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 
It's the anime. Watch the first 3 seasons. The first 2 are in the same continuity and are the kind of kids show kids should watch. They really deal with some pretty heavy real shit that like an 8 year old might irl and take that stuff pretty serious and it's just generally a really really good kids show that had care put into it. Season 3 is amazing but it's like if Eva and serial experiment lain had a kid and they somehow barely passed it past kids show censors. I fell off after that
You would actually recommend it??? I thought it was just a toy-selling grift. It has positive aspects?
The anime at least the first 3 seasons, never watched past have genuine care put into them (adventure 01 is fairly typical until the 3rd arc but that's cause it was to cunically sell toys but then the show was way more successful than they toys and they switched gears). But yeah, Digimon. Has surprising depths