Kamen Rider: General Thread

It helps that Kuroto and Beroba weren't handed easy wins by the narrative the way Gai was given in Zero-One.

That too, although Gai's wins made the moments where he starts failing and everything fails apart more appealing to me.

Him winning the who gets to run Hiden Intelligence arc, only for it to turn out Aruto still owns all the Huma-gears and rendering all his efforts pointless was a great moment of catharsis for me.

And of course, there's this:

That's right. Fuck you Gai.

I think Takahashi has a bit of an issue giving characters seemingly unwarranted redemption arcs/Heel-Face Turns.

Daichi is pretty much Gai 2.0, except the narrative doesn't take the time to shit on him as much, but he went from getting beaten to within an inch of his life by Keiwa to... actually helping Keiwa beat Kekera in the span of three episodes or so.

Then again Geats' final arc is kinda considered the weakest...

A lot of the reaction I saw to Daichi was roughly "why are you still here?. His heel face turn was unwarranted and personally I still don't like him, but I did see some people's opinions of him soften after that.

Latest episode of Gotchard.

They really need to stop letting Atropos just walk away afterwards. In fact, considering she's shown zero concern about attacking innocent people to hurt the heroes, why haven't they put more protection on Hotarou's Muggle Mom?

Also, Seina goes from Childhood Friend to Unlucky Childhood Friend. That's how it goes.

They really didn't have it on them to have the heroes opening fire on basically a child, I guess.

Fair enough, I suppose.

We know Supana would thwack upside the head if he could get a clean shot at her, but I suppose they just wanted a different kind of villain.

We'll have to wait until Atropos either physically ages into adulthood or unlocks her monster form before the Riders can take a swing at her.

I'd consider Atrapos using the Kamen Rider Dread powers fair game for a beatdown.

Latest Episode.

Clotho gets a power-up, and it looks like I'm going to have to get off my lazy ass and watch Gotchard vs Legend.

Ngl, Clotho's second outfit looks better than the new upgrade because she looks like a mix between Bane and Mileena.

I also like how this ep allowed Clotho's actress to showcase her martial arts skills via unsuited action.

Huh. Does she do her own suit stunts like Marika's old actress?

It would make sense.

She did her own stunts in Amazons, fwiw.

She was in Amazons?

Cool. Who was she?

She was Nozomi Takai, the muscle of the NPS.

Actually, now that Misaki's actor is in Gotchard, the last three seasons have all featured an NPS member as an antagonist at some point.

Fukuda's actor played Wakabayashi (and the Chameleon Deadman) in Revice.
Shido's actor played Kekera in Geats.

So I just found out that there was a Kamen Rider Game that used Resident Evil Style Gameplay called Genealogy of Justice for the Playstation 2.

Seems to star Ichigo, V3, Black and Agito.

Not sure why they went with those three specifically.

Alright. Finally watched Gotchard vs Legend.

So Legend was literally inspired by Decade, hence the blatant resemblance.

Considering he's got bit of Diend in him as well (he can both become Riders and Summon them), I wonder if he also met Daiki as well.

But at least I'm finally caught up and ready for the next episode.

Legend is odd though. Why do this now? We're nowhere near the time for another anniversary series. Hell, we had one about 5 years ago already.

Seems like Legend Rider gimmicks sell very well, I suppose. Revice had its weird lowkey Legend Rider thing too, I'm still not entirely sure why they did that (as much as George was a fun character). We quite recently got a Ridewatch set for Revi, Vice, Geats and Gotchard. They also did a second version of the CSM Decadriver a couple years ago which seemed quite popular.

Maybe after it was decided that Gotchard would use a card gimmick somebody decided that was a good opportunity to jump on (since Decade used cards too).

Speaking of which, they recently did a poll for Riders/forms to get new Legend Chemy cards, and the results are out. The winners are Geats Oneness, Dooms Geats, Buffa Plosion Rage, X Geats, OOO Tajadol, Chalice, Grease Blizzard, Cross-ZBuild, Punkjack, Ark-One, OOO Tajadol Eternity and Zein. They apparently did the top 12 instead of 10 because they were already planning on doing two of those (as well as Poppy, who we already got a little glimpse at previously), which seems weird. There are some cool ones, but it's a little disappointing to be honest, far too much recency bias from Geats and we really didn't need both versions of Tajadol. Most will be in the next card packs, and a few will come with a Legend-themed card binder.

Because Revice was the 50th anniversary of the entire franchise. Zi-O was meant to celebrate 20 years of Heisei Rider in particular, but Revice began airing 50 years after the OG series debuted. That's also why the Revice Driver has a 50 motif on it.

Definitely someone at Bandai. Gotchard is kinda the first series in a while where Toei zagged where Bandai zigged, which is unusual given how the show tends to be written around the merch.

Revice still certainly showed some recency bias though, since they didn't even end up making Vistamps for all the Showa Riders.

Finished watching Gotchard's latest ep and while the main plot takes a backseat to Legend's guest-starring role, Miyahara Kanon (Clotho's actress) at least gets to showcase her karate skills some more.

Clotho saves the day, which would probably be better for her if she weren't still their enemy.

And I get my first look at Zein. Not sure why he showed up, but ok.

Zein's design is wasted on him honestly.

Definitely a promo for Outsiders Episode 5. It's an otherwise bizarre scene in an otherwise straightforward episode.