I also have to write that I love Gotchard's white gloves. Very stylish and unusual.

I have no problem with that. I love the fact the show takes its damn time with the plot. It's slow and methodical, actually exploring its concepts and not racing through them like a jaguar on speed.

Geats is exactly how I like my pacing in Rider, slow and purposeful, forced to take its time.

I still prefer more active protagonists.

Gotchard's design feels very anime. Like take Ichigo's design and really liven it up and more toyetic.

It's cool that we're going with Cards as a gimmick again since it's been so long. It seems like the forms involve combining a theme (Grasshopper, Pirate) with a vehicle (Train, Car). I wonder if that plays into the gimmick for the bike (assuming Gotchard has one).

I'm curious if going back to grasshopper implies some kind of throwback or plan for a more traditional show or some kind of anniversary theme (although I doubt they'll go as far with it as past shows).

Sanjo and Sakamoto?

Well, Sanjo hasn't done a Rider show since Drive so it'd be kind of interesting to see how he would handle writing a modern Rider show in the Reiwa era (and certainly with Inoue and Takahashi we see that sometimes you can bring out the best from old favorites when you give them another go rather than expecting them to repeat themselves). I enjoyed W and Drive, and Fuuto PI, so I'm not really concerned on that front. At the very least I'd like to think a Sanjo show will refrain from too much Rider vs Rider content.

I wonder if this is why Sakamoto isn't set to direct any Ultraman Blazar episodes because he was working on this? Or the new Ultra Galaxy Fight. I wonder if they already finished filming the latter. Either way I'm expecting some good action sequences and at least one or two rapid-form-change moments as is tradition for Sakamoto.

I just hope Gotchard gets more monsters.

I hate for this season to be 2-parter episodes full-time.

I think it could be because of Shin Kamen Rider, Blazar's also kinda going back to basics in a way after Shin Ultraman

I bet Hopper and Bike will be the first power-up.
Also, it is worth noting that, unlike other cards, we have not just a Grasshopper, but "Hopper1". It is logical to expect that other versions will appear, especially "Hopper X"
Also, Geats is a nine-tailed fox, and Gotchard is clearly up to something with the ten. Is this not a reason to resurrect the number theory?

Like a lot of people, I have mixed feelings about Riku Sanjo as a writer. I've always regarded Kamen Rider W as his one-hit-wonder moment. I don't even like Fuuto PI! Drive was aggressively middling? Digimon Xros Wars was not very good. Just recently I watched the modern anime adaptation of Dragon Quest: The Adventure of Dai, which Riku Sanjo wrote the original manga version of. It had a handful of extremely good elements combined with aggresively generic shounen garbage. I was legit only invested whenever Popp was onscreen.

So yeah, I don't exactly have a great track record for liking the things he writes.

Riku Sanjo would be an interesting writer. I feel that a lot of his drawbacks stemmed from what was expected from Rider series at the time (two part format was a bit more common 10 years ago than now), and I absolutely loved Drive. He is a bit of a wildcard in respect to the fact that he hasn't written a live action Toku in almost 10 years, so it would be interesting to see him as a writer again.

Koichi Sakamoto directing? That would be amazing.


Also random: but after looking at Gotchard some more it just occurred to me that the cards have zero input on the coloring. Kind of like Revice (only Revice stuck to a particular color palette) it looks like the cards will not really give an indication as to what the form will be like (other than the basic elements).

I do like that he has a really interesting primary form. Usually primary forms tend to be minimalistic, but I like that he has a lot of detailing while keeping an overall simple aesthetic.

Really curious about the belt as well. One image showed him taking the two cards in/out of the belt with the backs of the cards facing the front, but the image of him kicking shows that there is some sort of display that shows the parts of the helmet design for the form. I thought the cards would form an image similar to Ex-Aid, but maybe it's an image generated by the belt itself.

Wait, so you dislike: W/Fuuto PI, Drive, and Kyoryuger?