Character · Digimon
Agumon
An orange dinosaur the size of a toddler, with claws, an appetite, and a habit of turning into something enormous.
In Otakana the clue reads: Small orange dinosaur that breathes pepper breath
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Digimon
- Letters
- 6 · Normal
Agumon is the partner of the first group's leader, and the template every later starter Digimon copies. Small, reptilian, permanently hungry, and loyal from the first minute. His attack in the English dub is Pepper Breath, a fireball he coughs up like a cat with a hairball, and it is nowhere near enough for most of what the digital world throws at the children.
That is what digivolution is for. Given enough of a bond he becomes Greymon, then MetalGreymon, then WarGreymon, each stage bigger and less cuddly than the last, and the show is careful that the transformation depends on Taichi rather than on Agumon. When the boy is reckless or scared, the evolution goes wrong. The partnership is the mechanic, not decoration.
The franchise started as a Bandai virtual pet in 1997, credited to the pen name Akiyoshi Hongo, and Toei Animation put Digimon Adventure on television in 1999. Agumon has been the face of it ever since, reappearing across sequels and reboots in slightly different bodies, which is unusual for a creature that started life as a keychain.
Spelling AGUMON
AGUMON ends in the suffix that almost every name in the franchise ends in: MON, clipped from the English monster. Learn it once and half the roster becomes guessable. The front is a-gu, from the Japanese for a bite or a chomp, and the U in the middle is the letter people replace with an O by mistake.