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I definitely like Kuuga, but much like with Fourze I'm pretty surprised when people tell me it's their hands-down favorite Rider Series. I feel like both shows suffer a bit from leaning too hard in one direction.
But hey, I like Kiva and Faiz, so everyone's different. Also, I'm glad to see you're back Die, this is my first time commenting on this thread but hardly my first visit. |
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And, I'll acknowledge, that it's definitely a Your Mileage May Vary sort-of situation. I'm someone who came in through Ex-Aid and Double, so, yeah, this is an adjustment. I do like trying to figure this show out, enjoy what it's trying to do without judging it unfairly. (That Godai/Kuuga switch-out shot! So cool!) Hopefully these posts aren't too frustrating to the Kuuga fans out there. I don't know that I can ever see the show you do, but I really want to see what it's doing. Quote:
The Kuuga as a favorite, while it's not me, I can see how folks would say it. It's definitely doing a different kind of thing to the modern stuff, while not feeling as janky as the Showa stuff can. It's a very clear middle-ground to the horror aspects of the Showa era and the form-change-heavy Heisei era. Not to keep making food references (I should really get lunch) but Kuuga, for the right kind of fan, is a very Chocolate In My Peanut Butter type of show. (Fourze is just great, though. They defeat the main enemy by telling him that they're proud of him. It's probably in my Top 5 shows, and I can easily see it being some folks' favorite. Without getting too deep in this parenthetical, I really enjoy how committed Fourze is to its themes and motifs. It's Degrassi, if they had a clubhouse on the moon and fought monsters. It's about friendship, and accepting people, and how no one's beyond redemption, and it's doing it within the language and framework of both a high school dramedy and a superhero show. High degree of difficulty, and there are some late-game pacing issues, but it never didn't feel like a Kamen Rider show to me.) I'm real interested in seeing Faiz and Kiva. They both have (from what little I've checked out), uh, reputations. But, like, so did Ghost, and I'm incredibly glad I watched that show. |
MASKED RIDER KUUGA EPISODES 21 - 22
https://kamenriderdie.com/images/kr/kuuga/kuuga22.png A fairly standard Kuuga two-parter (there's a Grongi murdering people, the team investigates, a short fight, Kuuga explodes the monster) that has a total grab bag of subplots (Nana's drama teacher has been murdered, Enokida is a shitty mom, Jean failed a child in the past) that, like, it's hard to see the story that's being told here. Events are washing over me without feeling like there's a coherent theme being explored. It's hard to talk about this story without just, like, recapping it. That's not fun for me! So, here're two things I wanted to pull out from these episodes. First, the Grongi plotline is coming on incredibly strong. It's shot beautifully in episode 21, super-saturated colors and bizarre angles, a weird fever-dream haze to the scenes. We start to get a bit more info, just enough to make the Grongi seem like more than bloodthirsty monsters. There's a bunch of stuff in this two-parter that feels undercooked or unimportant (So much Jean! Why so much Jean!), but the Grongi scenes just snap into focus. Their culture feels appropriately alien, making any new nugget of info something to be treasured. It's a slow-burn that has somehow not made me impatient. I'm really enjoying how this mega-arc is progressing. Second, it's weird to me how much of the investigative stuff in this series takes place in the present tense. For the most part, we don't get any, "Hey, here's info we learned off-screen and now you can know it so we can get the plot moving." If someone learns something crucial to the plot, we have to see them learn it, then see them tell Ichijou, who then conveys it to Godai. Similarly, if something's happening somewhere, we have to see the police find out about it, see them deploy Ichijou, see Ichijou tell Godai, see Godai ride to the location, then see Godai encounter a monster. It's an, um, interesting choice? As someone who fairly recently was watching Ghost ("Takeru! A monster is attacking!" - how 85% of storylines start) and Wizard (five seconds of monster followed by Haruto jumping into frame), this sort of point-by-point plot progression is the single largest adjustment for me to make. I don't feel like I'm doing too great. It's deliberate in a way that I don't see enough value in, relative to how long it takes for a monster fight to happen. I don't know. I've said before that this show has more of an X-Files vibe to it, but even Mulder and Scully could be in a place and just tell us in dialogue how and why they're there. I am not going to assume Godai's full of shit if he tells me he got a call from Ichijou to go to the place we're seeing him in. He's a trustworthy guy! https://kamenriderdie.com/images/kr/kuuga/kuuga21.png |
I did read once that Kuuga has been called the most realistic Kamen Rider show and I can kind of see why, I especially like how it tells you the time things happen.
