He's the green one whose fighting style is best summed up as "walking armory", correct?

Ayup. He has far and away one of the most satisfying arcs in the series. He's also just about as human as a character can get, he is written wonderfully.

My all time favorite character/rider in the franchise.

Shinji is a great lead character as well, he really grows throughout the series.

I...can just go on and on gushing over Ryuki, I really can. But for your sake I'll shut up and tell you to enjoy. The show doesn't have the best start, but damn does it get going.

Edit: Still downloading Amazon. Have about 65% finished....ugh.

Not gonna lie, what I read about Ren in the Secondary Riders thread really piqued my interest.

Ryuki has really good story arcs. The one with Gai and Raia was pretty good but the one in the 30s with Alternative and Tiger is fucking amazing.

Ren is definitely one of the better main/secondary riders. And his growth over the show is fantastic.

Agreed. It's such a character driven show and many of the arcs the characters go through are incredibly satisfying.

AAAAMAAAAAZOOOOOON!

...what the hell did I just watch?

So, as I said, Amazon is my first showa era season of Kamen Rider and having just finished the first episode I..really don't know what to say haha.

Being over 30 years old, yeah the show does show it's age. But I mean, it's over 30 years old, I can't imagine the budget was all that high, so yeah it's not going to look anything comparable to what we're seeing with shows like Wizard or Gaim, or even some of the older heisei era shows.

Plot-wise, again not really sure what to say. This was only the first episode, some very very basic things were..narrated, I do wish that we actually were shown a bit more early on rather than it just summed up and narrated to us, but I digress. Basically there's a 10-faced demon that wants this armlet, a wizardy science guy from the Amazon gives it to our titular hero, performs a ritual, says a few last words and then dies. Amazon makes it to Japan where the demon is doing demonic things and the guy he was told to meet that would explain things to him dies, he tears apart the monster and then howls into the setting sun, continuing his fight alone in his confusion. Oh and he sorta made friends with this kid who is the nephew of the guy he was supposed to meet up with.

We didn't really get too much characterization out of Daisuke, considering his dialogue is almost exclusively wild man sounds and howls that was kind of expected at this point. I'm hoping that he at least starts to learn a bit more Japanese or at least scales back the screaming a touch, wearing headphones while watching was giving me a bit of a headache. He seems like an alright dude though, all things considered.

Masahiko was your typical era kid, the kind you get used to after growing up on old Godzilla flicks. He wasn't annoying, which as about the best thing you can ask for in something like this.

The villain, well he's the villain. Not really sure what else to say about him at this point.

The fights were interesting. Having the rider literally ripping apart the monster with his hands and teeth was something else, especially given the use of blood. The only other season I know of to really do anything quite like that was Hibiki, and beyond blood now and then they dropped a lot of that fairly quickly.

Amazon is a really cool design too, far and away one of the most unique in the entire franchise. Aside from being an obvious body suit, not something I'd personally nitpick given the age of the show, it definitely has a much more organic look and feel, something only really attempted again in the failed Shin Kamen Rider. It's a nice change of pace and it's appreciated.

So yeah, it's a fairly short season and I liked what I saw, even if I don't really know what to make of it. So I will be sticking with it. Plus the music is that classic old Japanese toku kinda music that I grew up on in my Godzilla movies and Giant Robots and all that.

Re-watched Movie Taisen 2010 and finally paid attention to the crossover bit- only to realize that I didn't miss anything by not caring the first time and sleeping the second time I watched it.

The Decade portion felt worse this time. I was already annoyed from the point were Tackle was introduced, but my aggression reached a maximum when Decade used Blade to kill Ryuki. This movie was terrible enough without knowing the early Heisei Riders before, but having watched Blade to Kiva now made me realize how insulting Decade actually is. Thinks didn't get better, especially not when Kid-Kiva and Kid-Hibiki joined the fight (I have no problem with children, but those two are one of the things I always disliked about Decade).
The W portion was really good, actually even better than in my memory (no pun intended) but the crossover was extremely lame and overall pretty stupid.

Couldn't they have made just a movie about Begin's Night and leave everything involving Decade out? >,>

The two filler eps that introduced Megumi, and the uneasy trio team-up(Shinji, Ren, and Shuichi) episode were two of the best eps of that show.

After a lengthy hiatus (I've just not had the time lately) I jumped back into Hibiki with episode 13. Couldn't care less about Asumu being hospitalised which just goes to show how little interest in his side of things at the moment. I really liked how these episodes focus on Ibuki as an Oni just as much as they do Hibiki though - it's nice to appreciate the other Riders without the titular character always about.

Zanki too! I need to see more! Man these suits are just gorgeous.

That's honestly my opinion towards that and the W/OOO crossover. I just consider them to collectively be Kamen Rider Skull: The Movie.

Urghhh, that OOO portion. 30 minutes that ruined everything about my favorite rider. Well at least this wasn't canon.