Keeping your collecting to just the shows you like sounds good to me, but then it's like, They're All Good Shows? And now my decision-making matrix flags every potential purchase as Yes Of Course. I need to be more angry about my fandoms, like the (non-TokuNation) rest of the internet. It sucks liking so much stuff!

I'm glad we could turn this analysis of the Japanese TV series "Masked Rider Kuuga" into a support group for collectors, however briefly. Just remember to take it one henshin at a time!

Oh yeah, that's my thing; aside from a very small number I generally like every Kamen Rider show -- and even most of the ones I don't like that much like Kabuto or Gaim, there's designs or characters from them I really like and want to have!

But OOO and Build are -the- shows that really resonated with me. So if I have to choose any characters to get the high-end treatment, then yeah, I'm sure as heck saving up for Seihou Tajador.

I think as well it's the fact that... pretty much everything has a defined character to it.

Like to draw on another extremely addictive toy franchise, Transformers. Just looking at the most recent Generations figures, I'm really into wanting the likes of Apeface and Cliffjumper and Ironworks. All of them look like a lot of fun!

... but they also, for the most part, don't really have that much of a character to them. Even the most prolific and developed of that bunch, Cliffjumper? I can't really point to any great character arcs or journeys for him. Maybe Shattered Glass but I never read that. There's very few Transformers outside of the IDW comics and a couple of the cartoons that I really like for their characters, and Transformers is a franchise made up of a majority of 'characters' that never done anything.


But with Kamen Rider. EVERY figure has some sort of defined character.

Even looking at some of the most disliked characters out there that I can think of -- Kaixa, Ryugen, Specter. All of them had SOME sort of personality to them; some sort of role in the story; some sort of place in these events. There's no equivalent to some random Micromaster or Ultra Pretender or Combiner limb in Kamen Rider. Even Power Rangers sometimes dabbled in toy-only rangers, but with Kamen Rider; no matter who you get, you're getting -someone-.

And that can make it really addictive. I can find some random old Figuart on Mandarake for my collection just because they look cool, like Orga or Wizard Hurricane or Hercus, and they are still, technically, someone that appeared in media and I can draw on. It's kinda great.

Oh, jeez, please do not mention Transformers. That's my main collecting focus. That is, uh, that's where I had to learn to set limits on what I'd collect from Kamen Rider. Just, like, a whole lot of robot toys. It's been an expensive few years.

(And, my two cents, I don't think Apeface is a great figure. The modes are kind-of half-assed, I don't think it pegs together real well, and I just did not have a great time fiddling around with it. New figures usually spend a few days of Pick Up And Play time on a table, that one went into a bin real quick.)

MASKED RIDER KUUGA EPISODES 44 - 46

https://kamenriderdie.com/images/kr/kuuga/kuuga44.png

Okay, so, yes, the Grongi stuff in this story is pretty great. Not only do we get a brand new Kuuga form in Black Repaint Kuuga, but we get a couple thrilling action sequences, a for-the-ages beatdown of Godai, a lot of great Ichijou badassery, the exquisite tension of everyone on Team Kuuga pulling together to save the day, the deaths of every Grongi (seemingly) but Rose Grongi and Daguva... It's a very full story on a Grongi Plot level. A lot to talk about, anyway.

I don't want to talk about any of that. I want to talk about Enokida and (I might throw up a little typing this) Jean.

https://kamenriderdie.com/images/kr/kuuga/kuuga45a.png
https://kamenriderdie.com/images/kr/kuuga/kuuga45b.png

In the midst of the 11th hour of Kuuga's year-long story, the show takes some time to resolve the long-addressed but rarely-emphasized Is Enokida A Bad Mother question. It could feel weird, shoehorned in where it could not feel less relevant to the life-or-death struggles of the main story, but... I thought it kind-of worked? There's a very Kuuga theme of "do your best” working through these episodes, with everyone trusting in each other to give it their all, and things will work out. It typically reads a little simplistic to me, a way of ignoring the consequences of choices or the dangers of a course of action. It certainly makes positive outcomes feel more lucky than wise, anyway. I don't think it's weird to bring up how much of a given plan can devolve into failure!

