Generally speaking, I find that it's better not to try to apply logic to any of Yonemura's plots.

I actually remember some elements of this film. I generally didn't care much for it, but I always found the concept of the Hitler Youth Go-Kart Team to be hilariously stupid. Because if you're going to bend the world to the will of your fascist dictatorship, having a squad of talented go-kart racers is definitely a key part of that plan.

So, like, I have an answer for this!

If you're Shocker, and you've spent the better part of two years throwing every conceivable threat - including multiple seahorse monsters - at Ichigou and Nigou, to zero success, and then a guy in a car kills them both... you are ONE THOUSAND PERCENT going to assume that the car is the reason why Shocker is now unopposed by superhero cyborgs, and you are going to spend forty years trying to find the fastest car racers around.

The only surprise to me is that Shocker didn't go full Turbo Teen and start remodeling humans directly into cars.

D-VIDEO SPECIAL: KAMEN RIDER 4

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Takumi never really learned how to live.

If there’s a tragedy to his death, that’s it. He spent his first life certain of his death, so he fought like he’d never be around for the victory. But his second life he treated as too precious to risk; too tenuous to move forward. In an existence with two lives, there’s not much actual living in it. Too reckless or too cautious, with nothing in-between.

Because he knew what it meant to die. It’s not just the loss of a person, but the loss of what that person meant to others. He’d had to live with friends and enemies – sometimes the same person – dying, and had to find some way to keep going. The idea of more death, more sacrifice, more weight to carry… better to keep fighting for another outcome than give in to that finality.

But, it’s more nuanced than that. A death can be a gift, a way of treating a life as something to be shared with those whose stories keep going. Takumi’s second life was lived in paralysis, haunted by ghosts and guilted by survivors. His second death was a reclamation of his heroism, a chance to make his life more meaningful and valuable by his ability to hand it over for the future of others. In his death, he finally got to live his dream of a clear sky and a brighter future. It’s not a tragedy that he died; it’s a tragedy that it took him so long to truly live.

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I can’t imagine what I got out of this movie when I first watched it. (“Movie”; D-Video Special, technically.) It’s a story that slowly reveals itself to be a Faiz epilogue, and I hadn’t seen Faiz back then. It completely hadn’t stuck in my memory at all, beyond the time loop stuff and Yongou. Watching the back half of this, the last episode and a half, was a brand-new experience.

Like, I forgot Kaido was in this?! I don’t know that I’d’ve picked him to be the one trying to keep Takumi from sacrificing himself, but it works. It works great. Kaido’s strength as a character was always how the actor played the self-deprecating aspects as a thin mask over endless oceans of bitterness and grief, so it’s the perfect way to incrementally refocus the story on Takumi’s death(s). Kaido gets to defuse the tension just enough to make the conclusion the spotlight, while still weaving in the appropriate melancholy of his and Takumi’s reunion scenes. It’s so great to see them together again, but you can feel how fleeting it is.

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This is a story that gets who Takumi is, more than I thought the Taisen movie did. They’re both talking about his inability to embrace his new life, but this movie comes at it in a more generalized way, tying it less to Kusaka’s (KUSAKA’S) death and more to a Takumi that doesn’t know how to process his mortality.

It’s there in the use of the hill, and the screen, and what they represented in the finale. The hill was his new start; the screen was what was holding him back. Having the screen on the hill is the movie saying that Takumi’s new start is maybe what’s holding him back now, his possible future keeping him from dealing with his past. Staging his acceptance there, in that way, was such a love-letter to Faiz fans. It’s not just reused iconography and unearned nostalgia; it’s recontextualized history, the language of landmarks. The whole sequence was a beautiful return to the way Kamen Rider 555 would pose tricky questions about how best to live in a world that might not have place for you, and I couldn't be more grateful that they got it right.

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Not a perfect series, though, this one. It’s too long, for sure. Could’ve been two episodes, or a single hour-long project. Once it’s clear we’re in a Faiz story, there’s not much use for anyone but Takumi and Kaido. (Yuuto, especially, is barely necessary for the emotional stakes of this story.) A lot of the beginning of the story is about Kiriko and Shinnosuke processing Go’s death, but they never really have to come to terms with it. There’s not really much interplay between Shinnosuke, Takumi, and Yuuto. (Like, how does that team work.) Having the Great Leader look like Takumi – making Takumi defeat his own desire to live – is a little on the nose. Not nearly enough Deneb.

But that’s all beside the point, really. It’s a story about Faiz. It’s hinted at in the title, a subtle reference to the 4th Heisei Rider. As a Drive project, it’s not the best. Too slow, which is antithetical to Drive’s storytelling. But as a Faiz project? It’s a bittersweet tribute to one of my favorite shows, and it's a worthy end to one of the best Heisei Riders.

Very glad I rewatched this today.

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Something tells me I might've appreciated this more had I watched Faiz.

That being said, the theme song, Time is another jam. Yongou might be my favorite of the Recreate Showa Era Designs I've seen thus far. It has a very distinct styling to it and I feel like that works in it's favor.

