I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't! I kind of assume every Rider show at this point secretly has the same kind of wild production history OOO did, with Medal Zombie Date and all those other abandoned story concepts. Zi-O even made the entire plot of its summer movie about admitting there's never much of a grand plan for Kamen Rider, as far as plots are concerned. This is entirely assumptions on my part, but I'd imagine they actively try to keep things as flexible as possible most of the time specifically in case unexpected issues come up that prevent them from doing something they planned on... like having another month's worth of episodes. It's exactly why even though I appreciate the generosity of people letting Zero-One off the hook for some of its problems later on (and this was an unusually huge blow, no doubt), I also think it's maybe a bit overly optimistic to use that as an excuse? Mind you, as I say this, I'm also one of the people who thinks they did a solid job pulling things together at the end.

Real shame about Valkyrie though! Can't say I mind seeing all this mourning for Valkyrie's lost potential!

Oh yeah no, see I'm only excusing the rough but solid enough ending they managed to pull thanks to the issues that presented themselves.

The stuff in this thread, especially some of the decisions made in regards to Gai, and the Workplace Competition before the Covid stuff are actually baffling to me. Like good for you views went up, but also man you kinda screwed the pooch and had to course correct because yeah, as we all figured, the Gai bashing was a response to the reception to Gai's introduction arc. Like I don't know, I love a good drama piece, but I feel like making that the center focus and feeling that Kamen Rider's shouldn't have a place in their own show during that arc, really hurt it a lot.

Also just the lost idea of having Gai early into the new year taking over Hiden Intelligence, is like, possibly the best swerve ball that could have happened because you have Aruto fighting this tough battle against this terrorist group only for this capitalist to pull the rug from underneath. And I would have totally been invested in where they could go with that.

And people would be like, "Oh, but how would Aruto transform, he needs to be Prez." and it's like, having the Ark Connections from Shining Assault and Metal Cluster bypass the restrictions of the 01 Driver, easy as that.

Oh, the part about how the action not gelling with the drama was particularly, uh, let's go with "fun" for me to see, too, because that was consistently something I (and I'm sure plenty of others) criticized both the competition arc for, and even some of the episodes after it. I'd be really curious to see that whole discussion and not just secondhand highlights, because it sounds like the producers were simultaneously very sure in the stories they were telling, and also very conscious of a lot of the problems they were running into doing it, and that's super interesting to me.

I just think you're making a lot of excuses for how it was handled. Anyway, when the producer said that a lot of fans didn't like the workplace arc but how it had the most ratings, is it mostly the western fans not liking it, but the Japan fans liked it due to culture, since in Japan, things tend to be more job focused.

What gives you the idea they were talking about western fans at all?

Well there is this.

https://youtu.be/EQ2q4AB0W6w

Hey so Zea got shot to bits, right? Does that mean they literally destroyed the Rise Hopper?

As if the concept of bikes in this franchise aren't already undead!

That’s one thing I’ll give the end of Zero-One — they knew the bike had such a little part to play due to road laws, so they gave it one last spotlight against Ark-Zero then blew it to bits :lol

Ikazuchi betrayed the Ark just so he'd have the slightest chance of blowing up that damn bike that caused him so much hassle.