Today?
I was possessed to take this older game called Telefang and start imagining a Telefang region which would act like a fantasy Third World country. My thoughts are this.
Digimon is really futuristic.
Some fantasy worlds are really ancient, like how Pokémon was able to turn itself into Legends: Arceus.
But Telefang is so neatly situated in this era exactly after ancient fantasy and before the era of social media and good internet, like some kind of missing piece. I think this is some people's favorite era, honestly.
It's so easy to re-frame it as like, an awkward world behind the times that is bumbling along at its own pace.

Telefang "legends". We're in the historical period before cell phones and there are carrier pigeon things, but just like in the real world, only these rare big estates have them.
The plot revolves around central characters that are like foot messengers that travel long distances because there isn't technology.
Denjuu everywhere just wish things could go a little faster and the world could finally get to modernizing.
Of course, this will expose the world to the danger of external corporations invading it and trying to own it or make it dependent on them. Exactly like happened in the original game. This could literally be a prequel

But what I really like is the idea of an alternate swath of Denjuu that didn't give into the pressures of Sanaeba and basically created defenses to this situation ahead of time
In the original game there are "Natural Denjuu" and "Cultivated Denjuu"
But I think in this continuity there would be a third category? I don't know what it would be called. The third category is trying to build things domestically, basically, rather than changing due to the influence of foreign technology.
This could make a lot of game-mechanical sense. Natural Denjuu had natural evolutions and Cultivated Denjuu would often have "modified" evolutions, if I remember right. The new category of Denjuu would have their own distinct preference of evolution methods and other small distinctions like that.

They'd represent this particular bloc of "Communist" Denjuu trying to work together and build something constructive, not letting the outside control the Denjuu world, trying not to end up stuck with the "responsibility" of becoming capitalist empire just to resist it.

There is just something about this that really feels right. It's somehow poetic to take this game that became infamous because a Third World country just barely developing a videogame industry made a bootleg of it to not have to import foreign games, and make the story genuinely themed around that perspective.
Especially when those themes were already weakly but noticeably present in the un-garbled game already.