And Drive's final clash against Yongou is surprisingly clever with Type Formula and it's inability to perform a standard finisher without snapping Shinnosuke's neck. So they just pump the heck out of the Shift Car to make up for the power of a finisher. I don't put much merit in side projects getting certain quirks right so that's why I was genuinely surprised by this.

This is the only Super Hero Taisen I remember being actively excited for, probably in large part thanks to how generally excited I was about Drive. It just kinda seemed fun, and pretty shockingly, it actually lived up to that when I got to watch it? I'd honestly just call this a solid Rider movie without any further qualification. It's not exactly a masterpiece, but it certainly doesn't feel like a guilty pleasure, either.

I even found it still held up on a rewatch!

The point about the detached cynicism is definitely key here. I think (and this would also apply to Let's Go) that the movie actively treating the concept of a Kamen Rider as something with meaning and weight inherently makes it more successful as a big celebratory crossover.

This one, I'm admittedly not personally all that fond of, but I'll spare you the quote from that same post as above, because it's pretty snarky and that seems like sort of a mean thing to share in response to you writing so passionately about Faiz one more time.

Instead, I'll mention that the crew for this one, which is completely separate from Kamen Rider 3. Instead of Yonemura and Shibasaki, we've got Nobuhiro Mouri writing and Kyouhei Yamaguchi directing. Mouri seems to make working with other people's shows his specialty, so that's probably a huge reason this gets as close as it does to capturing more than just the surface level of Faiz. He's writing a belated epilogue to OOO now too, a show he actually DID write for originally, so thinking about it, this kind of makes me more hopeful that V-Cinema is going to turn out to be a worthy addendum in its own right. Yamaguchi was also an assistant director back when Faiz was airing, so that'd also help explain the attention to detail when it comes to stuff like doing that new take on the final shot of the entire show.

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I've never been 100% satisfied with how this works as a Faiz story, and the rest of it honestly drags a bit too much for me, but I'll absolutely acknowledge the effort and care you can clearly see went into it.

Probably, yeah!

I do like the suit a whole lot. I don't think the character is that memorable, especially compared to Sangou, but it's a very cool suit. It feels like a riff on Skyrider? I like the additional belts and straps, the overall bagginess of the design. It's very cool to look at!

No, for sure, it's a pretty good movie. (I don't know if I'd go with "solid", though, since the constantly shifting protagonists make things unsteady.) Sangou's got a legitimate arc for the film, and Drive really anchors his parts of the narrative. That's more than I can say for most Spring Movies!

And that's fair! It's not something that feels fully-crafted as a Faiz story (too much other stuff in the first half), but I liked how it resolved itself around Takumi's willingness to treat his life as valuable and deserved enough to be worth sacrificing for others. So much of Takumi's character arc is about his inability to see himself as valid, so an ending that relies on that validity -- that he can only create for himself, rather having society create it for him -- is going to hit me real hard.

It's not as good as Inoue may've done it, but a small story with Kaido and Takumi? Where Takumi has to leave behind his self-loathing and pessimism? To save a world that'll never acknowledge his sacrifice? PLEASE AND THANK YOU.

I only saw the first episode of this one. It wasn't subbed through my usual outlet and I wasn't as good at checking nyaa for stuff back then. I wasn't a huge fan of the Rider 3 movie and this was before my Faiz reevaluation, so tracking down the rest never became a priority.

I think it's worth tracking down. Flawed, for sure, but I think it does a better Takumi story than Kamen Rider 3 did. Not a... not a real high bar to clear, but still!

I really liked this special from the first time I watched it, and I'm still really fond of it now! I really enjoyed what it did with Takumi, even though at the time I watched it, I didn't like 555 all that much. The time-loop structure, the slow reveal that Takumi is at the center of it all, the great musical score (there's no OST for it anywhere out there?!) and all the emotional beats in the third act all really land for me.

It's honestly maybe the piece of Drive and Faiz media I think back to most often? Which is so funny because it's whole existence is so absurdly niche, being an obscure special that is in of itself a spin-off from a movie. I had zero idea what I was getting into when I first watched it other than knowing Drive was in it, which maybe plays a large part in why I was so pleased with it. It blew away my literal zero expectatoins!

Yeah, for all that it has going for it, this is still a ridiculously inessential piece of Kamen Rider media. The only reason for it to exist as a Drive story is to undo a bizarre plot-point from the Spring Movie, which shouldn't've needed a 90-minute follow-up, and probably didn't need to be in the original movie anyway. (Like, why does Go need to die all alone before the climax of the story? What purpose does it serve in the narrative?) It places all of its dramatic chips on Takumi and Kaido's relationship, a thing that a) hadn't been explored in over a decade, and b) honestly wasn't exactly a huge part of Kamen Rider 555 to begin with. Yuuto and Deneb are basically just there. The entire supporting cast of Drive is nowhere to be found in this Drive special.

Insane that this Faiz Epilogue In A Drive Special thing exists.