Oh come on, his car is totally going to have 7 gears :lol

Well we'll see about that. :)

Well to be fair, an unlocked Lockseed does have a small resemblance to the numeral "6". They might've switched from "how many things can we cram onto a belt" to more subtle cues. This season will finally confirm or debunk that theory.

Again, when people look hard enough they can find "patterns" in anything. I highly doubt any sort of consideration was given to the number 6 being a really subtle design element in this show. Just like the coincidence of there being 5 fingers on the Wizard Driver is not someone secretly being all like "we continued the theme! Really subtly!" There's just no point in that.

But I'm sure that even when Drive has no number 7 theme, overt or otherwise, people will continue to perpetuate that such a theme exists in the show.

IMO it wasn't very subtle to have the numeric symbolism of the number five on Wizard's driver. The most I'll admit is that it's more of a stretch to talk about Gaim's visor. All in all these are symbols that are noticeable features on the rider's suit design so an argument with coherent logic still exists. I would not simply attribute it to "looking too hard" for patterns. If Drive has no clear homage to the number 7 anywhere on his suit (be it 7 or VII) then it's really a broken pattern.

I would think words like 'coincidence' hold only if there've been official statements brushing it off.. Unless you make the argument that Toei didn't think it was important enough to address, in which case, fair enough.

If your looking outside of the main gimmick to continue your pattern, you've reached to far and the pattern is already broken.

Not to say that the theory is true, but I could imagine after the number 4 it'd be pretty hard to incorporate future numbers in non-subtle ways. I mean, the number 5 isn't so hard, hell, they already did have a Rider series with the number 5 as a motif, but I really don't know how you'd incorporate 6, outside of subtle puns, like those which may or may not be happening with Gaim.

The visor thing is the biggest stretch, because it's just supposed to look like segmented fruit and six happens to be an even number. If they'd used an uneven amount it would have looked lopsided and any less than six wouldn't have really given the impression of the segmented orange. If they wanted to clearly reference the number theme, why wasn't the orange locksided no.6?

And again, yeah, Wizard uses rings and the human hand just happens to have 5 fingers. I find it impossible to see these as anything more than coincidences.

I can't confirm or deny the continuing existence of the number theme, but I will say it does make sense that they would dial it down as the years go on. I could see them not wanting to deal with an increasing number of items on a single belt. Instead choosing to make subtle/overt references to a certain number with a single item or belt.

Maybe the numbering thing was meant to homage the first three riders who have numbered names. Since it stops at Wizard the 4th Neo-Hesei rider like it did with Riderman.