of locking them out of boosts. It didn’t help with the balance anyway because players who cared about battling just cheated the system by shaking their device over and over rather than actually exercising. Why you would buy an exercise aid just to cheat it is beyond me!
These improvements meant that I was taking on a more strenuous exercise routine. Whenever I got some free time I would try to sneak in a few exercise missions. My girlfriend found it funny at first watching me squatting in front of the TV or running around the apartment, but it didn’t take long for it to make a difference. While I didn’t get back to my peak, all the weight I’d built up from being locked inside was starting to go away. I was feeling more like myself in my day to day and recognised the guy in the mirror again. Neither of us could believe that a Digimon toy was what finally got my fitness back to normal.
“Wait, rewind a bit - the BE was announced in June 2022? Isn’t that before the first English version of the bracelets was even announced?”
Yes. Yes it is. But buckle in, because it keeps going.
So yes, right before they announced the English version of the Vital Bracelet they announced a much better version was on the way. But the Vital Hero was totally functional and worked with the exact same app as the Japanese bracelets, so you could still get a lot of value out of it.
For a while.
Because the new bracelet was revealed alongside a new app, developed in-house by Bandai Namco. At first it wasn’t clear whether this was a new app just for the BE or a replacement for the old app. But as time would go on, the usually-regular events in the app would become scarcer and scarcer, before stopping altogether. The community was confused but could read the writing on the wall - eventually it was announced that the old app would be shutting down and players would be required to evacuate all their Digimon into the new app. By transferring them onto their bracelets. One-by-one. This clunkiness would be a sign of what was to come with the new app, dubbed the Vital Bracelet Arena.
Because while the BE itself was a big improvement over the regular Vital Bracelet in a lot of ways, the Vital Bracelet Arena app was a shadow of the Vital Bracelet Lab.
For one - simply using the app was a nightmare. Countries that had access to the original app couldn’t download the app at launch, if at all, and there were regular server errors that would boot you out of it. This wasn’t helped by the fact the app called to the server for each and every action you could take which meant that even the most basic functionality you use on a regular basis would take so much longer than in the VB Lab.
It was also clearly designed around the BE while only providing minimal essential functions for the Vital Bracelet and Hero. You could no longer send special missions back to your Vital Bracelet, which meant that some evolutions with higher requirements became a major hassle to try and unlock. The app also did not save your Adventure Mode progress like the Lab did, which meant that getting the exclusive Digimon unlocked by clearing the Adventure for each DIM Card was also now a hassle.
The Arena also changed up the battle system so that you fought against other players in real-time using pairs of Digimon. The battles were actually quite engaging now, but the issue with forcing real-time multiplayer with a niche product only officially released in one country… is that you are not going to find players. Outside of seasonal events, you would be hard pressed to run into another player - if you could even get past the server issues in the first place. These battles also did not count towards your Digimon’s evolution like in the Lab app, and for some reason would take away some of your Digimon’s Vital Points as an entry fee.
It didn’t help that battles were segregated in a much less logical way than in the previous app. The Lab app allowed you to transfer Digimon in and out using either the Vital Bracelet or Vital Hero with no issues, and provided battle lobbies for each level of Digimon evolution - if you sent Agumon over he could fight against other Rookies and your MetalGarurumon could stick to a higher-level lobby for more of a challenge. Within the Arena app, your Digimon collections were separated between Digimon raised on a BE, those raised on a Vital Hero and those raised on a Vital Bracelet. Since most people using the app imported a Vital Bracelet, the Vital Hero lobbies were sparsely populated. The battles were also not separated by evolution stage either, so while you could send your underpowered Digimon into the app there was no use for them there because they wouldn’t stand a chance against the fully-evolved Digimon people were battling with.
But by far the change that hurt the most going from the Lab to the Arena was the total draining of all the style. The original app was designed around Digimon specifically, and leant hard into the Y2K aesthetic that the franchise is known for. Every menu looked great and there were so many neat little touches, like the transfer animation syncing up between the bracelet and the app. The BE was designed to be a more generic device because there were a large number of crossover BEMs featuring characters from anime like My Hero Academia and Demon Slayer. This led to many aspects of the bracelet and app feeling more sterile and bland so as to not make any branded characters feel out of place. These crossover cards were more limited in functionality compared to the Digimon ones and could regularly be found on clearance on import sites, so the trade-off was not at all worth it.
