Those were the days, but Reiwa ain't been so bad. For Gotchard alone this past year, we've gotten a dozen Hades Sisters episodes, that Class 3-G short, a few Gotchanimes... we still get a bunch of incredibly weird crap!

Worth mentioning that while he’s portrayed by an actor here, director Hiroyuki Kato is a real person, who did direct some episode of Go-Busters proper. (His episodes are… mostly ok. He doesn’t really have a style of his own, beyond basically aping whoever the main director for the current series is)

As for things that aren’t on the watch list… I realised I forgot the Final Live Tour when giving it to you. It’s a stageshow that’s sort of similar to Rider’s Final Stages, which you can find at the usual place.

I will try to track it down! Thanks!

Yeah, like asking the hard questions in life. Do Chemies take dumps? :lolol

And don't forget "What alcoholic beverage does Hopper1 prefer?"

I assume beer. :lolol

I agree, this movie kind of sucks. Yoko is one of the protagonists of Super Hero War Z though, so maybe you'll get more enjoyment from rewatching that, presumably during your Wizard thread.

EDIT: Nevermind, I see it's on your list for this show as well.

Well yeah, I know that Ayase's still the actual cool guy of the team, but I'm referring to cool temperaments in general. Takeru introduced himself to his team while looking down on them from his literal high horse, so if he's not the cool guy then I don't know who is. I'd say that Takeru, Hiromu and Kairi are probably the most cool-tempered Reds in the 21st Century.

Honestly, I still haven't watched Gingaman yet, so I'll have to take your word for Ryouma. I know his big bro is portrayed by Ogawa Teruaki though, so I guess nekketsu is a hereditary trait. :p However, Gingaman was Kobayashi's first, so this seems like an outlier. I wish I could forget about ToQ 1, but watching Boonboomger is going to make that difficult.

Can't brew beer without hops, after all.

I remember back when Kamen Rider Saber was airing, that to hype up Super Hero Senki (written by Mouri), one of the production blog thingies specifically brought up the huge variety of shows he's been a sub-writer for, and how he always displays an ability to grasp the kind of show the main writer is making and all that. It got me thinking like "now that you mention it...", and ever since then, I've taken his work even more seriously than I already did. So yeah, honestly, I might not argue with this assessment.

Funnily enough, I vaguely recall when I originally watched the show that I remembered Nakamura's name right away but didn't commit Morishita to memory until way later. :lol

Anyway, yeah, very cute episode for Yoko and Usada. I feel like he's sort of inherently the funniest Buddyroid on account of being an R2-D2-esque trash can with legs, so between that and Yoko's oftentimes childish disposition, it's maybe only right that this one is more fun than it is complex. Like, if the characters the story is focusing on can be dictating the overall tone in this fashion, that's probably just another sign how fully-realized this show's world is, you know?

And bold of you to assume the show didn't care about those Megazords at the end! Between the cool entrance for the Busters, all the Machines teaming up in Animal Mode, and the insert theme playing, they did everything they could to spice that scene up! ...which is probably something they'd feel the need to do if they also felt the scene wasn't particularly interesting simply on a narrative level. Hm.


Oh man no you're really going through with thi--

--Oh, okay then. Glad to see you're making the much healthier choice here, Die!

I kid, I kid. Er, I mean, I kinda do, anyway? Obviously Net Movies are already frequently more enjoyable than even the well-regarded films they're sometimes promoting, but yeah, in Super Hero Taisen's case, admittedly, it's probably all the more true. I'd kind of love to have some incredible contrarian defense at the ready for that movie, but seeing as I've never enjoyed it that much myself, the best I've got is that it's *probably* not specifically Yonemura's fault.

Now I wanna see Hopper-1 with a pint and full Oktoberfest gear. :lolol

TOKUMEI SENTAI GO-BUSTERS MISSION 10 - “A REASON TO FIGHT”

https://kamenriderdie.com/images/sen...busters10a.png

It finally hit me with this episode what the main difference between Sentai and Rider is, based on my gigantic sample size of ten episodes from one (1) Sentai season, versus 26 Kamen Rider seasons: there’s no subplots here?

I mean, there’s definitely background stuff happening around the edges, character development stuff mostly – Hiromu learning a lesson, or Yoko confronting Ryuji’s dark side, or whatever the moral of the episode is – or the slowly developing plot of Enter’s Zord-building scheme, but there isn’t, like, a B-plot for an episode. We’re in one story about 1-9 characters each episode, with two or three acts per episode, and that’s it. There aren't really cutaways to completely separate plots that bubble up in the background, or act as a release valve for tension occurring elsewhere, or just provide an isolated spotlight for a different cast dynamic. Like the title says, there’s a Mission, and that’s what you’re going to get for 20-odd minutes.

I think that’s proven fairly successful as the framework for an action-adventure serial featuring three main characters, but it sort of handicapped this otherwise excellent installment devoted to the relationship between Hiromu, Rika, and Nick. Namely, we haven’t seen Rika since Mission 1, I don’t think anyone’s mentioned her in a serious way since then, and I don’t think she ever shared a scene with Nick before. (I may be overlooking a flashback or something here!) In an episode that already has to take us from Rika and Hiromu on the outs because of his decision in Mission 1, all the way to her understanding his, uh, Reason To Fight by the end of the episode, it doesn’t help things to have so much of the family’s backstory consigned to an exposition-heavy scene on a bridge between Nick and Rika. Like, it would have been nice for pieces of this story to have been dropped in a few episodes back? Or maybe Nick could’ve shared a scene with Rika, even once? It’s a lot of information that show didn’t have time for previously, and it made a few of the emotional beats not really land for me super well.

(It sort of also doesn’t help, for me, that this is a story about Hiromu and Rika that Hiromu is strenuously excluding himself from. I get that it’s true to his character, and I get that a lot of the point of this episode is how Nick is the glue binding the family together instead of the thing breaking it apart, but it still means that there’s no real cathartic moment between Hiromu and Rika at the end.)

But, y’know, I still think this one worked okay for me. There’s a lot of sweetness in Nick’s desperation to patch things up between Hiromu and Rika, as well as some stunning visuals throughout that sell the significance of the weight that Hiromu and the rest of the team have been carrying for the last 13 years. (That shot when Nick is consoling a scared Rika while Ryuji fights the Megazord in the background!!!) It’s a tense, exciting episode of Go-Busters that manages to sketch in some fun new layers to the relationship between Nick and Hiromu. Sadly, the relationship between Hiromu and his sister wasn’t my favorite part of the episode, but I guess it’s hard to deliver that sort of density when you’ve only got the one plotline per episode. I will try to get used to the difference!

https://kamenriderdie.com/images/sen...busters10b.png

IT’S TIME FOR Special Buster!

Man, that fight between Hiromu and the Metaroid… so good! The idea of doing a close quarters, one-on-one duel is exciting enough, but that finish was gorgeous and clever. I am really digging the action on this show!

(NOTE: Sorry to anyone who posted earlier today that I didn't respond to! I didn't see the new posts until I got on here just now, and it's very late, and I need to get to bed, but I appreciate everyone who posted today!)