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04-14-2020, 08:45 PM | #411 |
Kamen Ride Or Die
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So, uh, funny story: my version didn't have any endings? I guess? It's just the villains surrounding Shinji in Knight Survive form, and then Shiro's like "Maybe this was a bad ending?" And then there's something about "the other half of the tale," and I thought he meant the TV show? Did... did I somehow see none of the endings for this special?!
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04-14-2020, 09:00 PM | #412 |
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So, uh, funny story: my version didn't have any endings? I guess? It's just the villains surrounding Shinji in Knight Survive form, and then Shiro's like "Maybe this was a bad ending?" And then there's something about "the other half of the tale," and I thought he meant the TV show? Did... did I somehow see none of the endings for this special?!
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04-14-2020, 09:13 PM | #413 |
Showa Girl
Join Date: Jun 2018
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"Choose Your Own Endings" in Kamen Rider can go one of two ways: the difference is meaningless, or the difference is maddening. Really embraces the concept that way.
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04-14-2020, 09:24 PM | #414 |
Kamen Ride Or Die
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Okay, I grabbed a different copy off of TV-Nihon. This one had both endings. I watched 'em both, now.
(Also, I forgot to mention it before, but I really liked that Shinji does Ren's Henshin when he uses Ren's Deck to become Knight. A great touch.) It's an interesting idea, to have two endings. I don't think either one of them are very good, in that they're both open-ended and fatalist. Either Shinji's detonated by 11 Final Vents or he's driven mad by the inevitability of Rider Battle. Awesome choices! Do I want Shinji to die screaming, or die screaming? What kind-of blows me away is that, of the two options Ryuki fans were given, Continue Fighting in the Rider Battles or Stop Fighting in the Rider Battles, they chose Continue Fighting. The whole premise of the show seems to be that fighting in the Rider Battles is a terrible idea. I seem to recall an episode that ended with a child that was overcome with terror at the hideous weight of being a Rider on Ryuki. Well HOLY SHIT is Ryuki not getting its point across, because about 60% of viewers/fans voted FIGHT OR DIE. That... that would maybe worry me, if I was producing Masked Rider Ryuki! If the beating heart of my show was a man desperate to end the Rider Battles, and viewers were like Rider Battles Ad Infinitum, uh... (In fairness, superhero fans will usually vote for the more violent ending when given the option. Just ask Jason Todd! That said, Jason Todd got killed by a very slim margin, while this split was a more troubling 58/42. Definitely feels like viewers didn't get the Rider Battles Are Bad memo!)
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04-14-2020, 09:43 PM | #415 |
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I'm pretty sure the fans understood the whole thing with the Rider War was bad but like you said they most likely wanted to see the more sadistic choice play out. It far more intreasting there even a comic adaptation of this special which expands upon the Fight ending. With Knight Survive winning but he lost he sanity in giving up his ideals and killing about 10 people so that he no longers remember if he's really Shinji or if he actually the real Ren. Some more food for thought on the Fight Ending
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04-14-2020, 11:52 PM | #416 |
Kamen Ride Or Die
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Good lord, that is bleak.
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04-15-2020, 12:25 AM | #417 |
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I’m only 2/3rds of the way done with Ryuki, and even that much of the show couldn’t get crammed into what’s basically a two-episode story. Trying to do an entire season’s worth of plot was out the window, I get that. Stuff was going to have to get cut to make room. Dropping the whole idea of the Contract Monsters, it’s not a huge loss. It’s a level of complexity that you need to strip out to keep this story humming. Card Decks That Give Magic Powers is, like, it’s fine. It’s enough of the core concept to make an hour-long story still feel like Ryuki.
But that's it (and Shiro is only the narrator). It makes sense that it debuted between ep. 33 & 34, it only tells about 2/3rds of Ryuki actually. Tiger and Imperer doesn't even get an identity here, and because you watched it now, I can't talk further about it other than the 13 Riders version of them may have different identity from the main series one. And for important note; this is probably how the Rider War goes if Shiro just sends a Mirror Monster to the biggest obstacle in Rider War, Shinji, before he becomes a Rider, but as seen here, Shinji still becomes Ryuki. Quote:
Stripping down the Ren/Shinji relationship to just a couple beats, that’s harder to forgive. The Ren/Shinji frenemy thing, it’s maybe the best part of Ryuki, and reducing that to the most basic We Aren’t Friends/You’re Too Naive/I’m Weak/Avenge Me arc for Ren… it’s the most boring way you could approach their story. I mean, at least Ren gets an arc, it’s more than you could say for anyone else, but it’s still a shitty arc. There’s no room to let the performance help out the dialogue, so it plays pretty unconvincing to me. I’ve spent 30-odd episodes watching Ren start to believe in Shinji, and for Shinji to start to understand Ren, but I didn’t buy their decisions in this one at all. It’s all echoes of more interesting stuff from Ryuki, but without the valuable connective tissue of why the characters make these decisions. Here, it’s just hitting marks. Dull. Predictable.
(Also, I forgot to mention it before, but I really liked that Shinji does Ren's Henshin when he uses Ren's Deck to become Knight. A great touch.) Quote:
But, man, the greatest sin of this thing is taking the entrenched ambiguity of Ryuki and making it Good Guy Versus Bad Guys. That’s… ugh. You’ve got all these different motivations and goals and schemes in Ryuki, and you just have Shinji plus Ren versus Everyone Else. Why? When you have a blank canvas to paint on, why do a monochrome version of a rainbow? It’s literally the thing that makes Ryuki special. It’s not the Rider Battle, it’s the why of the Rider Battle. With this, you just get a bunch of Riders fighting, and I could not have cared less about it.
