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Kamen Rider Die watches Kamen Rider Hibiki
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10-23-2020, 09:19 PM
#
369
Kamen Rider Die
Kamen Ride Or Die
Join Date: Aug 2019
Location: Chicago, IL
Posts: 6,159
KAMEN RIDER HIBIKI 1-29 WRAP-UP
"Won't you sleep with me every night for a week
Won't you just let me pretend this is the love I need"
-Waxahatchee, "Swan Dive"
I honestly don't know if I like Hibiki, or if I just
want
to like Hibiki.
There's a ton of quality in this series. The characters are phenomenal, with so much depth and dimension. The arcs are real, honest,
important
. Every actor elevates their part, adding clever notes to make a richer, fuller world. The stories this show chooses to tell are so much more grounded and relatable than anything I've ever seen on a Kamen Rider show. It takes parts and stories that would normally be mortar, the home lives and school troubles and tiny indignities, and makes them bricks.
Except, I fundamentally don't know if they're right to do that. The things this show is great at are things you can watch in a hundred other shows, in genres that more fully support those ideas. If I wanted a warm family dramedy, I'd just go watch a warm family dramedy. I'm watching a superhero show, and the superhero parts of Kamen Rider Hibiki are almost
infuriatingly
weak.
Like, the formula in place of Camping > Douji And Hime > More Camping > Makamou, it's so goddamn boring at times. Most times, if I'm being honest. More than once I've mentioned how weird it is that the monster plots seem like they distract from the drama, and that honestly shouldn't happen
once
, let alone on multiple occasions. Compelling monster plots are a necessity in a superhero show, and Kamen Rider Hibiki treats them as perfunctory, as afterthoughts. There's something positive to be said about the ways the show uniquely makes the mythic elements, the superhero elements, mundane. In fact, I've said exactly that! But it substitutes Being Clever As A Concept for Being Fun To Watch, and that's maybe not a great trade.
Kamen Rider Hibiki... it's like going to a steakhouse whose best dish is the chicken. Even if the chicken's great, wouldn't you be better off going to a chicken place? And shouldn't the steakhouse excel at serving steak?
There are moments in the first 29 episodes of Hibiki that I adore, and every single one of them is a non-superhero moment. That's not incredibly out of character for me or anything, I'm usually less dialed into the superhero stuff, but the level to which I feel like this show undercooked the superhero parts... it's not great. It is not a great look.
This is all sounding maybe more negative than I thought it was going to come out. I really connected with the characters, and I enjoyed spending time with them. It's just, I feel like I haven't been watching a
Kamen Rider
show, you know? The things I want out of a Kamen Rider, it's not saying Henshin or collectibles or motorcycles or anything. Hibiki skipping out on that stuff, I don't think it's a dealbreaker. But there's a specific kind of arc, a specific kind of storytelling, that this show opted out of in the first 29 episodes. It wanted to do something different, and it had a clear vision on how to do that, but the differences made it too little of a Kamen Rider show for me at times.
It's the lack of any spine to the Makamou story, if I had to point to one exclusion that seems especially problematic. I guess there's a little more to it now, in the back 40% of the show, but it's too little, too late. The Makamou are animals, but they feel like natural disasters in the narrative. The Oni that are fighting them, there's no real intricate strategy or anything to the individual stories. Little variations, maybe, different weaknesses or hunting grounds, but the basics are the same. It's simplistic in a way that I thought this franchise had left behind, and it hamstrings any sense of progression that'd give new weight to a stale formula. (I really sound like I hated this show! I didn't think I did, but these are the words I'm typing so maybe!) The monster plots... it's like the Oni are fighting fires. How many different stories can you do about fires getting started? And once the fire needs to be put out, how many versions can you do of it needing to be put out? I know there're shows about firefighters, but I also know I've got zero interest in watching them. And I've got a huge interest in watching Japanese superheroes detonate monsters!
I don't know. This is all coming off real down on the show, and that's maybe not what you'd expect after a generally positive thread so far. (I think?) But as I'm trying to think back on the last month or so, I'm finding myself more and more disappointed in how little entertainment I found in the Oni stuff. The non-Oni stuff, great, front-to-back, with precious few exceptions. The Oni stuff? Largely forgettable.
All of which is to say, you know, not going to suggest that this show maybe didn't need a different take for it. If the current creative team was unable or unwilling to course-correct, maybe it was time to bring on a new one. I might end up missing some of what the first team valued in storytelling, but there's definitely room for improvement.
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Last edited by Kamen Rider Die; 08-18-2023 at
02:36 PM
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