https://youtu.be/elW1khAWD58
Here's also zero ones battle theme

Oh dang, you guys are almost done? Ohh. I missed a lot.
It's the reset ending! I definitely liked the part too when Sougo's uncle managed to somehow repair all the watches. It's so touching.

So, technically Sougo separated the worlds and undid all the time mishaps caused by the Another Riders and the Time Jackers, that most likely mean things like Kenzaki and Hajime losing their undead attributes did not happen. Or maybe not, I don't know, but Sougo puts everything back the way it was to enable everyone to move forward to the future much smoother, with everyone able to live relatively peaceful lives. All at the cost of his own memories and powers, giving up the kingship dream.

Except that's not exactly it. I like that the despite Sougo's act, he's still one day destined as the king of time, Ohma ZI-O is an inevitablity.

Onto Ohma ZI-O, I'm not exactly sure where it was said, but apparently back in episode 1, when Ohma ZI-O erased the people from a wave of a hand, he didn't actually kill them? He sent them somewhere safe, it just looked like they were killed. I don't know if this is real, something Shirakura said, I could've sworn I read it somewhere. Maybe it's a retcon, but I'll take it since it's this reframing of Ohma ZI-O as this tragic king who took on all the world's evil at a terrible cost and only wish for people to remember the Heisei Riders that came before him.

Back to the finale, /Our/Sougo was Ohma ZI-O was splendid. Something about this form's re-debut reminded me of Kuuga Ultimate somewhat. A black/gold red-eyed form appears before the final villain, with a transformation process so shockingly simple. Granted a giant lava timey-wimey thing appears below Sougo, but the transformation just him pressing the sides of the belt reminds me kinda of Kuuga Ultimate.

Could the ending have been better, mmm yeah? But I still had fun with this, since it still culminated in the stuff I wanted to see. A reset ending and Sougo making use of Ohma ZI-O.

I think the fun thing about the ending is that well... it's very vague on what Sougo did aside from what we see happen with his High School AU. Like we don't have specific worlds being labeled as "world of (blank)". And we don't know if certain Riders are together in them still or not. And I like how purposely vague it is because it gives a lot of flexibility going forward.

It's an ending that basically allows future writers to do whatever they want in regards to continuity moving forward since there is no strict like "one world" thing that a lot of Phase 2 was trying to imply.

No problem. Us writers should help each other out!

Well the events of Ghost did last 6 months in universe, despite the show running for a year as usual. So now that you mention it, I guess it's possible that the events of Decade started later in the year considering how each episode leads in to the next without any implied breaks.

My own headcanon for Tsukasa and Sougo is a little different, where Tsukasa fuses the worlds which therefore creates the possibility for Oma Zi-O to exist at the center of those worlds, by inheriting all those powers (in other worlds, Oma Zi-O is also Decade's fault). But the outcome of those mechanics is similar to what you've suggested.

Remember, Geiz already called Sougo "Sougo" before, when he and Tsukuyomi were fading away in Over Quartzer. However, this time in the finale was memorable as well, I thought it showed amazing acting from both Okuno and Oshida, they really sold those emotions with Geiz leaving behind his grudge against Oma Zi-O and giving his blessing to Sougo to become that man, believing he won't become the same evil demon king as the future Oma Zi-O, since this is the Sougo he knows, the one who cares about his friends and wants to become king to create a better future. Arguably, you could say that Sougo succeeded, in a very weird way....

The future of Rider Time Zi-O VS Decade! Look forward to that! :D

Oh and I guess I should congratulate you. IWAE! Kamen Rider Die has finished his journey through the Heisei Era, in only a quarter of the time it took me to reach that point earlier this year!

There was a lot of hype for Kamen Rider Tsukuyomi in the finale, but damn, she quickly succumbed to that Female Rider Curse, barely doing anything important, before being killed by Swartz. Tsukasa gave a poor explanation for why Kamen Rider Tsukuyomi is supposedly such a big deal and while she may have been the solution to the whole timeline collapse problem, the execution of it, like everything else in that Swartz subplot, feels so lacking!

