Wait, is this true? I was under the impression Kaixa Break was some photoshopped, purely hypothetical thing from some magazine or something. At any rate, I highly doubt that would have any real influence on how the show ended up being written. As much as I like to stick up for the indefensible, I think Inoue just legitimately didn't put a lot of thought into how that watch got introduced. It's never addressed directly, and trying to put together an answer from the facts you do get later only leads to more questions.

That all being said, I really, really love how the Faiz Accel is introduced. That simple shot of the watch smacking Faiz in the head, and him awkwardly just looking down at it sitting on the ground? There's just no way I can't love that. Again, Faiz is a show that loves to give the middle finger to tradition anywhere it can, so in that sense, it's a perfect introduction for the first real power-up to have. There's really no excuse for not cleaning up the "why?" of it, but the "how?", the show totally nailed in my book. Moments like these are why Kusaka is such a "lovable" character. The only way that could've been more characterful is if he tossed the watch straight into a nearby trash can instead.

Every episode since the second one! I think you paying less attention to the music is probably another result of the difference in our formative shows. Ex-Aid had a bunch of great insert themes... all of which were only used about twice in a row before disappearing entirely like they never existed. Not so much the case with Ryuki! Hatenaki Inochi has the kind of place in my heart BELIEVE YOURSELF has to anyone who's seen Agito. It was a real motif, and something I strongly associate with the series. To this day, it's impossible for me to not get psyched about some Final Vent action about to go down whenever I hear those sweet guitar riffs kick in. That, plus OOO being on the air, with its simple and appealing set of themes for each Combo means I've just always been paying plenty of attention to this stuff. I had a huge attachment to Kiva's soundtrack a good couple years before I even watched the show. :lol

Die's threads do some wonderful things, because I think right now I'm about to disagree with you in favour of Faiz?

Because I think the real beauty of how the Axel Watch is introduced, about how much it doesn't care as much as other powerups; would be heavily weakened by giving it some sort of explanation or origin. Like chucking it at Takumi's head would still be hilarious and memorable, but having no backstory or no reason for it to even exist just compounds the enigmatic egregious entity that the Axel Watch is. No Why. No How. Kusaka just gave Takumi the ability to Clock Up and we're never going to say why or bring it up ever again.

Yes. Good. Do more of this.

KAMEN RIDER 555 EPISODE 22

https://kamenriderdie.com/images/kr/faiz/faiz221a.png

--1--

I missed Kusaka! He’s the worst, but I missed him!

He’s a shit-stirrer, is his thing. It’s not that the show lacked for drama in his absence, but him showing back up propels so many plots that it feels like I just watched three episodes instead of one. He’s a busy dude!

--2--

First off, he has to throw shade at Takumi, which is always welcome. I love how casual he’s gotten with it, dropping his friendly demeanor that the others see, and telling Takumi that he owes his survival to Kusaka. Just the smarmy way that he demands Takumi’s thanks, and how happy he is that Takumi tells him to go screw. He loves rivalries, I think? I know he said he likes proving himself in combat, but I sincerely think he just likes conflicts. Physical, intellectual, emotional… he stirs shit so that he can get that rush of beating someone at something, anything. Even if it’s just that they got mad easier than he did, it’s a tiny victory for Kusaka.

Plus, like, so fun. So perfect for each other. Him and Takumi, it’s like the inverted version of Takumi and Yuuji. With Takkiba, it’s very sweet, very nurturing, them stealing little glances at each other. With Takusaka, it’s them being total jerks to each other until the room sets on fire, not even looking at each other. I’m shipping all of them!

--3--

And, man, shipping episode!

It’s all weird relationship drama, convoluted and captivating. It’s almost all centered on Mari, the somewhat surprising hub of these tangled emotions.

So, let’s see if I’ve got this right:

Keitaro likes Yuka
Yuka likes Kaido
Kaido likes Mari
Mari likes Yuuji
Kusaka wants to possess Mari, which is both irrelevant and incredibly relevant

It’s a lot for one episode! I think the show balances it all pretty well, finding time for all of these variables, as well as Takumi, Yuuji, and their feelings about these shenanigans.