The Enokida version of that theme, on the other hand, feels more grounded, more kind. It's less about just powering through, trusting in the rightness of your actions, and more about making connections, gaining forgiveness through an earnest attempt to do better. She's been a shitty mom, not because she's been putting work ahead of her kid, but because she hasn't communicated her need to do her job to her kid. She's ashamed of her inability to be all things to all people, so she takes on the role of Bad Mom to spend even more time at work. She avoids her family to feel less bad about avoiding her family.

It's to the show's credit that it never seems to judge Enokida for putting saving lives ahead of being a mom. I was so, so scared that the Kamen Rider franchise's generally regressive gender roles would have her need to surrender her job and non-maternal identity in a way that would never be asked of Ichijou or Tsubaki or any man. But, thankfully, that's not how it went. It was (and I cannot believe it either) Jean who was the key character, reminding Enokida that her job has a purpose, that she's saving countless lives, and that she doesn't need to be the best mom, just Sayuru's mom. The theme of doing your best, it's a liberation to Enokida, a relief from the fear of failure. She's allowed to maybe be a shitty mom, since she's trying her best, and that means wanting to do better. It's a heartfelt, mature view of parenting. I sort-of can't believe it was not only on this show, but maybe the best part of a truly great three-episode story.

Please don't tell Jean I said that.

https://kamenriderdie.com/images/kr/kuuga/kuuga46.png

Ohhhhh snap, are we nearing the end of Kamen Rider Die reviews Kuuga? KEEP IT UP! :rock:

I figured this open invitation was the perfect opportunity to go watch these episodes again and I'm happy to report that... Kuuga is a really awesome show!

What I'm way less happy to report is that the conversation at the end is indeed completely borked.

The gist of what's actually going down is that Mika was scared seeing Ichijou being so aggressive, all the more so because she had just seen him so happy right beforehand. She found it hard to believe that the guy violently restraining a criminal in the street was the same guy who was just chatting it up with her about their taste in sweets, but what Yuusuke is reassuring her of is that both of those sides of Ichijou are equally real, and that the side of him Mika was scared of doesn't invalidate or erase the part of him that's a kind person.

It's part of a larger theme in Kuuga, that I'm going to have to yell at you about when you finish the show, about violence, and the effect it has on people, something that connects directly to Yuusuke's current situation with his growing powers, the motives of the Grongi, and even the fact that the main villain in 43 isn't even a monster.

So needless to say, I think these episodes were actually pretty tight, to a level I wish I could articulate properly off the top of my head. But since I can't do that, I'll just mention one other translation error that really bugged me, which is in 42, during the conversation immediately proceeding this screenshot:

...where Yuusuke says he's glad the meeting they all had didn't feel like a formal meeting at all, and more like regular old, normal time spent with friends. Nothing about how nice it would be if they could stop having meetings.

I'm not going to spoil anything, but oh boy am I looking forward to your thoughts on 47.

That's what I was thinking they were aiming for. It's tough, in general for me with Kuuga, to figure out some of the emotional beats because of how... bland the acting is? I feel like the actors are frequently saying one thing, portraying another, and the editing is doing God knows what. The action sequences and Grongi plots have a clarity that I feel the dramatic parts usually (but not always) lack.

It definitely doesn't help that these last 15 episodes or so are subbed by what looks like a different team. (MCS? Is that a thing? The font's different, anyway.) It feels a lot more truncated, with less descriptive language and more blunt statements. I'm having to intuit a bit more than normal, and it obviously is not going super great. Thanks for your feedback!

And, yeah, probably going to need someone to argue for a thematic read of this series. I'm kind-of barely seeing the edges of a theme maybe, but nothing with the forcefulness of other Kamen Rider shows. It's all a lot more purely procedural than I was hoping for, but it ain't over yet.

I really really wanted to be done before Christmas, but I'll settle for before New Year's. Thanks for checking out this thread!

Probably tomorrow!