They don't call him the Greatest Clock Repairman In History for nothing!

It's not like our Sougo ever knew the Myokoin family, so does Geiz like have totally unrelated parents now? Tsukuyomi's name was never Alpina? Everybody's suddenly calling each other with honorifics? Honestly, these questions aren't even important, since the most shocking part about all this is that Geiz doesn't have his collar anymore! Someone call Tsukasa to destroy this broken world!

I do tolerate this ending better than Ryuki's though, since at least it's not a return to status quo. Another way of thinking about it is that our Sougo is like Amazing Sougo and he just created the Ultimate Sougo universe or something. Maybe the best way to approach this new universe is to try and dissociate it from the one that created it. However, I still think Build creating World C is the best reset ending I've seen in KR.

I feel like this is only fair to the seasons that came before, restoring them to how they were prior to the Time Jackers' meddling and their interactions with Team Zi-O. But I recall the moral Sougo learned in the Gaim arc, that people are capable of taking care of themselves. Like, maybe it'll take a little longer for Kiriya to grow in to his role as Hibiki's successor. Maybe Kanzaki will finally snap and restart the Rider War. Even without the events of Zi-O, I think some of the development we've seen with the Legend Riders could still happen anyway, with obvious exceptions like Takumi and Kusaka. Shirakura actually pointed out that Sougo obtained the Double Ridewatch in canon through an event similar to HG Forever, but not exactly the same way. Our Sougo may have failed to become king in the main timeline where Over Quartzer didn't happen, but he passed on that dream to the New Sougo. Someday, some iteration of Sougo will become king, he will make that dream a reality!

I held off on my thoughts, because I needed to consider this line. And find how it's almost accurate to put it that way, unless the final arc was changed almost completely.

Is this a great finale? No, not at all. But is it a good (enough) ending for this show? Honestly, that depends. For me, I'd say it's better than what I was thinking, not quite as good as it could have been, but not a bad way to end it.

I feel like Geiz's death somehow reminded me of Ryuki? Be it Shinji's death in the mains series, or Ren's death in the 13 Rider special, I somehow found myself looking back to this series and seeing his sacrifice something akin to that. I don't know if I can really put into words, or if I'm completely misremembering, but that's how I look back on it.

Oma Zi-O's debut transformation is great, maybe could have been done better, but getting to wipe out Swartz and his backup buddies (boy did I enjoy seeing Evol show up just for the heck of it) was fun to watch, and how Sougo even does boss Woz around to give him his speech, like a true Demon King he was feared to become. What I truly love about Oma Zi-O's debut is how you can tell he's a threat you probably can't defeat, a future that will happen no matter what, it felt like an event that both the heroes and villains can't prevent, and that's something I liked about Zi-O, that it didn't matter how pure and innocent Sougo was, there would always be the event he would become Oma Zi-O.

Swartz is not a good villain in many ways, and there are only perhaps a few positive things I can attribute to him, but his role as the final boss is not even a question. But, as I mentioned early on in this journey, the Uncle is my favorite character in this season next to Woz. Both are great supports, uncle moreso, but the fact that while his schtick was to be the guy who owns a clock shop that gets almost no customers whatsoever, he was always there to support the heroes even if he had no idea what was going on, even fixing the Ridewatches, and that's why he's a great guardian figure and supporting character. While Woz was just so much fun to see every time he showed up on screen, and how involved he became with the cast as the series progressed.

Overall, Zi-O, much like real history, isn't perfect, nor can everything in it be considered all good or all bad, it has both, and while it tries to make the best use out of it's themes and plotlines, I wouldn't call this a bad season, or even a bad anniversary. But neither can I say it's a great season either, as it's biggest storyline has an almost laughably bad quality in some places, and it honestly loses itself more than losing itself in the anniversary aspects (funny enough), to me at least. But it's not a bad season all things considered, I still had fun, and I wouldn't have minded rewatching the season with everyone here, but seeing how well my memory held up was interesting to say the least.

