>>717260554
>As a game and by design there's no concept for a bond or getting your mon to love you in the v-pet.
It's a raising sim, the entire point is that you raise your mon and this is where the bonding is meant to come from as you care for your v-pet. The cage aspect was left incorporated onto the Digital Monster line to emphasize a sense of danger, these were removed for the Pendulum and later series because it didn't fit in with the lore of the vpets being specialised monitoring tools.
>It's not, again, while they had a bond it's not the same thing what we see in the anime
It is literally the same thing we see in the anime, the only thing that's different is that evolution mechanics are derived from v-pet mechanics.
>The main character [actually has to go through a character arc]
The entire finally was Bun overcoming Death Meramon with the MC's faith in him. The entire lead up to that point was the MC learning to accept Bun and to get over his past trauma. It's straight up a precursor for both v-tamer and adventure.
>And yet it only plays a significant part in one branch.
It plays a signicant part if all branches because that's literally the core concept of the franchise. s.