Yeah, I'm not sure exactly what versions of everything you've grabbed, but Midnight Crew Subs originally did Kuuga years and years ago at this point, (which, fun fact, was apparently a big event considering so many fansubbers' attempts at Kuuga stalled out in the teens it was called the "Kuuga Curse" for a while), and more recently they've started a retranslated version using the Blu-Ray releases, which is only about 30 episodes done, unfortunately.

I don't know these details off the top of my head, so somebody more in the know correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the original versions might've even been straight up "scrubs" of some bootleg subtitles, meaning they would've been translating a fundamentally poor translation into English with minimal if any understanding of the original Japanese dialogue, which would explain a lot of the extremely baffling mistakes. Mika never said anything about Ichijou not needing a laughing face! I don't even know what that means!

When I watched Kuuga it was MCS' original subs, and they were better than nothing but not on the level of something like TVN. Plus no subtitles for the Grongi language, which made it kind of hard to get into their side of the story.

MASKED RIDER KUUGA EPISODE 46.5

https://kamenriderdie.com/images/kr/kuuga/kuuga465a.png

Hey, it's a late-in-the-series clip show! Not much to talk about from it, what with it being 90% things I've already seen and thought about and talked about, but I'm glad I ended up watching it. (Well, I fast-forwarded through the clips, but you get my point.) The new 10% wasn't some revelation or anything. It was mostly weird costume changes and people eating/demanding food. But all of it was happening around New Year's, which is, uh, now, so it felt appropriate to be watching it. If you've got a copy on hand, it may be worth buzzing through. Celebrate New Year's with Godai and remember the happy times of 2000: kicking monsters until they explode and generally failing the people of Tokyo!

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MASKED RIDER KUUGA EPISODES 47 - 49

https://kamenriderdie.com/images/kr/kuuga/kuuga47.png

This is it! The finale (more or less) of Masked Rider Kuuga! Forty-six episodes all leading up to this climactic struggle! So much to--

Okay, I want to talk about Jack Kirby.

Have I brought Kirby up before when it comes to Kamen Rider? I feel like I have, but I don't know where it would've been. Anyway, I was thinking about Kirby a lot as I was watching this final Kuuga story. Kirby is... well, he's the King of Comics. If there were a Mount Rushmore for American comics creators, he'd be on it. He created or co-created some of the biggest characters in superhero comics, but he also reinvented the way people drew comics. His style was a revelation in the 1960s, becoming the de facto Marvel Style. Generations of artists have grown up on his style of art, incorporating it into their own, and in turn inspiring the next generation. He's ubiquitous, infused in the DNA of comics.

But that can make it difficult for modern fans to appreciate his contributions. Looking at his art in 2019, it's like a rougher version of any Marvel comic on the stands. The things he was doing that were innovative are now expected. He created a language that everyone now speaks fluently.

That's... honestly, that's how I ended up feeling about Kuuga. It's primordial. It's not a Kamen Rider story with magic, or a Kamen Rider story in a high school, or a Kamen Rider story in a hospital. It's, for better or worse, just a Kamen Rider story. It is the archetypal Kamen Rider story.

There's things I can squint at and say that it's about, mostly from discussions characters have in the finale. The need to defend, rather than harm. Selflessness over selfishness. The dangers of endless escalation. The importance of fighting for something. I don't know how much I saw those themes play out regularly through the series, but they're likely there. It's just, those themes are the themes of nearly every Kamen Rider series. They are the backbone of Kamen Rider as a franchise. They're easy to miss because it's, like, the background noise of Kamen Rider. The almost imperceptible hum of Protect Smiles and Promote Justice. So when a show is entirely about that background hum, it's tough for me to get into. Intellectually, I know that this was where that hum originated, loud and clear and vibrant, but as someone who's experienced so many shows that smothered that hum in bigger ideas, better effects, twists and turns and subversions of expectations, it's tough to get much out of the default.

But that's just me, and that's my baggage.

As a show, as a finale, I think this was Kuuga at its... most Kuuga. I don't mean that as some dig. It's just, this was a story that was sort of everything about Kuuga to me: good, bad, fun, grim, weird, predictable. It was the best of Kuuga, it was the Jean of Kuuga.

