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04-13-2024, 06:07 PM | #641 |
Kamen Ride Or Die
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I also like the Alcohol Dopant, both in concept and execution. This definitely feels like something we'd never have gotten on the live action show, the concept is maybe a bit too adult for a kid's action show/merch showcase. It's sloppy and chaotic, but being full of booze also makes it both more reckless and harder to fight. The whole look behind it is also just way outside of something we'd get in a latex suit.
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04-13-2024, 07:33 PM | #642 |
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FUUTO P.I. EPISODE 8 - “THE CLOSED K - A CHAIN OF MALICE”
Man, I thought this one all the way worked. Where last episode leaned a little too much on setup for me, this one is the glorious middle chapter that has action, reveals, humor, and some fun deductive leaps from our heroes. It’s the sweet payoff to last episode’s (for me) stale introduction. It’s actually really fun to see Shotaro and Philip presented with a bizarre mystery that end up collectively solving, despite how I might’ve made it sound last time. There’s a little more of Philip’s deduction than Shotaro’s gut instinct, but each of them serves a role in the investigation: Shotaro helps steer and center Philip’s unease at the petty maliciousness of the mansion’s guests, while Philip connects the dots to make sure that Kanna can feel some relief from suspicion. It’s the two of them acting as one investigator, which we honestly don’t see a whole lot? (They even call it out here, which is nice for viewers who never saw the live-action predecessor.) We usually get a story where Shotaro and an assistant – Akiko, mostly – goes out and interviews suspects, collects clues, and fends off attacks, while Philip stays back in the W Cave until it’s time to search the Gaia Library. They don’t ever really go out and solve a mystery together, in person, at a place. Philip, as seen here, is sort of not the detective you bring on location! He’s kind of bad around people! And the people themselves are also not great this time, but in an interesting way. We’re in a story of amoral greed, where both the culprits and the victims are using each other to get what they want. It’s a story where anyone could be the killer, and almost no one is above suspicion. (Well, Kanna, who it turns out is a sweet girl who’s being taken advantage of, assuming there are no additional twists coming up for her.) This makes for a fun reveal, as we find out that – actually – no one was murdered by a Dopant, and the two dead bodies were the unfortunate victims of Museum-style human experimentation. (Also, alcohol poisoning, which is nice use of the Gaia Memory as USB drug metaphor.) It’s a neat deescalation and complication to last episode’s whole There Is A Killer On The Loose thing, as now things are trending a little more into traditional Kamen Rider mad science. Speaking of traditional Kamen Rider stuff – very excited to see the rest of Team Double show up through the use of Revolgarry! (I was honestly hoping there’d be a few lines from Tokime wondering why Revolgarry doesn’t have anywhere for people to sit down as it careens through the streets of Fuuto, but alas.) We not only get an amazing payoff to last episode’s terrific gag of Tokime misunderstanding Akiko’s journal entry/drawing, but we get to see Accel take on the Scream Dopant. It’s a dynamic fight, with this show’s first use of the Trial Memory, and it’s a nice diversion from this episode’s more straight-forward mystery solving. Which I liked! I liked the mystery solving, the classic change-up on how many killers and victims there really were, and the general vibe of Shotaro and Philip in this one. They’re very heads down on this case, which is fair considering the rising body count. What humor and goofiness there is comes around the edges – the Tokime/Akiko/Terui triad, and Philip informing one of the contestants that he’s very good at dressing up as willowy women to bait a killer, but it’s not a passion of his. Cute moments of levity, but this one does a stellar job of both ratcheting up the tension, and resolving it in clever ways. This one worked for me!
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04-13-2024, 08:13 PM | #643 |
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04-13-2024, 08:14 PM | #644 |
Alias: ZeroEnchiladas
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So this was a fun middle part to everything, we've got Shotaro and Philip solving the mystery while also leaving us in suspense at who the true villain is.
I do love the idea of a case where no one actually died because they were murdered. It puts a unique spin on things, and makes the Alcohol Memory unique in how it works. Of course there's a slight snag in trying to apprehend the actual perpetrator given we've got Masquerade duplicates and Scream running around. Thankfully Accel's also around to keep them busy, but still. -Everything in the Manga is played straight... until we get to the Masquerades showing up. They end up showing up not only against Shotaro and Philip but also while Terui, Akiko and Tokime are trying to unclog the tunnel. The result is Terui and Tokime going on ahead while Akiko uses the Revolgarry to combat the ones left in the tunnel. -Scream also doesn't show up immediately, with Shotaro and Philip heading to the mansion, meeting someone (I'm being vague on purpose) outside the mansion before Scream shows up with Accel going to take her on so that the others can get to the bottom of things. |
04-13-2024, 09:09 PM | #645 |
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Tokime's constant belief that surely there can't be anything weirder to learn than what she already knows about Team Double will always be hilarious to me.
It's definitely more interesting to have a murder mystery with a villain, but not a murderer. By removing rage and revenge from the possible motivations, whatever's left is bound to be meatier for the audience to enjoy!
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04-14-2024, 04:50 AM | #646 |
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I like that they emphasise how big a threat whoever’s behind the case is by them having a silver Memory like Isaka did. Not to mention the fact they’re able to call the Memory back to them from a distance. Definitely a good way of selling them.