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MASKED RIDER KUUGA EPISODES 23 - 24
https://kamenriderdie.com/images/kr/kuuga/kuuga23.png Conflicted feelings about this one! For, like, 90% of it I was going along with its pleasant sense of impending doom, the ways both Sakurako and the Grongi seemed to be waiting for another shoe to drop, the weird-even-for-Kuuga overexplaining of plot points, the standard Pole Pole anti-humor... regular Kuuga stuff. A little transitional, sure, but we're at the (roughly) halfway point of the series, so it's fitting for things to get more... something. Dangerous, or darker, or whatever. (I mean, over 1400 people are dead by the end of episode 24, so, more dangerous?!) I thought this would be one that didn't thrill me, necessarily, but one that was doing the work to progress the story. A workhorse of a story. But then we hit the end of the story, and I can't believe how mad I got. Furious. I was briefly contemplating learning fluent Japanese, flying to Japan, and questioning everyone still alive who was involved in this story until I got the answers I deserved. So, this one's got a Grongi knocking off folks who rode together on a train, while Godai tries to figure out why he's got problems fighting as Purple Kuuga. The show spends, again, a weird-even-for-Kuuga amount of time laying out how the Grongi picks its targets. We see every step, then we have to see Ichijou and another cop slowly, incrementally, put the sequence of events back together. Which, totally redundant, but, y'know, that's Kuuga's thing. I'm not mad that they spent so long investigating clues that viewers already saw when they could just tell us Ichijou pieced it together, and convey his knowledge via a dialogue scene with Godai, or a TV news bulletin that they also gave us. It's only frustrating because of how they didn't use the time they spent telling us stuff twice. Specifically, they didn't tell us how Kuuga overcame his power shortage. They didn't tell us how the hero of the show became powerful enough to stop a rampaging monster. Godai goes to see Enokida, she sticks him in an electrical room (never explained why she has one), he turns purple and gold (which I guess is better?), defeats the Grongi... then he, Sakurako, and Ichijou just stand around for five seconds until the episode ends. What? What?! WHAT. They spent the whole episode double-explaining a fairly simple The Grongi Is Tracking And Killing People plot, including an entire scene of Ichijou interviewing a shop owner to find out that people were giving out lighters in a train station DESPITE ALREADY SHOWING US THAT SPECIFIC PIECE OF EVIDENCE IN ITS ENTIRETY, but they don't bother putting in one line of Godai explaining how and why he's fine now?! They don't spend ten more seconds to explain why Enokida has A LIGHTNING ROOM?! They don't skip the pointless Pole Pole scene, where literally nothing of consequence happens, to have ANYONE explain why Godai is more powerful now?! Like, I can probably fill in the blanks. They kept referring to a weird lightning prophecy, there's a "joke" mention of the defibrillation having lingering effects, whatever. I'm not completely confused by why a superhero on a Kamen Rider show got more powerful midway through a series. It's just, for a two-parter that stretched out a simple Grongi Spree Killing (which happens basically weekly now, I'm not sure how there's anyone left to kill) to over 40 minutes, and couldn't let one piece of investigative information not get explained in minute detail, it is infuriating that the superhero part of the superhero show is left to narrative hand-waving and viewer inference. I don't mind a show that feels like it has to spell everything out, but then they have to spell EVERYTHING out. You can't double up on one thing to shortchange another. That ending was... I did not have a good time with it. https://kamenriderdie.com/images/kr/kuuga/kuuga24.png |
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Anyways, I'm tempted to try and argue some points about these episodes, but considering I'd be doing that based on my memories of watching them years ago at this point, it probably wouldn't be that fruitful. I will say I remember the explanation for what was going on with Kuuga's powers feeling fairly clear-cut. |
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It's like he's building a square table, but he puts three legs on one side and one leg on the other side. It's got the right number of legs, and it doesn't immediately collapse, but it could be so much more stable my dude it is not that hard to build a table. |
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