Oh, shit, did they?! I honestly don't remember them at all. It's been almost six hundred episodes of Kamen Rider since I watched Ghost, so I'm pretty amazed I can even tell Ghost from Specter.

Ghost is the... blue one? With the two horns?

They showed up in a few episodes near the end of the series, where they would say "Takeru is the key" and then fuck off again. I don't think they even interacted with other characters, just each other. It felt incredibly random, and that's with having seen these web videos. I cannot even imagine what it must have been like for someone who hasn't.

I have never seen the web videos. Well maybe the first one. I'm actually not entirely sure.

In any case, I recognized the girl, I think as a tie in with these, but promptly forgot about it until it was just now brought up.

I really can't recall anything they did in this series.

It was revealed in the last few episodes that the twins were the physical manifestation of The Eye, and were allegedly guiding the whole show along despite very little evidence of such.

I feel like the Legend Rider Parka's are some of the best looking Legend Forms in the franchise tbh.

Thankfully it's easy since the Ghost and Specter suits have a simple base. So adding onto that with a simple coat helps a lot. Compared to say the Legend Rider Arms from Gaim's run.

Well, it's nice to see that their first appearance was as baffling and forgettable as their later appearances. I appreciate the consistency, if nothing else.

Yeah, I'd say that the Drive, OOO, and Wizard forms came off the best, while the Double, Fourze, and Gaim ones didn't work as well. It absolutely helped that the Ghost suits have a very minimalist base, and the coats that worked well blended in with the undersuit's design and aesthetic. There's still a bit of a clash, even when an orange coat from Gaim mixes with an orange undersuit from Ghost, but it's not nearly as weird as, yeah, the Legend suits from Gaim.

I was going to say "or Ex-Aid", since that show's Legend suits are garish and over-the-top, but a) Ex-Aid's design philosophies are "garish" and "over-the-top", and b) I love those Legend suits.

No arguments here. Why do you think my icon is Specter Kiva Damashii (it was originally Sigurd Kiva Arms, but I realised that I didn?t like Sigurd that much as a design or a character.

Originally posted to "Kamen Rider Die watches Kamen Rider Ghost" on August 25th, 2019:

https://kamenriderdie.com/images/kr/ghost/474.png

And then there's the Special Final Episode. What should be a combination of two things I care about, an epilogue with characters I'm invested in and an appearance by characters from my first ever Rider show, this episode just dragged for me. The epilogue for the Ghost characters didn't get much space to breathe, and the Ex-Aid stuff felt too "FINALLY something fun will happen next week!" And I love Ex-Aid! But they overshadowed the character work, and that's not really how I wanted to leave Ghost as a series.

https://kamenriderdie.com/images/kr/ghost/475.png

And I'm actually a little surprised how much the Ex-Aid stuff bugged me. I really, genuinely liked Takeru by the end of the series. I was fascinated by what the show ended up doing with Alain, with Specter, with Javert. I wanted to see more of those reformed anti-heroes and villains. I wanted a better sense of what came next for this world, because, yeah, I liked it by the end.

~SINCE I CAN’T TIME TRAVEL BACK TO PREVENT THE TRAGEDY OF THAT REVIEW~

Oh, this was a really nice epilogue. Boo, 2019 Kamen Rider Die! Boo!

I like the use of an extended epilogue to talk about how Making Connections can lead to sadness, as the investments we make in other people can cause heartbreak if those people aren’t around anymore. It’s a bit of a spiritual successor (no pun intended) to the Hibiki finale, where it’s subtextually about this particular show not being around anymore, but there still being value in the time spent with it.

It’s a nice, low-key lesson for an additional episode. Watching everyone go off and have adventures -slash- abandon Onari is bittersweet, and it’s easy to be less than enthusiastic at the prospect of never seeing Takeru again. Having Ayumu – who is 100% Takeru’s son from the future – get all mopey and fatalistic over not having his favorite superhero around anymore… I mean, that’s sweet. It’s a bit tiresome to get to the catharsis (Ayumu’s delivery is as flat as you’d expect for an actor his age, and his dialogue is all vague and morose), but Takeru’s steadfast optimism and joie de vivre keep the episode humming along well enough.