Now if I can just get around to the rest of the Zi-O stuff...

Very interesting! Thank you!

Yeah, there're elements that can't really be the same, since Team Zi-O doesn't really exist for Oma Zi-O, but I like the idea that Oma Zi-O's origin was similar to Sougo's: a kid who took on the mantle of King Of Time to save the world from an active apocalypse, and then became despised by the people he'd saved. He views himself as a Good Despot, because half of the world survived, but his lack of empathy (due to having no one in his life to call a friend) makes him the villain. There's a tragedy there, for sure.

It requires a little bit of squinting, though, because a) he definitely killed a whole bunch of people in the first episode; and b) the remains of humanity live in the Misery Fields of 2068, and that's not exactly beyond Zi-O's powers to fix. His origin might be tragic, but he's not exactly a sympathetic figure in the narrative.

Yeah, I don't know that this ending dooms Kenzaki or Takumi or whomever. No reason that Sougo couldn't make alterations to help those guys out.

It's a great moment! I don't love some of the middle section, but they completely nailed that scene between Sougo and Geiz.

The important thing is that we all reached this future together.

I'll get more into this tomorrow night, but I feel like A Fun Group Of Characters That The Plot Frequently Lets Down is about as on-the-nose of a Heisei Rider season as you can get. I really liked these kids, eventually, and that made it a success for me. There were episodes -- especially in the last stretch -- that just murdered my enthusiasm, but they just ended up being bumps in the road. Not a perfect year, not the best year, but maybe the best anniversary season we're likely to get.

KAMEN RIDER ZI-O: SERIES WRAP-UP

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Creating an anniversary season to Kamen Rider has such an insanely high degree of difficulty that it’s amazing they’re even intelligible, let alone any good. A regular season can be considered a success if it manages to tell a thrilling, thematically-rich story around its recurring cast. An anniversary season needs to do that, AND craft individual outings for returning actors that honor their past work in a way that both new and old audiences can appreciate, AND create an overall statement about the span of time the show is meant to celebrate. It’s nuts. It’s maybe too big of an ask?

That’s a quote from when this thread kicked off a couple months ago, right before I started watching Zi-O. Not to take the fun experience of watching an entire Kamen Rider season and make it sound routine, but things went pretty much how I expected. Kamen Rider Zi-O was a show that succeeded for me in spite of its anniversary elements, not because of them.

I did appreciate what this show was trying to do with its Heisei tributes, though. I liked how it tried to take 19 individual lessons about growing up and arrange them into a road map for a poorly-socialized teenager. Some of the installments stretched the original shows’ themes a little bit (I don’t know if the OOO one landed very well?), but we more or less got stories that drew inspiration from a specific show in a manner that helped Sougo on his path to becoming a hero.

But the cavalcade of guest stars never really meant that much to me, regardless of how heavily they were used in an episode. Whether it was someone like Chase doing a speedrun of his character arc, or Kouta handing over a couple Ridewatches and peacing out, the most I could normally manage for the Big Guest Star moments was Hey Neat. I don’t really care? It’s not a series that’s about furthering those characters’ stories across a season, you know? (I am so grateful we didn’t have to see nineteen Legend Riders show up in the finale to back up Sougo!) They were like the Victims Of The Week: cool if they could be interesting, but they shouldn’t be as memorable or important as our regular cast.

That regular cast was ridiculously enjoyable to watch, and occasionally just plain ridiculous. Sougo’s growth from Actively Repellant to Brightest Star In The Heavens is the main reason I can’t ever quit these shows, no matter how unevenly they might begin. He was a character that grated on me, until I tolerated him, until I enjoyed his ingratiating enthusiasm, until I loved his hard-fought optimism and undying commitment to giving people the chance to find their best selves in their best futures. He smiles a lot, for a Rider, which was so weird at the start. It came off as flippant, which it sort of was. But then he just kept smiling, and it read as a port in a storm; the one thing you could be sure of was that Sougo was happy to see his friends, and he was happy to get another chance to go on an adventure.