I really dig how the one thing you can always count on Takumi to care about is relationship drama. He’ll opt out of most non-Orphnoch heroism, but he’s always got a taste for other people’s tortured romance. That makes him a great sounding board for Mari’s options, and I adore how much he’s supportive of her dating Yuuji. It’s so nice. I also love how he didn’t immediately vomit when she asked if she should date Kusaka.

The Kusaka thing… his whole scene with Mari in the van where he makes his appeal for her hand? It’s like cringe comedy. It’s so blatantly false that I was howling. (This and the You Guys It Was Killing Me Not To Call You Back bullshit from the beginning of the episode, huge fan, big supporter of Disingenuous Kusaka.) Mari is so visibly uncomfortable during his heartfelt (“heartfelt”) plea for her affection, and he just lays it on thicker. Like, she is clearly not into him like that. He’s embarrassing himself, and it’s brilliant.

Even better, when he overhears that she likes Yuuji, Kusaka somehow convinces him to go to Kamen Rider Warehouse for a chat. (Definitely a cool place to get dragged for a conversation with a guy who looks as intense as Kusaka, smart thinking from Yuuji.) He basically can’t decide whether to beg him for info on how to make Mari like him, or just beat the shit out of him. We don’t get the answer, unfortunately, because one-half of Lucky Clover’s Internship Program shows up for a fight.

--4--

The Lucky Clover stuff in this one was pretty fun! First, I didn’t realize that Murakami wasn’t a member of Lucky Clover, so that’s more clear to me now. (I thought he was in the group before he became president of Smart Brain.) Second, after not really caring about the dude who wanted to join and got immediately murdered last time, I was decently interested in the two new candidates. It’s mostly down to how involved Kageyama and Houjou are in the process.

(Let me quickly call out the delightful recurring gag of Live Action Hatsune Miku giving the Lucky Clover pitch to an Orphnoch, only for Kageyama and Houjou to shove her out of frame before she can finish. Houjou basically unfolds in out of her shadow!)

The two new Orphnochs are fairly distinct, a skateboarding street youth and nocturnal salaryman. While it’d’ve been fun to see Kageyama with the uptight nerd and Houjou with the disobedient slacker, I like that what we got feels like who they’d pick. I can see Houjou admiring the stoic effectiveness of the bespectacled nerd, and I can see Kageyama digging the iconoclastic flair of the hooligan. The two new characters are pretty well realized, and they still end up saying something about the older characters. Smart writing and design!

Having two teams of two gives us a really fun Faiz ‘n’ Friends Fight, with Faiz using Accel to take out the salaryman and damage Houjou (big day at Kamen Rider Stadium); and Kaixa teaming with Horsepower to square off against the other two.

(Incidentally, standing ovation to Kusaka and Yuuji sharing, like, one scene together before they learn each other’s secret identities. Takumi and Yuuji still dance around it in a great beginning to this episode, so everyone else gets to learn their secrets pronto. Amazing!)

That shot of Kaixa and Horsepower, back to back, swords at the ready, with the camera rotating around them… chills! Very exciting way to end a Kamen Rider episode!

--5--

This was a really good one, and it was good in a way that I think is more… typical? It doesn’t really tweak the format a ton, it just ratchets up the romantic dramedy, while still leaving room for monsters and fighting. This one… I think the levels were right. I love the weirder ones, the funnier ones, the emotional ones. This one, it’s a solid bit of Kamen Rider. And it’s mostly thanks to Kusaka!

https://kamenriderdie.com/images/kr/faiz/faiz221b.png

I think you got all that right, besides that Yuuji clearly has the hots for Takumi, while Takumi likes... himself, I guess. He's the sort of guy who's more hyped in discovering who's gonna end up with whom, rather than doing it himself. Damn, they keep finding new ways to make him sneakily relatable.