It gets off to a great start, really. Apocalyptic imagery. Civilians in flames, Kuuga in pieces, a serene Daguva relishing in the chaos. It's, honestly, a lot of what works best for me in this finale, a suggestion of terror. I don't need to see Daguva killing thousands of people. I've mentioned it before, but the body count on this show frequently dips into the absurd, a mountain of corpses that render any victory pyrrhic. Showing me one quick flash of an unstoppable, bloodthirsty foe, then letting that hang over an episode of pensive heroes, that's perfect.

Following that massacre up with over a full episode of The Last Day Of Yusuke Godai, again, great. I really appreciated the way the show drilled into all of Godai's relationships, making that the primary story being told. It's not a story about if Godai's going to defeat Daguva. I mean, of course he is. It's about the journey these characters have been on, the hopes they've placed in Godai, the feeling that, while the end of the world may not actually be near, the end of this show is.

It's a shame the show ended without landing the Grongi story, though.

It ends, I guess. Ichijou shoots Rose Grongi to death, after not getting much in the way of answers. Godai beats Daguva to death. The final Grongi battles are just more grim, more portentous, more gory versions of what we've seen before. There's no real explanation as to what this was all for, nothing that provides more details than that I guess the Grongi show up every so often, fight each and/or Kuuga, destruction? It's nice that they kept it mysterious for so much of the series, but I really could've used something more from Rose Grongi than some vague We're Not So Different, You And I thing. And Daguva, I don't know. He's not even a character to me. He's a threat, a terrifying Final Boss, but he's not a character. It's a testament to these episodes, and how genuinely great they are, that I gave even one shit about Daguva. He looks cool, he's shot well, but there's nothing to him. He's someone I felt nothing about once Kuuga beats him. Just, okay. That part of the story is over now. I guess we're going to do an epilogue.

And, man, I really liked the epilogue. (I know there's an Episode 50 thing, but I'll watch that tomorrow or maybe later tonight.) It's super smart. It's got a clever symmetry to the start of this final story, the way the beginning is all sad people saying goodbye and fearing for the future, and the end is all happy people (bittersweet, but happy people) looking forward to a better tomorrow. It's clever. It's a great structure to this story, using the Daguva fight not as some climax, but as a fulcrum. It allows every character another scene, another way of commenting on what Godai meant to them and to the story. In the same way Daguva is more terrifying in implication, Godai is more heroic for his absence.

That's the best part of this ending to me, the thing that really nailed the emotional core of the season. Keeping Godai offscreen until the very end, having him go someplace new but still work to protect people's smiles, like, yes. He needs to go show these kids how to smile. Sure, every other Kamen Rider may be trying to protect smiles, but smiling? That's Godai's original skill.

This was a really solid finale. It didn't drastically change my journey with the show, for good or ill, but it solidified what it felt like watching this series. It was grim, it was spare, it wasn't so much about the monsters and henshins as it was about people trying to find something to cling to in times of tragedy. It was about doing your best and trusting in others to do their best. This wasn't my favorite Kamen Rider show, but I can see why this series got people excited about making more Kamen Rider shows. It's a formula and a set of themes that are endlessly mutable in the specifics, but immutable in their core. I'm glad I got a chance to experience it.

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MASKED RIDER KUUGA “EPISODE 50” AND WRAP-UP

https://kamenriderdie.com/images/kr/kuuga/kuuga50.png

I love this sort of shit. Some of my favorite Kamen Rider stuff is all of the weird-ass, non-canon Net Movies for Fourze and Wizard. Weirdo things like cop show parodies and quiz shows and all of that. It’s warm and charming.

So, yeah, this total goof was right up my alley, and a nice little palette cleanser after the dark, emotional final episodes of Kuuga. Some great gags, like Ichijou and Godai walking away because Minori’s slow-motion was too damn slow, and Ichijou’s actor falling down while descending a hill and laughing through the rest of the take. Sure, there are a few in-jokes I’m sure I didn’t get, but I’ll never turn down a lark like this. Very fun thing to end on.

