I like Hibiki, and I'm glad that you've been receptive to it's unique style. I remember distinctly how one of the earliest scenes, of Asumu having a meal with his family who are talking about him, and both they and their voices fade away in favour of the music to show how much he feels like an outsider to what's happening. Those kinds of moments hit incredibly close to home. In fact, a lot of the themes about finding your way in life struck such a chord with me. It took a few episodes for me to get along with Hibiki's particular way of doing things, but once I did, I was really into it.

As for episode 9, I get what you mean. It's kinda all set-up, but you would have also come to expect this show to just show 'things happening' to Asumu and letting you decide the meaning or worth of it by yourself. Sometimes you'll decide 'i dunno if i needed to see this', though.

That has been one of the issues I had with the show. The monster fights get less interesting the more you watch them till they reach a "filler" level in the episodes and you just wait till they're done to go back to the more interesting character stuff.

It's definitely not a great sign for the episode that the moment that excited me most was this cameo from Blade and Leangle (check the bottom left corner!):

https://i.imgur.com/EjnlH6F.png

Despite featuring 100% more Strongest Rider than the usual Hibiki episode, I definitely agree with Die's criticisms. That being said, it was still super enjoyable in a comfort food kinda way?

Like that first scene with Hibiki, how the episode just throws you into this fight with zero context beyond "we need to remind viewers Hibiki is cool too after last week", I can't help but love it. But I definitely didn't get a ton out of the story, either. It's all atmosphere in this one, which is what Hibiki is best at, so not a total loss, but still.

And at the risk of bookending this post by proving how unengaging the actual plot is, those scenes of Hibiki just kinda walking around in suit made me realize a potential secret reason this show has such a comfortable vibe – Those Disc Animals hanging off his belt make those jingly noises constantly, and it totally makes it sound like Santa Claus is about to show up at any moment. Like Hibiki comes with built-in Christmas cheer. Truly genius sound design, and I'm only kind of joking here.

Talk about product placement, awesome find. :lolol
Funny how the two suit actors for the two riders on that thing were busy with Magiranger that year.

Oof. That is... that is pretty much his arc that you just gave me? After he had a grand total of a minute onscreen? Man. That is a bummer, knowing all that. Definitely less excited to watch the next episode now.

It's very cool that you've got things you want to share about Hibiki, that's the entire reason this thread exists, but if we can keep the discussion to just the current episode (and anything prior), it would really help me out. Talking about how many future appearances someone has, or how well/badly their storyline plays out... that's exactly the stuff I don't want to know in advance.

I appreciate your help with this!

I think one of the things that made 9 not work for me is that it needed Asumu telling someone, anyone, a little of what he what he was going through. We see him isolated from his friends and stressed out after the bookstore confrontation, but there's no way for him to vocalize those emotions, leading to something where I can care that he's upset, but I'm not that clear on why he's upset. It's a plot that needed maybe one or two lines of dialogue (a voicemail left for Hitomi, maybe?) to indicate where the story was heading. Something to help set our compass, you might say.

The other thing is how sort-of overstuffed this episode felt, and how overstuffing it with plot meant substantially less of the normal Tiny Delights, but that's a different problem.

I just don't like it when the monsters that Kamen Riders fight are just non-communicative animals. It's not that fun for me? I like monster plots that can have some variety to them, while Hibiki's (to be fair, five) monster plots have mostly the same arc to them.

The other thing is that the monster plots are all something far outside of the city, happening in mostly sparsely populated areas. It's made the monster plots feel less urgent, maybe even less heroic? It doesn't feel as much like The Day Has Been Saved, as it does like This Is A Mix Between Animal Control And Forest Management. Definitely useful! But a lower-tier useful than fire fighting or crime fighting.

It was a little less enjoyable for me, I think, because I'm not crazy about the trend of the first part of a two parter being all set up, and the second part being all resolution. I don't know that viewers should feel disadvantaged by watching a single episode as it aired? This is the second story in a row where I kind-of wanted to reach through time, grab the production team collectively by the shoulders, and say IMAGINE IF THIS WAS YOUR FIRST HIBIKI EPISODE. There's a way of doing serialized storytelling that still honors the unit of entertainment that people are engaging with, but this isn't that.

Ha ha, amazing. Not the vibe I got from Hibiki, but I'm glad he can create some timeless Christmas cheer for you. He mostly just makes me thinking of camping?

More like standard... tokusatsu hijinks? (which is why I think with "turns into a superhero to defeat monsters, with a heavy emphasis on human connections and allegorical struggles for growing up" as something to describe this, it's not necessarily Kamen Rider show, more like the genre). And well, this is similar to what I said at Faiz thread regarding Lucky Clover vs team Faiz/Renegades, as what Akira's ideals given in previous episode, obviously expect this among the Takashi group. They take their job extremely seriously, so their routine will only that monotone monster hunting, unlike the relatively "directionless" Asumu and the school, who spend time on less important daily activities like watching at cinema, going to book shop, trying out foods, etc.

You just described my beef with some (actually a lot) of the Rider finishers. Like the Unified Burst Fire Style here, the attack seems no different from the usual attack outside saying "Unified Burst Fire Style". Like said in this post (and some of my idea here), to me finishers should have something that differentiates it from ordinary attack, either in attack or effect, though it depends on what powerset you have.

If Akira interacts with Asumu, it'd seem betraying her (overboard) ideals established in previous episode. Focus on the job, without involving anyone that is no help. Unless somehow they can be on break. Hibiki and Ibuki just work in separation like before.

