It is a pretty cool design, yeah! And it's such a slap in the face to J!!! (What a phenomenal payoff to that setup in the beginning of the episode.)

Feels like dramatic sequences always happen on the cliff. For sure, it's a strong emotional climax with Yellowbuster having to fight Berserk Bluebuster who made her cry the first time. But Yoko's not that scared crying kid anymore, she's endured much worse than this and now it's her turn to repay the favor to her big bro for taking care of her for so many years, as she's strong enough to take care of herself and save Ryuji from himself, showing how the two of them are equals. It's a sweet conclusion to their development arc. In contrast, the Beast Morphers version of this episode was terrible, due to ending on a notoriously problematic message!

Is Escape really back though? Like, Our Escape? Her personality is totally different now, like she's loyal to Enter instead of Messiah. Remember that Messiah assimilated Escape's data in to his Megazord form and the source of that data had been destroyed in Episode 30, hence the importance of the Avatars' origin. Enter has the Messiah Cards to revive him, but not Escape. Not Our Escape anyway.

On another note, I'll be rewatching along with Gobusters VS Gokaiger, as I have a lot of opinions on that movie. So look forward to that!

Depends on the execution, I guess. Manmarva's return was definitely bad, as it threw away the conclusion of his rivalry with Kabutoraiger and made him a rampaging mindless monster to be destroyed. Ninja Storm made his final form a MOTW instead, which feels like an improvement. How humiliating. At least Madwrecks got his personality back eventually.

True, this isn't the previous version of Escape, but it's not like this episode's revival of the Escape/Ryuji feud was completely out of character for her. It's... pretty much her whole character? (Ryuji even points out that everything she's doing is recycled from her debut.) I don't know that she had enough of an arc or evolution for me to see much difference, beyond the Papa Escape stuff.

Sure, the surface-level thrill-seeking part of her is still there, but the emphasis on that is what makes her seem uncanny to Ryuji. It's like watching a caricature of Escape, right? The sincere emotions and beliefs that she fought and died in vain for are nowhere to be seen now. It shows how little Enter understands about the meaning of emotions, that he was only able to make a version of Escape based on his image of her, without any of the deeper parts that made her unique and close to human.

Maybe! I... feel like we are seeing different amounts of character to Escape, but that's totally cool. (I definitely think her new devotion to Enter is pretty much 1:1 to her old devotion to Messiah.) I'm glad she made such a strong impression on you!

With Die having both understood the strong series structure level stuff of this story's place towards the end of the show and also readily acknowledging the subjective nature of how he felt about the way it chose to go about that story, I find myself with shockingly little to say about this one, despite remembering it well enough. I could argue for the depth of Escape as a character or something, but no wait that's been covered too! (Admittedly, I was apathetic enough towards Escape the first time watching the show that this development probably bounced right off me too back in the day.)

I guess the only thing left at a time like this is to resort to pointing out completely inconsequential trivia.

The cliff from the climax was still in my head after all these years, but skimming back through the episode, I was a little shocked at how many filming locations were giving me deja vu, even by the typical standards of Toei tokusatsu. Not only am I pretty sure I remember that cliff, I'm pretty sure remember that bridge, too! I feel like usually in these shows it's like one "hey I know that place" per one episode, but here, not only does all that stuff feel familiar, there's even one more place that shows up in a brief cutaway at the start of the episode that I don't think shows up nearly as often as those other places?

Here's this episode of Go-Busters:

https://i.imgur.com/GNnVhjH.jpg

And here's episode 31 of Kamen Rider Kuuga:

https://i.imgur.com/T7RC72F.jpg

See, usually the reuse of filming locations in these shows is a matter of where it's easy to film a nice fight scene, but in this case, for a brief scene of two characters sitting around, they went a place that apparently didn't change much in the decade between 2000 and 2012 -- some cafe on Toei's lot. A suitably quick trip for such a quick bit of filming.

I presume director Katsuya Watanabe made sure those windows are blotted out the way they are so you can't see the stage numbers on the buildings in the background, something I can assume safely, because I once read Nobuhiro Suzumura say he had to do the same thing when he directed that episode of Kuuga.

(I think it says something about how deep I've gotten into Kuuga trivia over the years that I was instantly more certain of where I had seen those chairs before without looking it up than I am about that bridge, even though I've definitely seen the bridge in way more shows. It's honestly a bit scary that this ended up being the easiest thing from this episode to talk about for me.)