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And, yeah! This is the end of “Kamen Rider Die watches Masked Rider Kuuga”! Thanks so much for letting me do this! I know this is a show a lot of people love, and while it maybe didn’t work as well for me as did for some of you, I really enjoyed getting to watch it and talk about it here. I hope you don’t think I was unfair to it. Now is 100% the time for you to tell me what I missed, and why you love it. I’ve said it other places, but I do enjoy getting to hear why art that didn’t work for me works for others. Tell me why you love Kuuga. I can take it!

I’ll be here to respond to anything anyone wants to say about Kuuga, but otherwise, it’s another small break from Kamen Rider watching for Kamen Rider Die. I’ll poke around the boards for sure, but I need a couple weeks of space to recharge the ol’ Amadam. (Also, I got real backed up on some Netflix stuff, so I need to clear those out of the queue. Also also, I’m going to see if I can make a go of it with this Star Wars Jedi game. It’s… it’s not looking great!) The current plan is to be back on the boards in mid-January for a trip through Agito. It’s another new one for me, so hopefully that’ll be fun.

Thanks again for reading and responding! You are protecting my smile!

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Yes, you have brought him up before, pretty much right at the start of the thread, no less.

And I could talk argue Kuuga's merits sticking entirely to that comparison if I wanted to, but I think I'll take it a bit further.

Let's talk about Steve Ditko.

https://i.imgur.com/AiBGWTj.png

Ditko was a lot less prolific than Kirby, and yet the most iconic of his work is every bit as influential. His run on Spider-Man is truly the stuff of legend. He created one of the most enduring characters in pop culture, the hero who quickly became the face of Marvel Comics. Everyone who has ever drawn a Spider-Man comic since is paying tribute to him in some way.

And yet, Ditko's style simply is also totally inimitable. His dynamic sense and his eye for the weird are products of his own unique imagination. This is obvious simply from looking at Spider-Man's design. A mysterious, lanky figure with his face completely covered by a mask went completely against the common idea of what a hero looks like. It was a look unlike any other, and no matter how many people since then try to play in that sandbox, none of them will ever quite be the same. They can add more lines, more detail, and bring their unique imagination to the table, often creating things that are great in their own right, but there's always one inescapable truth. Only Steve Ditko could be Steve Ditko.

That's how I see Kuuga, compared to Rider shows both before it, and after. It acts as a foundation for the shows that have come since, to be sure, but it isn't something that can simply be "topped". It was a show that did a lot of very bold things that few other shows would ever dare to try. Those final episodes in particular are especially reflective of that. Yuusuke's final showdown with Daguva is by far my favorite ending boss fight in the whole franchise. Kuuga was often unconcerned with being as theatrical as your typical hero show, and that scene takes it all the way. It's not triumphant or satisfying. It's two men beating each other to death. It's unpleasant, it's not fun, and I respect the hell out of Kuuga for going that far. Very, very few series besides Kuuga would have the nerve to show their main hero crying as they lay the smackdown on the ultimate evil. Perhaps even fewer would then go on to have a final episode with no hero action whatsoever.

Kuuga, I've always felt, is a show that had something very special to say. I wish I had watched it more recently so I could do a better job describing it, but even as my memories of how exactly everything played out fade, I won't ever forget how strongly Kuuga portrayed the idea that, as cool as it sounds, being the guy who fights monsters isn't something to be glorified. It's a burden to be taken on, and a heavy one. Without rewatching the show, I can't tell you how much that comes across throughout, but it definitely comes together perfectly at the end, with that final episode in particular making it abundantly clear that the biggest influence Yuusuke had on the people around him was simply being Yuusuke.

So needless to say, I like Kuuga a lot, and if I'm being totally honest, it was something of a surreal experience seeing how difficult it was for you to get into. It was also a really valuable experience, too though, because Kuuga has always been a series I have a hard time seeing how anyone could not love, and I think you did a great job as usual explaining why you felt the way you did. I almost wonder if the light in which you see it will change when you have the shows right after to compare it to, but either way, I'm really looking forward to seeing you talk about Agito.

