That's the point, though.

Yeeeeesssss! Hibiki! I will definitely be ordering him. I guess all the figures on this new body are going to run about $50+, eh? That'll be a killer.

Yup. The intention with Hibiki was to create a rider show unlike any other. The creators were quoted as saying they wanted it to be the Amazon of the Heisei era.

When the project initially started, Toei had just scrapped plans to make a Ninja Araashi reboot, which would have meant no rider for the year. But that entire project was scrapped in favor of starting over from scratch with Hibiki. And so all the love and attention of the staff was poured into creating this surreal rider show unlike any other before it, and honestly since. He's intentionally very different.

But don't ever believe the false rumors that it was not intended to be a rider from the beginning. It was 100% supposed to be a rider series from the outset. The confusion comes from the pre-production of an entirely unrelated show (the Arashi reboot) that never took off.

But I thought Hibiki was suppose to be it's own thing that became Kamen Rider at the last minute?

Toei planned a henshin Ninja Arashi Reboot for the 8 am time slot for the year 2005 so much is true.

But they scrapped it and started planning for Kamen Rider Hibiki instead. hibiki was always supposed to be a Rider show from the first day of planning.

Exactly. It was always intended to be a Kamen Rider, from the moment the Arashi project was scrapped.

Well that explains why Arashi shows up in an SIC Hero saga story.

And its still extremely ironic that they did Kamen Rider instead because they though it would sell better and then the Hibiki toy sales were really bad :lol

Since I'm gonna end up pre-ordering Leangle & Hibiki from BBTS I'm gonna end up getting Leangle in August & Hibiki in September unless they setup the Hibiki figuarts like the Gaim ones and don't give Bluefin permission to distribute them a month after the Japanese & Hong Kong release.

Bandai is not going to give bike to Hibiki... :(