Even the Ex-Aid stuff played a little better to me this time, not least because I am so excited to rewatch Ex-Aid movies. In this episode, the mechanics of Kamen Rider Ex-Aid aren’t really there (Genm can just vanish like a spirit? Shakariki Sports, of all things, can change the future?), but the tone is correct enough. Ex-Aid instantly protects a child, he wants to change people’s fates, the Gashacon Breaker appears… I don’t know, it’s fine. I liked how Takeru tried to take the Ex-Aid Changing Fate thing and wed it to Ghost’s Making Connections thing, so we get a little lesson about taking your connections into a future that you can shape. A concise story that teaches kids that friendships have value if you don’t get to see that friend again, and that the future can be a place where you make new friends… that’s a fitting little coda for Ghost.

I got way way behind on this thread for a bit, so allow me to do some catching up real quick.

I'm pretty fond of this movie. It's not really a favorite of mine or anything, but I deeply appreciate its whole existence, I guess. Just the fact that they used the usual spring movie slot to do a film with this much of an intimate and personal narrative. It was, of course, especially personal for Hiroshi Fujioka himself, who on top of playing Hongou again in such a starring role, was actually directly involved in crafting the movie's story from early on. Everything I've ever seen from Fujioka in interviews suggests he has an immense respect for the character of Kamen Rider and the way a hero like that serves as an inspirational figure, and you can definitely see that coming across in this movie. Even the very Ghost message of how precious life is was apparently more something Fujioka wanted to emphasize, which blew my mind a little when I first found that out. Like, it might be a happy coincidence that the story is so thematically matched to Ghost?

Regardless of the details of the production though, I was pleasantly surprised by this movie when I first watched it. There are lots of little bits of the execution that aren't that great, but I still found it enjoyable overall, and I applaud it for having the soul it does.

(and yet that was still more level-headed than most critical opinions of Ghost I was used to seeing at the time!)

Anyways, yeah, not a great ending, but a pretty good summer movie, I'd say. Dark Ghost is ~maybe~ my favorite movie villain Rider? I'm not committed to that opinion, but I think about it every now and then and realize that I actually really like this guy. The thing is, just the previous year, the movie villain Rider was Dark Drive, who I thought was like the coolest dude ever... until I saw Surprise Future, and the twist of that character's identity ended up diminishing a lot of my affection for that (amazing!) suit in the long run.

Argos, though? Way more my speed, with his reasonably fleshed out motivations and goals. He's exactly the kind of character I imagine as a literal Dark counterpart to a hero, because he has aspects that both compare and contrast with Takeru, and I find all that super cool. He's at the very least my favorite part of the movie he was in. And his suit is sweet too! ...Which is why I don't at all like that he ditches it for that much lamer Kamen Rider Extremer getup! But at the same time, it's like, if my only gripe with Argos is his choice of outfit for the final battle, I think that goes to show how much of a satisfying antagonist I found him.

These things are rushed as all heck, and I have always legitimately adored that about them. We've had how many big dumb crossover movies that barely acknowledge the actual character behind their returning characters, and here come these shorts where Nobuhiro Mouri just decides, for these low-budget free YouTube things, that he's not gonna stoop to that level with his scripts. The new heroes get new forms based on the old guys? Have them reference some central theme from those shows to prove they've earned it! Old villain suits coming back for them to fight? Have them bring up their whole deals from those shows in dialogue! Make the whole format for the fight scenes like 50% moral debate and *cram* those speeches in there if you have to!

In a world of so much Kamen Rider spin-off material where legacy characters are reduced to Just A Suit, these things strive to be more than that, and it made them yet another one of the pleasant surprises of Ghost for me.

Also a pleasant surprise from Ghost: how good this extra finale was! Just an absolutely perfect thematic capstone for Ghost as a series. Like you caught on to (this time around), there's a really obvious meta layer to Takeru reassuring a child that you don't have to be sad Kamen Rider Ghost won't always be around, and that's cool by itself, but along with the Ex-Aid guest spot, the episode manages to work all that super smoothly into the overall messages of Ghost as a series. That conversation at the end between Takeru and Ayumu is probably one of the biggest things that cemented for me that Ghost was legitimately one of my favorite Rider shows ever. It's so true to everything Ghost was about, and you can really feel the year of growth Takeru has had as a character, learning everything he has from all the people he's made a connection with in his adventures.

Yeah, I didn?t need to have read a summary of the novel or watched the final stage show to figure that out. (They?re more there to add to him)