And like with W’s debit 5 episodes ago, with Accel’s debut comes an updated CSM, that includes an Engine Memory with all the Engine Blade sounds. No Trial Memory or Booster, since W’s CSM products tend not to do upgrade items. And we also fully meet the second of Street’s (which is what the wiki tells me our new villain group is called. The show is kind of coy on naming them) executives, in the form of Scream. With a casting choice that surprised a great deal of the western fan base. Rider-lert! Scream’s VA is Miku Ito, who had recently come off a year of voicing Lovekov for 15 minutes worth of footage in Revice (and that doesn’t include appearing as herself in the Subaru Kimura two-parter). Since the summer movie hadn’t come out on home media, to a lot of western fans, the contrast was jarring. |
04-14-2024, 08:31 AM | #647 |
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And thanks for the casting info!
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04-14-2024, 09:41 PM | #648 |
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FUUTO P.I. EPISODE 9 - “THE CLOSED K - THE ULTIMATE TWO HALVES OF ONE”
I would’ve bet money that CycloneJoker Xtreme wouldn’t show up until the final story. This story didn’t seem to need it, and it’s exactly the sort of form you roll out at the season’s finale. Having it show up in the penultimate (or, y’know, third) story didn’t feel like the right move. But, of course, it’s the perfect move. This three-parter is about how exceptional Shotaro and Philip are when they’re together. They’re always partners, but they’re rarely in action together as detectives. They work cases semi-separately: Shotaro, pounding the pavement while roughing up crumb-bums and stoolies; Philip, combing through evidence and puzzling out hidden connections. In this story, though, they’re doing it simultaneously, in tandem. They’re able to combine intuition and observation in real-time to figure out the truth of what’s going on in the mansion, and who the culprit truly is. (The grandmother; the butler was always a red herring, and Kuya was too reliably incurious and lazy to be faking it.) This is a story all about how Team Double’s never more capable than when Shotaro and Philip are on the same page. Which is why it’s the best possible time to introduce Xtreme into this animated continuation of W. That power is the embodiment of how unified Shotaro and Philip can be, so it makes sense to have be the deciding factor as Double squares off against their first High Dope. The fight is quick — I think the arrival of Xtreme and the Henshin sequence take up more time than the two-move battle — but exciting for its brevity. After getting pummeled relentlessly as CycloneJoker, the flip of them just swiftly eliminating the Alcohol Dopant as Xtreme is very, very cool. While the battle was swift, the denouement was appealingly drawn out. We got to spend a lot of time learning various motivations and details, from the important — Kanna’s participation (she was just sort of sheltered and bored) — to the almost hilariously trivial — why Philip couldn’t get a phone signal (IT WAS THE MUSEUM, instead of just a bunch of rich creeps doing secret sex games opting to block folks from transmitting photos of it) — and it made this thing feel so thought-out and robust. We even spend a little time with Kuya, who vows to reform his decadently idle ways and become the upstanding citizen of Fuuto that Kanna might respect someday. It’s cute, even if it feels a bit like a much longer subplot from the manga that got truncated in the anime. Everything from this sprawling and (at times) convoluted mystery got put to bed, almost entirely thanks to the deductive prowess of Shotaro and Philip. I kind of flipped 180 degrees on this story, by the end? Where I was first disappointed that Fuuto P.I. opted to tell a basic Shotaro/Philip mystery story, instead of utilizing its newest cast member in fun or unique ways, I ended up sort of appreciating that this show took a story to demonstrate how on their game or two-in-one detective can be when they’re put in their element. I mean, not finding cats — their other element.
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04-14-2024, 10:08 PM | #649 |
Alias: ZeroEnchiladas
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Truly we received the Ultimate W.
Anyway this was a rather fun ending to the case and I really enjoyed the wrap-up this time. Especially with the true twist of Kuya not being a drinker and him drinking tea this entire time! That actually caught me off guard the first time around. As for Manga changes... oddly enough the Kuya and Kanna stuff played out basically the same in the manga as it did in the anime. Idk if they show up any further because well, I've stopped reading at this point (will get into that at the end). But it seemed to me just like a nice way to send off the characters. That said! -So the first change is the anime being courteous last part and giving us three suspects instead of two to give the illusion of choice in who did it. Because when I said Shotaro and Philip ran into someone after chasing the Alcohol Memory in the manga, that someone was Kuya. Which meant there was only two choices in the manga compared to the three the anime went with for its cliffhanger. -The biggest change though is Bando's reveal. In the manga he already shows up as Aurora and doesn't give his name. It's only during the denouement that Shotaro and Philip sus out that Aurora was the guy they met at the mansion. I can only imagine that them finding out Bando's name comes into play during the next manga exclusive arc that the anime chose to cut, the 'p is a Devil' arc and they put it here just to have that. Speaking of 'p is a Devil' though, yeah we're going to be skipping to the fifth volume's arc next time. Considering what little I heard from the content of it as I was airing I can only assume they did this to give us a satisfactory conclusion in 12 episodes and also likely took important and key details from the manga's 4th volume and transplanted it wherever they could into our final episodes. Which is why I hesitate to ask anyone on stepping up to summarize it given it might contain spoilers. And normally I'd be like "Okay I'll do a spoiler tagged review or something or a vague summary by reading the manga". The only people who have subbed Futo PI, Genm Corp, only ever got up to the second chapter of the 'p is a Devil' arc. And I don't plan on reading an incomplete arc so that concludes my fun little gimmick of mentioning manga differences. |
04-14-2024, 10:22 PM | #650 |
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As for Manga changes... oddly enough the Kuya and Kanna stuff played out basically the same in the manga as it did in the anime. Idk if they show up any further because well, I've stopped reading at this point (will get into that at the end). But it seemed to me just like a nice way to send off the characters.
And thanks for all the manga notes! It's crazy to think that, amongst all the U.S. push for this anime, that no one bothered to import and localize the manga. We got Kuuga (badly), but this comic got skipped? Disappointing!
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