Shinigami said
To be honest, I don't really get season 3. It pretty much lost me at hello...:O But I did like the idea in season 4 when they can figth as digimons themselves!
I admit I'm biased because it was the first season I ever saw, but honestly I just really like season 3 because, by comparison, it just seems so... adult. Some parts of it were surprisingly creepy and/or dark, even early on, and as it continued it was just so... wow. I've never felt more sucked in by a Digimon plot before. And I loved the final villain.
Also, I feel like this is the only season that really accurately captured the whole "digital" aspect. Seasons 1 and 2, despite tacking the prefix "digi" onto everything, pretty much just felt like a fantasy adventure story. Some kids get sucked into another world with fantasy monsters that evolve to get stronger and kill each other, whee~! But it really didn't need to have the whole "digital" thing attached to it (even if the franchise is based off of digital pets). Meanwhile, season 3 took the digital concept full-swing, actually making it feel almost sci-fi-esque. Digimon are constantly described as data, but in a way that actually makes sense this time. They're thought of sort of as programs - which are programmed to fight each other, which is why they have that instinct to fight. And they absorb the data of their enemies in order to make themselves stronger so they can digivolve, which means adding a whole bunch more data onto themselves. And because they're data, they can easily be deleted. But because they're sentient, that raises a whole bunch of moral questions when you have people who just want to delete them all and... yeah, it's just really interesting to me.
Plus, given the fact that the team who produced this was basically just told to "re-work the entire Digimon series in a way that will encourage kids to go out and buy the video games and trading cards", they did a
fantastic job of making all that work without totally sacrificing the story and managed to create something that wasn't an enormous cash-in. o.o