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Thread
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Kamen Rider Die watches Masked Rider Kuuga
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12-12-2019, 03:37 PM
#
122
Kamen Rider Die
Kamen Ride Or Die
Join Date: Aug 2019
Location: Chicago, IL
Posts: 6,159
MASKED RIDER KUUGA EPISODES 27 - 28
An incredibly solid outing that maybe doesn’t have the surprise emotional heft of the previous story, but manages to tuck some decent drama into a really stellar monster plot.
One of the things that’s bothered me about Kuuga is how few
moves
the Grongi Spree Killing plots tend to have. Obviously there’s more at work than them just offing a ton of citizens, but the nuts and bolts of a Grongi plot tend to just be Monster Keeps Showing Up At Places To Murder People Until Kuuga Murders It. Once you add in the formula of Kuuga Fight At End Of Part One and Kuuga Fight At End Of Part Two Plus Explosion, it can make the already-somewhat-formulaic Kamen Rider two-parters into pure repetition. There’s still some fun to be had in the (brief) fight scenes, but everything getting to that point starts to drag.
This story came out great, I think, due to the main twist of an actual pattern to the killings, meaning all of the Ichijou investigation stuff had a really fun reveal. The idea that the Grongi is following a piece of music to pick locations and number of targets, man, I was
thrilled
with that. It’s weird enough that I didn’t see it coming, and yet exactly the sort of thing I’d expect a supercop like Ichijou to figure out. The right balance of insane supervillainy and logical deduction. It made the whole story feel like it was leading up to something and then
actually led up to something
. That is not a given for Kamen Rider Kuuga!
The use of the rest of the cast to sell the nightmare of living in Tokyo during this season of Kamen Rider is in line with what made the last story work. This show can off ten, fifty, a hundred people in an episode, but if I don’t know them, care about them, it’s just a number. With Sad Boy last time and Nana and Minori this time, there’s a face to the stakes. I care about the cast of Kuuga (not, uh,
a lot
, but I don’t wish them ill or anything), and when they’re terrified about the constant, unending assault by the Grongi, it makes the show feel more dangerous. It might sound like faint praise to acknowledge that it’s smarter to imperil characters the audience has any connection to rather than just list an ever-increasing body count, but conveying the stakes of the story is something Kuuga’s had a real tough time with for me, so credit where credit’s due.
And, not to be a broken record, but all of the Grongi stuff is
perfect
. The Polar Bear Club Grongi (look, I can’t remember their nonsense word names) had a real mysterious energy, and a great M.O. The Scorekeeper Grongi is totally surreal, a nicely creepy escalation of the game. And the new Kuuga Grongi (“Twoga”),
holy shit
. Awesome motorcycle duel, a unique vibe as an antagonist (?) and clearly some history with past Kuugas. Into it, into it,
into it
. Just give me whole episodes of Twoga chasing Godai around and Rose Grongi being in weirdly lit rooms.
Anyway, yeah, no real complaints this time out! Even the Enokida/Jean scene, with two of my least-favorite/most-superfluous characters, tied in to the whole “you have to find some way to soldier on even when things are overwhelmingly dangerous and it’s hard to live your life” theme that the rest of the supporting cast was dealing with. Just a top-notch Kuuga story.
__________________
Currently working on: Go-Busters is next! Archive of previous shows on
KamenRiderDie.com
!
Last edited by Kamen Rider Die; 04-03-2023 at
10:09 PM
..
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