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There’s a few interesting changes to the plotting, though. Nothing that makes up for what was taken out, but I did enjoy Kamen Rider Geico and his insane finishing move. (Being swung like a pendulum by his monster, and then doing a spinning piledriver? Amazing! And the legs of his victim sticking up out of frame is the cherry on top.) It’s fun to have a successful businessman as a Rider, a dude who feels like his business accomplishments mean nothing next to the visceral thrill of proving his dominance in combat. That’s clever, and I hope he shows up in the main series. Also, hey, nice to see Tezuka and Shibaura, even under diluted circumstances. (The changes to Tezuka’s character… why?! Why rip away his interesting motivation to give him a thinner version of Ren’s?)
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This whole thing just felt like a fool’s errand to me. In order to tell a semi-coherent version of Ryuki’s story in under an hour, you’ve got to strip out all of the nuance, all of the ambiguity, all of the interesting moral dilemmas and hard-earned warmth and questions and grit… so that all you’re left with is a lot of suits and a lot of fighting. I… I don’t want that to be what Kamen Rider is? I want someone to use masked superheroes and rubber monsters to say something worth hearing. With this, it didn’t feel like anything I hadn’t heard a better version of before. This was like a bar band cover song of Ryuki.
Last edited by DreadBringer; 04-15-2020 at 12:45 AM.. |
04-15-2020, 12:46 AM | #418 |
Kamen Ride Or Die
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Location: Chicago, IL
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Yeah, the No Contract Monster thing, it maybe breaks the concept of Rider Battles? Quote:
While Shinji works to persuade other people to stop the Rider War (though in this special, he does it mainly by looking for partners) and fight for justice, Takamizawa (with Shibaura as main partner) works to persuade other people to bring their worst side and ditch humanity as Riders, and fight those against that.
A lot of what works well in the series is how, give or take an Asakura, there's equal weight given to everyone's outlook. Most of Shinji's character growth comes from trying to understand the other Riders, figure out what's driving them. In this, it's just All Of The Bad Guys fighting Shinji, and eventually Ren. No one's got a great argument, nothing that's really capable of getting you to think. It's barely even an argument, beyond Stopping Evil or Being Evil. I don't know, there wasn't a compelling anything to the viewpoints in this one for me. Quote:
Unfortunately there are probably some people who dislikes the "boring" drama of philosophy clashes between the characters, moral dilemmas, etc. and wants to follow Ryuki only for the battle royale part (it's like... those that only care about the action part but also with the added nuance of heavy fan of battle royale games like Shibaura), to watch Riders ganging up, fighting and killing each other, and is probably disappointed that the main series isn't into that much and treating 13 Riders as jumping straight into the point for Ryuki premise.
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04-15-2020, 05:59 AM | #419 |
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You want to hear from someone who preferred the special? That’s my cue to enter then.
I’m more fond of what this special does to characterise the two leads than the series itself, namely because it ignores ALL the problems I had with their in-series characterisations. I also love seeing Shinji trying desperately to hang on to his innocence during all this, namely because I’m trying to do the same thing in real life. And also, when people talk about all the casting and character milestones concerning the Riders in this show, they overlook one in this special. The guy playing Verde was not only the first non-Japanese actor to play a rider (half-American) but was also at the time the oldest actor to play a Rider at 38 (the current record holder is Kamen Rider Jun, at age 60). And the original Ryuki manages to make an impression on me, purely for the casting joke he entails. (For an explanation, he was the Red warrior in a past Super Sentai show, who had this (the first in the video) as his main mecha https://youtu.be/nOZfBmR546s |
04-15-2020, 08:08 AM | #420 |
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This was a thing that sort-of bugged me. I don't want to nitpick the changes this story makes to the rules of Rider Battle, but the more I think about it, the more the Card Decks being the root of all powers... it's a dumb loophole that breaks the Rider Battles? Like, in the main series, if you take out a Rider, you take out a Rider. Once they've made a contract with a monster, you can't reuse their Deck. That thing gets broken or they get killed, it's over for them. That reduces the number of Riders (assuming Shiro isn't just being a dick and handing out Decks like they're packets of tissues) and brings the contest closer to completion. Right? But in this one, Shinji gets a Deck from a dying Ryuki... which keeps Ryuki in play, despite Ryuki dying. Now, killing the Rider doesn't necessarily mean there's one less player, so killing a Rider is way less important than destroying a Deck. Why didn't Kitaoka just break Asakura's Deck when he had it? It'd mean for sure that there'd be one less opponent, no matter if Asakura got free or not.
Yeah, the No Contract Monster thing, it maybe breaks the concept of Rider Battles? Quote:
They just do it in real boring ways, I thought. There's no nuance. I like the gimmick of Kamen Rider Geico, his whole thing, but his pitch in this one is just generic villain bullshit, same as Shinji's generic hero bullshit.
A lot of what works well in the series is how, give or take an Asakura, there's equal weight given to everyone's outlook. Most of Shinji's character growth comes from trying to understand the other Riders, figure out what's driving them. In this, it's just All Of The Bad Guys fighting Shinji, and eventually Ren. No one's got a great argument, nothing that's really capable of getting you to think. It's barely even an argument, beyond Stopping Evil or Being Evil. I don't know, there wasn't a compelling anything to the viewpoints in this one for me. Last edited by DreadBringer; 04-15-2020 at 08:10 AM.. |
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