CGI costs more money than acting. Normally the first episode of seasons have lots of cgi to get people hooked on fresh finisher moves and other shit then the CGI isn't used as much until the finale. The henshin not using their current environment bugs me a lot. I don't want to see the same henshins in the libray every week. It's worse than sentai roll calls that reuse most of the same change graphics all season long.

Minor nitpick, but I feel like the scene with Touma discovering he can't just leap into using 3 books in one go could've been executed a little better if they didn't have him immediately transform to defend against Calibur in the very next scene.

That said, the rest of this episode was pretty nice. Dezast initially seems to be this shows version of Jinga from Garo, so it'll be interesting to see what they'll do with him as the show progresses.

I think if there's more CGI because of the pandemic, it's not because of budget but because it can be done by (probably fewer overall) people working at home or otherwise in quarantine. I don't know what the lead time is between an episode being shot and it airing, or how restrictive things are in Japan right now, but I imagine they still want to limit the number of people standing around together inside (some of them without masks) if they can.

I do hope the henshins don't take up quite as much time in the future. I liked how in later episodes of Zero One they'd sometimes just have three or four people transforming at once and their jingles would all be overlapping each other and it didn't slow anything down.

The council of sitting around antagonists are not doing anything yet and we are already introduced to ANOTHER powerful antagonist?

Good that this episode shows that Touma's book nerdiness are good for solving the story related problems...and that we already going full belt capacity on episode four.

At least this guy has a name, which automatically puts him above Calibur’s back-up dancers.

same I thought they'd cut out most of the henshin jingles out after the first few episodes

It's only episode 4 guys :'D

It will be the same as Ex-Aid. Ep1~10 we had video game-ish stock footage for the main 4 and they made it even quicker at some point. Then it stopped. Then only Mighty Brothers, Maximum Mighty, and Muteki had one but quickly disappeared. Poppy had a quick one too.
Kuroto, Parad and Chronos didn't have one. Only special effects.

With already 10-ish Rider teased in the main series, you can't expect every henshin and form change to have stock footage at some point.
They'll cut them at some point and will keep them for important form change such as character introdution, elemental combos and season power ups.

10-ish teased riders sounds like the perfect amount of Riders to give stock footage/green screen transformations to constantly forever in order to eat up filming time :D

I personally no problem if this series always used a CGI in transformation scene or in the some settings.

Hmm....I think this episode are really enjoyable. :D

I love Touma as protagonist and he really remind me to Shinnosuke (Drive) in some aspects.

The Saber's 3 Book Combo Form is really cool too :D

What story is the Hedgehog book based on?

Also, I feel it's a bit of a bad call to have his 3 book form to already use red/yellow/blue. Since that's the same color combo as the 3 leads, it makes me think if they do pull a trinity situation, we've basically just seen it sans a few details.

Anyway, I continue to feel a continual sense of disinterest for this show. Hopefully it'll pick up. While I will say this has been the best episode, that's not saying a lot.