This stretch of episodes... was the part where I did enjoy the Magnificent Seven interaction (as I always do), but the lack of world-building kinda bothered me. KR shows usually aren't good in developing the world and society around the core characters anyway, especially the less episodic ones, but it's particularly noticeable in Faiz where it kinda felt like the core characters just exist in their own cocoon and keep weirdly running into each other in a world where nobody else really exist; you just don't really get a good grasp on how an Orphnoch-infested world looks like besides the very few obligatory appearances from the police character.

On the other side, I was really sold on the potential drama between the seven core character, that every time the Smart Brain/Lucky Clover stuff came up, I got annoyed because their shit was just way less interesting. It's good that you get the villains' perspective yada yada, but I was so much more intrigued at the potential Faiz Quartet vs. Orphnoch Trio collision over anything else, especially with Kusaka being such a wild card and very atypical secondary Rider.

I think that's the trick to what's making Faiz so special, though. Instead of spending a ton of energy building out the world and then filling the space around it with character drama, Faiz is spending a ton of energy building out the character drama and then filling the space around it with world building.

And, yeah that can be a bummer for folks that'd (understandably!) expect more details on the villains or the series arc, or just get some context for what this world is like. For me, I kind-of love that everything that usually makes a Kamen Rider show a Kamen Rider show is almost totally incidental to what's most fun about this show. The other stuff is still there, and still good (that Kaixa/Horsepower team-up!), but seeing the core cast bounce off of each other is something no other Kamen Rider show can really do. (I mean, Fourze, but it wasn't really two groups like it is here.)

Yeah, I totally agree that it's the show's main appeal, but that's also a dangerous game the show's playing; they keep expecting the audience to not just tolerate, but also put the effort to understand and empathize with the oftentimes atypical and counter-intuitive way the characters are behaving. They... didn't always succeed at that, I believe, even to the people like me who are really intrigued by these characters.

(Also, I just started watching Wizard, and my god, Shunpei is totally the homeless man's Keitaro)

Oh, for sure. Any time you subvert audience expectations, especially when you base a lot of that subversion on difficult characters, it's pretty much an All Or Nothing play. If you think it works, you valorize it. If you think it doesn't work, you crucify it. It's a very big swing by a creator. It's ballsy. I don't want to give this deeply idiosyncratic show unwarranted praise, but I feel like this series is cracking open the concept of Kamen Rider in a way similar to what Kuuga was doing. Really interrogating what kinds of stories are possible, you know?

(I hate Shunpei SO MUCH. There are very few characters in Kamen Rider that I instantly hated without ever revising my appraisal, and he's one. He's like if Keitaro had no interior life or ability to dress like an adult.)

I was going to mention this earlier, but kinda forgot, so here we go:

Toshiki Inoue's first big hit was Chojin Sentai Jetman, the Sentai series that aired right before some obscure, largely forgotten series with dinosaur robots. Jetman is often ranked as one of the best shows in the entire franchise and its breakaway character was Gai Yuki/Black Condor. He was the dude who spent most of the series butting heads with the team leader and aggressively creeping one of his female teammates. He was kind of an asshole but he was incredibly popular. I can't say that what happened next is Gai's fault or a pre-existing inclination, but all of Inoue's shows since then have featured a character who works with the heroes but who also stirs up loads of interpersonal drama while doing so. Houjou was a relatively low-key version of this and you'll see another example when you ignore my warning and watch the Inoue era of Hibiki. Kusaka is probably the peak version of this trope, though. Trust me when I tell you that we have only seen the tip of the doucheberg that is Masato Kusaka.

I'm going to mention this now because it's one of the more notorious things Kusaka is known for and its sometimes mis-attributed to the series. Toshiki Inoue wrote a novel version of Faiz that retells the story in an even darker form. Kusaka's attitude towards Mari on the show gets pretty creepy, but in the book he infamously straight up sexually assaults her. It obviously doesn't happen on the version that kids were watching, but there's a lot of overlap in how Kusaka views Mari in both versions.

Another thing I forgot to mention before now: the Kaixa blaygun (the X-shaped gun/lightsaber) is my all-time favorite Rider weapon. I love that damned thing so much.

Yeah, 2003’s SHT shows are the only ones where the topic of sexual assault is likely to come up in a discussion. And that’s all I’ll say on the topic.