...this was a pretty big twist! Was not what I was expecting to hear about this episode! But thanks for the info!

TOKUMEI SENTAI GO-BUSTERS VS KAIZOKU SENTAI GOKAIGER: THE MOVIE

https://kamenriderdie.com/images/sen...sgokaigera.png

Nnnnnnnot for me, on a bunch of different levels.

The main one is how much this film is – by necessity and audience preference! – a gigantic celebration of a pile of different Sentai shows I’ve never watched, and have very little interest in watching. (Kyoryuger! No thanks!) Beyond the Gokaiger of it all, and the Special Preview Sentai, there’s a million GokaiChanges and Megazord GokaiChanges, referencing an additional 34 series of Sentai. It’s all celebratory and nostalgic for most fans, I’m sure, but it was all just noise to me. Didn’t care, beyond the most surface-level bright colors and explosions stuff. It was like watching a trailer for a film I had no interest in. (I swear, if I’ve got to watch that goddamn Wicked trailer in front of one more movie…!) I liked it fine as a rousing conclusion to a big crossover movie, but I didn’t really care which robot was blowing up which other robot.

(I will confess to really loving the use of Shinkenger to ferry a message across several centuries. That was super clever, and had me rooting for this film for about eight minutes.)

And then there’s the Gokaiger of it all… I don’t like Marvelous? I am unbelievably tired of films having a Marvelous plot that’s all about pretending to be a bad guy so he can defeat different bad guys! (I know this one came first, but I still really hate it as a plot.) It’s a needlessly confusing start to this story, where the entire Gokaiger team gets their Pirates Of The Caribbean makeover before trying to murder the Go-Busters, all for a scheme that… gives the villains exactly what they wanted in the first place, plus murdering Nick, Gorisaki, and Usada for good measure. Your returning Sentai heroes, everybody! It’s aggravating as a premise, and it innately makes me resent the Gokaigers showing up. (Gai continues to be a dog-brained nuisance, but he’s not exactly a focal point of this film.) I don’t know their villains, and I don’t like their main guy, and I don’t get most of their references, and I can’t invest in their half of the narrative.

(I also love that their ship/Zord was destroyed, so Bird Robot was just like I Went Back In Time And Grabbed It so it could be there for the finale, and like… grabbed it from when?! Is there a past Gokaiger team that doesn’t have their ship anymore? It is the most regrettable form of discourse to crab about causality in a toku story, but this is a pretty big deal for their backstory in the film! Losing their ship to the bad guys is directly referenced as a major problem!)

But the Go-Busters stuff is still pretty good, if massively telegraphed. (Like, I’m surprised Nick didn’t just say What Would You Do If We Died Twenty-Five And A Half Minutes From Now during the first Go-Busters scene of the film.) I am a sucker for any story that centers the Buster/Buddyroid relationship, and this one was a pretty fun version of it. It’s as much about the emotional impact that the Buddyroids have on the Busters, as it about the lessons the Busters have learned from the Buddyroids that made them the heroes they are. Convoluted sentence – apropos for this dumb film – so lemme take another run at it: I liked that the loss of the Buddyroids wasn’t just about losing friends and/or partners, it was about honoring the people who taught the Busters how to be heroes. They keep fighting to honor the sacrifice of the Buddyroids, and Hiromu’s ability to get on-side with Marvelous is completely down to Nick’s worldview. The idea of earning trust by trusting others… pretty great message for a crossover film between a government Sentai group and a bunch of space pirates who got three of your friends killed for no good reason!

That thread, all of the Busters stuff that concludes with them using their vaccine program to reanimate the Buddyroids, I liked it. It’s solid. But everything else! All of the dumb Gokaigers stuff and trips down memory lanes! Not for me!

IT’S TIME FOR the Toei Edo set!

https://kamenriderdie.com/images/sen...sgokaigerb.png

Man, if there’s a way for a movie to toss in a brief trip back to Japan in the 18th Century, you can bet Toei’s gonna grab it. You could probably do an entire fanfic series of every Rider or Sentai who spent twenty or so minutes in one square block of Japan in 1770-whatever teaming up, but only if you’re okay with a cast in the hundreds. This is the nostalgia I care about, not the Magiranger Zord or whatever. (Cute Beet Buster gag, though.)