Things did gradually get better though, thanks to some updates to the app and the BE itself supporting firmware updates through the SD Card slot that the original bracelets lacked. The Arena app received its own Adventure Mode, which allowed you to send inactive Digimon on quests. After a certain time they would return with rewards you could use to power them up (and these would differ based on the combination of evolution levels you sent out, giving weaker Digimon more of a purpose). The rewards offered were actually so much better than those offered by the in-app events that they would go on to nerf them several times, but they never stopped being useful.
The bracelet itself received an incredible update that totally changed its gameplay loop - by completing battles, enemies would sometimes drop items that provided various useful benefits. Things like increasing the Digimon’s training timer or multiplying the stat boosts gained from exercising. It was so much more efficient to max your Digimon out and you no longer had to worry about your Digimon being locked out of training. It was now a much better combination of virtual pet gameplay and fitness tracking, making the exercise gameplay loop a lot more satisfying.
Now, you’re probably wondering how the English side of the company was handling the BE launch. Well, first they revealed the Vital Bracelet Arena app… days after it had launched. The app was available since late November, but they tweeted about it a few days into December.
And then they just kept posting through it, as if the Vital Hero line was still ongoing.
Then came one of the most bizarre announcements I have seen.
Yes, a Batman-themed Vital Hero and two DC Comics-themed character cards. These had not leaked, they were not based off of anything that was released for the Japanese Vital Bracelet, and details were scarce. Was this the same as the Digimon Vital Hero? Was it actually a BE under a different name? If it was a Vital Hero, how would it account for all the features that were no longer present in the Arena app?
This is the can of worms I left unopened earlier. The Vital Hero did technically get new cards after all, but they weren’t the ones that people had been asking for. They were also clearly rushed out in order to get SOMETHING new for the Vital Hero line after head office had already moved on to the BE. You can see the same 3 character bases re-used for almost every character and the evolution charts make no real sense at all.
Why does Cyborg evolve into Wonder Woman? Why is Lex Luthor a higher evolution level than Darkseid? Although the Batman card does give Robin a branching evolution into either Nightwing or Red Hood, which is morbidly hilarious. Supply your own crowbar.
The bracelet and its manual still referred to special missions from the old app which you could no longer utilise but, in a surprisingly cognisant showing, the evolutions on the DC cards did not require near as many trophies as the Digimon ones so you could still reasonably achieve each one without use of the app. I still do not really understand how these came about or what they were hoping to achieve with them when so little care was put into designing them or incorporating them into Bamco’s larger Vital Bracelet plans.
But it wouldn’t matter that much, because in due time the Vital Bracelet Arena would be sunset as well. While announcements of new cards were usually pretty regular, things went quiet after the reveal of a Pulsemon BE Memory. Many speculated that it would be the last one, bringing things full circle by having Pulsemon be the beginning and end of the Vital Bracelet, but others held out hope for either new BEMs or a new model of bracelet. Alas - in June this year, it was announced that support for the Vital Bracelet Arena would be ceasing, and no new BE Memories released.
Thankfully it wasn’t as bad as the shutdown of the Vital Bracelet Lab - if you signed in during a certain limited period you could convert your online data to an offline save that would maintain all of your Digimon and items and continue to operate without the servers. Some people missed this window and unfortunately lost all their Digimon - but the app would still work and they could build their collection back over time. You could no longer use the app for battles, but storing your Digimon was the more important part.
The final punchline? Without the server checks the app loaded in a fraction of the time it used to, making it more convenient to use than it was while actively supported.
It can be real hard being a Digimon fan. You never know whether you’ll actually get anything, and even when there are new releases there’s no guarantee Bandai Namco will give them the effort they deserve. But for now, I still have so many DIM cards and BE Memories to fill out my Digidex with. I just raised the new BE version of Pulsemon into a Kazuchimon, and DNA Digivolved it with Fenriloogamon to unlock the strongest Digimon in the game. I can’t battle with it online anymore, but it was never about that. It was using my fondness for monster collection games to improve myself. The combination of virtual pets and personal fitness is such a genius idea, and I hope someone else picks up where the Vital Bracelet left off.