Of those three, Hibiki is the show I can recommend the easiest. While all three of them are flawed in their own unique way, Hibiki's flaws without a doubt the most straightfoward and the easiest to prepare for. I said my piece about Kiva earlier in this thread but, long story short, the show starts off fine but becomes more and more of a trainwreck the further you get into it. While this mostly applies to Decade as well, Decade's protagonist makes the show more fun to watch due to his unique personality and the novelty of an antihero as the primary rider while Kiva's protagonist makes watching the show more frustrating then it already is.

As for the show itself, Hibiki is a unique Kamen Rider show that takes full advantage of how unorthodox it is to tell a coming-of-age story in way that's not just special when compared to Kamen Rider, but special when compared any show. At least... the first half is.

I really look forward to this, I can't imagine how I could enjoy this even more :lol

I will do it, for you. Who subbed it so far? If it's only TV Nihon then I'll have to wait.

I like Keitaro, but his main problem is that he is featured in Faiz. The stupidity involving this character is off the charts. The penpal thing was especially dumb IMO.

And he's too silly I think. While Kotaro can step and really be serious if he needs to Keitaro always just seems like a joke to me, I can't buy anything this character does.

I mean it's not just him mentioning it briefly, they play the full flashback twice, and it's a big part in his early quarrels with his fate as a Rider. It's resolved quickly but that doesn't change the impact it has on the character.

Just want to add that, though the first 35 episodes of Hibiki are gold, it's sooo tonally unique amongst Heisei Riders that you might find yourself resisting it at first. It's - I hesitate to say realistic, it just far more grounded than your typical Rider, nor does it have the typical Rider stuff like belts. It could have easily just been called ONI and been entirely seperate from KR and no one would blink. However, give yourself over to it and you will be greatly rewarded.

Until it crashes headfirst into MT. INOUE ZONE, that is.

Awww~

Unfortunately you will indeed have to wait. Assuming Over-Time even gets around to it? I mean, they did the summer movie eventually, so...

Agreed on both fronts. Hibiki is great and definitely something to prioritize, despite having the actual weakest last stretch in all of Rider.

I need to apologize to Ghost for suggesting otherwise. I consider Real!Hibiki and INOUE!Hibiki different shows to the point I straight up forgot they are technically the same series. :lol

Their track record of V-Cinemas is pretty good too, so I'm pretty comfortable with waiting for this to be released from them.

Well, don't worry too much. I'm actually one of the minority that love Faiz, so Inoue Zone won't be so bad for me, haha :D. On a side note, I heard that Hibiki's producer is also Kuuga's producer. Since, he made such a good series like Kuuga, maybe Hibiki will be as good as or even better than Kuuga.

Um, why does it seem that everyone hate TV-Nihon? I actually pretty like this fansub. Well, I agree that Over-Time might have a better translation but as far as my experience, TV-Nihon isn't really too bad at all. Though, you need to process the words the several seconds. Still, I really hate Over-Time for calling siblings with their name, instead of calling them 'Big Bro', 'Big Sis' or even don't translate them at all. This one of the reason why I like TV-Nihon better.

Their translations used to be terrible, they left Japanese words in there for fun because they expect you to know what they mean. Like they left the entire sibling pronouns untranslated or stuff like "itadakimasu". And I personally know what it means but it's still lazy to not translate it all the way and use Engrish instead. Breaks the flow of reading quite a bit too.

Then there's the whole issue with them inserting English insults which are way harder than the Japanese counterparts just to be edgy.

Lastly, I despise their graphic shenanigans. Like putting up logos behind the text and changing fonts for the Henshin and shit. It's distracting and annoying.

Those were the issues which drove me away from them in the past, I have no idea if they are fixed or not. What cemented my opinion to never watch any of their stuff again though was finding their forum per accident and reading the translators talking shit about the show they were subbing. That's an absolute no-go, I know it's fan-translations but god damn show at least a basic level of professionalism if you're publishing stuff on the internet.

If it's well written and formulated critique like the one our boss Den-O does for the articles of his photo shootings then that's absolutely fine, but those guys were talking trash like no man's business.

To which I said in my mind "Fuck these guys" and that's why I rather never watch certain movies and stuff if TV Nihon are the only ones who subbed it. Because fuck those guys.

TV Nihon's infamous for screwing up translations pretty badly. Such as in Gaim, Kouta's sister said something that really pissed off a number of people. Turns out, TV Nihon botched the line which resulted in thw mess. Gaim had it again because TV Nihon translated 'akumademo' which means selfless into 'Even though I'm the devil'. The most infamous screw up is 'Ladies and gentleman, banana new shoe'. Hell, there's a tumblr which caught a BUNCH of stupid shit TVN did called Onore TV Nihon

Yeah, TVN's overly literal translations are noooot my favorite. By and large, I may understand the RANDOM JAPANESE they leave untranslated (and even that had exceptions), but trying to show anything they subtitled to a less familiar audience just results in a barrage of "What did they just say?". I also have a deeply dislike the use of translator's notes. I understand if you use it on the rare occasion for something which you think is vital, but mid-2000s TVN threw them around for practically no reason. It really ruins my suspension of disbelief to see a random note that I probably can't read fast enough and have to rewind to read some inane comment that was completely unneeded. Nowadays I really think at least translation-wise they have improved, and in Gaim's case they are my preferred subbers, but even then I vastly prefer the more localized translations of Over-time. I guess it is a matter of preserving the meaning of a show for an audience of a different culture by changing some details to a tonal equivalent or being much more literal like TVN and potentially losing some meaning to an English-speaking audience that way.

That's not actually what akumademo means at all but yes, TV-Nihon did indeed botch that line hard.

So, just to add a nice, moderate perspective to this conversation, TV-N really has sorted out a huge amount of the problems they had in recent years and it's a mistake to assume their current stuff is anywhere near as awful as something like their Magiranger subs (*shudder*).

They still make actual, objective translation errors every now and then, but so does every group. Just a couple weeks ago Excite Subs turned a simple line in Ex-Aid into complete nonsense that actively contradicted everything else in the episode. I whined about it in the episode thread and everything.

But since this whole conversation started because Kiwami wanted to watch the Specter movie, I should also point out that, even beyond the obvious special effects text and onii-chans, their subs for it are serviceable at best. There's an "itadakimasu" in there that isn't being used in the usual context of eating but is still left "as is", which would suggest that it was just mindlessly translated from the captions or something but there's no way that's the case since they also messed up several lines by mishearing words.

Although given the translator was quick to let us know in their forums how much she hated the whole film, maybe it's just laziness? I mean, I honestly don't say this to crap on TV-N, and I love that they make it a point to sub every last thing in a series down to the commercial bumpers, but jeez, if you're straight up saying you feel like you've wasted your time translating something, it probably isn't going to be your best work?