It feels like watching multiple shows if the cast didn't always gather around (like some of the Phase 2)? I mean yeah, sometimes I want the focus to each characters as individuals, though admittedly it can be harder to watch, depending on scene cuts. And for this one, Asumu just found a shoplifter, and he tries to stop them, where he only helped stopped the girl (and got a nasty smack on the face for it). It's likely just basic human decency, though I want to ask why you didn't accept this as much as when someone like title Rider is doing this? Hibiki's heroism may have partly rubbed on him (not fully, his tendency to choke there). It's right though that the episode didn't show anything that happens in Asumu's head, which I've been wondering to know too.

Y̶e̶a̶h̶,̶ ̶e̶v̶e̶n̶ ̶i̶f̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶ ̶g̶o̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶t̶h̶r̶o̶u̶g̶h̶ ̶h̶a̶r̶d̶s̶h̶i̶p̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶s̶u̶f̶f̶e̶r̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶l̶i̶k̶e̶ ̶A̶m̶a̶n̶e̶ ̶d̶i̶d̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶B̶l̶a̶d̶e̶:̶ ̶M̶i̶s̶s̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶A̶c̶e̶.̶

I don't recall the secondary Rider often being total sidekick in other series, probably iirc only G3, Gatack, Cross-Z, and probably Specter post-ep. 12 occupying that role. Mostly yeah, the "virtual antagonist" part, but I have to explain, they're the Rival archetype (famous example: Vegeta in Dragon Ball), which description is "Character who clashes with the protagonist, but isn't the main antagonist", as mostly, the lead Rider is ideal hero, while the secondary Rider is anti-hero. And by that it's actually inverted from what you say, the secondary Rider is usually the one seen as more competent than title Rider.

If there’s one issue I sometimes have with Hibiki - and Daimajin Kanon is really guilty of this, too - it’s that it has a tendency to go with a “more is more” approach to establishing how downtrodden the main character is. I’ve never liked the shoplifters arc because it doesn’t tell us anything new about Asumu - he lacks self-confidence and has trouble standing up for himself. We know that already. This is just another example of character traits that he’s already demonstrated several times by this point. The show is built around him growing up and maturing, but it also has a bad tendency to go for “one step forward, one step back.” The imaginary sheep was nice, though.

This episode also features the debut of Hibiki’s flaming Ongekibou, which was the only thing I knew about the character for a long time.

That works too!

Anyway, I definitely see what you're saying about the way the episodes are structured. From what I understand, Rider screenplays actually are written as wholes, which would maybe explain the disconnect here? It's probably pretty easy for the production team to forget that back half is going to take the viewer a week to see when all they have to do is turn the page?

It might also be another quirk of Takatera in particular, since Kuuga was often pretty brazen about this kind of thing too.

It's weird, because in some ways I actually like how the show approached Unified Burst Fire Style? They just did a whole two-parter about Hibiki training and trying out new techniques (including a very long segment of him actually drumming!), so the idea of him having a new move he wants to try out is both firmly established in-show, and also thematically appropriate because he achieved it by training hard. That's Hibiki's thing, being well-trained!

It's just, beyond the flaming drum sticks, the move itself is a little underwhelming. If they hadn't bothered to to call out how this move was some highly-anticipated tactic, I'd've just assumed it was the same finish as always.

I got complicated feelings about Unified Burst Fire Style!

Which is how they could've done it. I don't want to write the show for them, but there's any number of ways Akira and Asumu could've crossed paths in an episode. They're the same age, living in the same area, going to (soon) the same school, and they both frequent Team Hibiki Bar and Grill. (I can't call it Tachibana's, I spent two months typing that name, I need a goddamn break.) They have a half-dozen ways to meet up in a story.

I definitely don't think Asumu meant to stop her! It seems like she ran into him, since he was pretty much a deer in the headlights at that point, and then she tripped over him. He was an obstacle to her escaping, but he didn't really try to stop her. If he did, he might not've felt so bad for the rest of the episode.

If there'd been even a little explanation about what the sheep meant, it would've been one of the screencaps for the episode. But then the bookstore employee reminded us all about how financially imperiled your local bookstore is, and then I wasn't going to use anything else.

But, yeah, Asumu. I don't mind the idea of them going back to the well of Asumu Lacks Self-Confidence, since that's his defining trait. (That image of Hibiki saying he's well-trained, but it's Asumu doing the salute and saying "I find it difficult to believe in myself!") Doing stories about that... there's really no way around it? But stories like this where it lacks perspective, where it feels like there's no awareness in-character or metatextually that we've hit some of these beats before, it can make it hard to feel as invested in a character as we'd like. If, again, we'd maybe gotten a moment where Asumu says that he knows he froze, and that he's beating himself up about it, I think some of the criticisms about this plot being repetitive fall away. Keeping it all in Asumu's head, all we can look at are the results of his actions, and they can be a little underwhelming!

Yeah, some shows balance it better than others. I think one trick is to make the first part (where there will be no resolution) a little bit more fun, a little less plot-heavy. That's what's made some of the other Hibiki stories work when they've got the same structure as this one. If either the Ibuki or Hibiki plot had carved out some space for jokes or prep or something that didn't feel so plot-driven, I might not have felt as bored with them.

The show's still figuring out how to most dynamically handle Hibiki's finishers. We're still on the journey, not at the destination.