Most of those adventures were with the Time Orphans, and I sort of love how one-note they ended up being. Tsukuyomi never really grew beyond being a Time Mom, despite the show trying a couple times to add complexity to her character. Both attempts sucked, so I can’t really blame them for sticking with the proven Time Mom role. (I think Tsukuyomi’s actor is great, but both the Kill Sougo and 2058 plots were among this show’s low points.) Geiz has charisma for miles, so it’s easy to miss how little his performance changes over the season. There’s a lot of depth added to his motivations – how his relationship to Sougo matches the viewer’s – but he’s hilariously taciturn throughout the entire show, and entirely unconvincing in his attempts to hide his affection for Sougo.

Deeper into our cast we had two characters that could’ve been comedy-only goofballs on a lesser show: a wacky uncle who accidentally turned his repair shop into the requisite Heisei Cafe; and a gloriously theatrical hype-man, variously spouting exposition and acting eternally suspicious. Uncle and Woz were so much more than that, though. Each actor found the requisite humor (Uncle in particular had what I’d swear were some scene-stealing ad-libs that busted up the actors, since they land right at the cut), but they also brought a warmth to their responsibility to shepherd someone, while they tried to let him find his own way. They cared enough for Sougo to let him make mistakes, but they were always at his side to let him know that it wasn’t worth giving up. As support characters go, they were all-time.

If only the villains were as nuanced! The Time Jackers never really came together as a series-long threat, and I actually just laughed when I realized that they were the series-long threat. Oma Zi-O exists as a larger plot complication and a staggeringly powerful metaphor, but the Time Jackers – and their Another Riders – were who our heroes spent a year locking horns with. They were… not good. Some of my least favorite villains, full stop. Their schemes never made a ton of sense, and their utility to the series was minimal at best. Pinning the entire endgame to Swartz’z ambitions and Ora’s duplicity and Heure’s safety was a fatal miscalculation, and I assume the stink of it lingers for fans more than the sweetness of this show’s heroes. The Time Jackers are barely coherent as a threat, and rarely entertaining.

Oma Zi-O, though. Heisei villain for the ages, if you’ll pardon the expression. If every Heisei show from Kuuga through Build was about teaching children how to grow up, it’s only fitting for the final Heisei villain to represent the fear of growing up into someone you don’t like. Reminding kids (and viewers of all ages) that they have to work daily to be their best selves, and that it’s okay to be scared of the future so long as you never let that fear define your choices… just great lessons for a Rider show to codify into their anniversary season. Beyond that read, it’s fun to think about the other stuff Oma Zi-O might represent: addiction, depression, isolation, a fear of vulnerability; the sky’s the limit for how you want to view Oma Zi-O as a metaphor. Legitimately a villain I can’t stop thinking about.

So many of the characters clogged up my brain for the last couple months, but I can’t say I expended much brain power on this show’s Time Nonsense, or the rapidly shifting landscape of its series arc. This thing’s a mess, even for a Heisei Rider show. It starts off as a time travel show, and then sort of abandons that for a more straightforward Legend Rider showcase, and then goes hard into a multiversal apocalypse. There were points where it felt like the show was trying hard to course-correct – watching each week’s episode and recalibrating towards only the parts that were working – but then the ending is even more of a disaster, plot-wise, than the beginning. The line-graph of this show’s plotting quality was a sine wave. For every clever character beat, there was an infuriating/opaque/infuriatingly-opaque episodic or serialized plot.

But, really, that’s what makes it such a perfect Heisei tribute season? I can’t even count the number of these seasons that I’ve ended feeling burned by the series plot, but wistful for the character beats. It’s just these shows, man. Their plots are all kinda dumb, and most of them have a tough time telling a complete, coherent story over 40-odd episodes. If this thing didn’t make me roll my eyes at Time Nonsense, or grit my teeth at a dumb twist, or resent a ludicrous villain plot taking up valuable screen time, it wouldn’t really be Heisei Rider. That stuff is as integral as a whole cast of characters that I’m 110% invested in, or outstanding fight choreography, or great music, or evocative cinematography, or or or. I dislike parts, but I almost can’t imagine these shows without them.

Kamen Rider Zi-O isn’t the best season I’ve ever watched, for sure. Too uneven. An endgame that leaves a sour taste, despite a final scene that’s one of my all-time faves. But by trying – and largely succeeding – to tell an original Kamen Rider story alongside a tribute to nineteen previous seasons, it was easily the most Kamen Rider season I’ve ever watched.

That’s enough for me.

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I don't have much to say other than, I'm really glad you enjoyed the characters. Honestly after hearing how you weren't really a fan of like Legend Rider stuff I figured the main thing that'd win you over (it was never the plot) would be the Main Cast (sans Villains) and I'm glad that they ended up landing for you.

Seeing you baffled by Sougo and then learning to love him and his infectious attitude was really great to see over the course of these like couple of months. And it was always fun like chiming in ever now and again too. Also getting to record a couple of commentaries with the Memory of Heroez gang was also neat.

Overall I had a fun time here!

I mentioned at the beginning of the thread, that on my feelings on Zi-O were....Complicated, on my first watch, and I was rewatching to properly straighten my feelings out about the show.

When I first watched the show, the first time around, I didn't know what Zi-O wanted to do for its audience: did it want to purely celebrate the last 20 years through sheer fanservice, to be this reflection upon Heisei Rider (both sublety and overtly, the good and the bad) before the franchise takes a leap into a new future, or just tell a story about its own characters like any other season, because it was obviously struggling to do those ideas indiviually, much less trying to do it all simulateously! As a result, didn't have much fun with this show.

Now, at the end of my rewatch......Well, Zi-O didn't magically get better, it's still sorta this goopy melting pot of half-baked and overcooked ideas? But! I feel like a have a much better understanding of the vision, and it's lead to a deeper apperication of what the show was trying to do, as messy as it was.

Overall, I wouldn't say I necessarily like or dislike Zi-O as a season, I respect it for what it is. I like these kids, Uncle and Woz all very much though, so I wouldn't mind re-watching some arcs in isolation though!

Some assorted thoughts.

-Sougo! I've mentioned this before, but not having a proper grasp on the kid absolutely soured my experience with the show on the inital watch. I did grew to have some vaguely positive feelings towards him, but those moments were really few and far between in the show proper, the bulk of my positivity on Sougo relying on a certain piece of post-show content. The kid still baffles me at points, but I Get Him Now, so he's bumped up from "eh..." to "alright" in my book!

-I'm sure everyone and their grandma will say that Zi-O turning out the way it did reflects Heisei Rider's......quirks, better than any flashy all-star Rider Kick of celebration could, and I agree! It truly ended up encompassing all the delights and defects of that era, more or less. Reiwa is still in its infancy, and I'm sure some folks will say it's currently "More Of The Same" for KR, but rewatching Zi-O gave me a reminder of the gap between the two, the different traits and whatnot.
(And of course, it's a conversation for another time, but I'll be interested to see your thoughts on Reiwa Rider's own little assortment of quirks when we get there, Die!)

Me, too! And we've still got a week to go! Here's the current schedule:

THURSDAY: Final Stage
SATURDAY: Geiz Majesty
SUNDAY: Decade vs Zi-O
MONDAY: Zi-O vs Decade
WEDNESDAY: Thread Wrap-Up

Still some more to dig into, even if the series itself has concluded.