Well, uh, obviously I was bringing him up again to spotlight the, uh, symmetry of the final three episodes. That, y'know, that was why and it's not at all that I got lazy about checking into things I wrote.

The burden thing, okay. If that worked for you, I can see the rest of this grim, serious show working great. (I didn't realize when I started this show how chillingly accurate the screencap of Ichijou shouting "If you're not going to take it seriously, stay away!" would be.) The obligation, the sacred duty of protecting Tokyo from the Grongi, how that became a burden for the Team to bear, okay, yes. There's definitely stories with each of the team where they demonstrated their commitment to beating the Grongi. Ichijou doesn't go to see his dying mother. (She lives, no big!) Enokida has to suffer the pains of neglecting her son. Everyone has to put up with stopping by Pole Pole. It's dark material, sure. I'm just not as sure those themes worked with Godai.

I mean, there is a lot of people talking about the emotional and physical toll being Kuuga is taking on Godai. Many, many scenes of non-Yusuke characters talking about how he's giving up so much to defend them, how he runs the risk of losing his happiness to become more powerful... All of those scenes are in the show and attest to the theme of You Guys Maybe Being A Kamen Rider Sort-Of Sucks Real Bad. But, honestly, I'm not sure anyone told Joe Odagiri?

The character of Yusuke is one where, it's a lot of "tell, don't show" for me. He's such a fun, upbeat character, always trying his best and seeing the bright side, protecting smiles, it's a little difficult to square that with how we're constantly told in the final episodes that he is maybe one more fight from losing everything about him that people love and becoming an unstoppable warrior of darkness. Like, he rarely seems that concerned about it? There's a way to read that as him tamping down his fears to not worry his friends and family, but besides maybe one two-parter, we don't really see the potential stakes to Kuuga's growing power.

Not to compare this to another show, but it'd be like if the Hazard Trigger were introduced in Build, and Sento used it to defeat a villain without quite losing control, then used the Trigger without any problems for eight episodes, and on the ninth one we got a scene of Banjou and Sawa talking about how dangerous it is for Sento to use the Trigger and how worried everyone watching the show should be for him. That... no. That is not how you convey stakes!

And, without giving this paragraph the time it deserves (I really gotta get to work!), I wonder if that's maybe why I'm more down on this series than you were. In the overall, I think Kuuga told its story well. It's just, in the minutiae, I think it had some problems properly dramatizing its themes. There's weird tonal things, the ways a dark story would lead into a light story without really referencing the shift, the ways characters would drop out then reappear as though everyone was waiting for them, the ways scenes didn't feel built to tell a story but to hit a quota... I don't know. I wonder if this is a show that's less fun to watch than to have watched.

Thanks! I hope you'll keep giving me your outlook on these shows when you feel strongly about them. Kuuga left me cold in a way that, honestly, I'm still processing. I do have to get to work, but that probably won't stop me from coming back to this board in a few hours to get some of these Kuuga thoughts out of my head.

More Godai thoughts!

Godai, to me, is maybe the best thing about Kuuga and the worst thing about Kuuga.

He's the best because he's bright and fun and cares so much about helping people. He's dedicated to fighting monsters, but he's equally dedicated to entertaining children, letting kids know it's okay to feel sad sometimes, honoring his mentors, lifting up his teammates, and just generally being a good person. He's this beautiful Heisei butterfly, struggling to emerge from the rest of the show's grim, brutal, Showa cocoon.

He's sometimes the worst, though, because that Showa cocoon is, like, every other thing in the show but Godai. Ichijou and the Task Force are grim sentinels of justice, desperate to hold back the tides of darkness. Every slight victory is built on the backs of dozens, hundreds, thousands of less-fortunate victims. Godai, I don't know, he mostly seems like he doesn't belong in this show. He's pointing the way to a better future, a more fun Kamen Rider that balances the darkness with hope. But, like, that future isn't in this show. His goofy optimism and upbeat belief in the unstoppable force of good, sometimes I wonder if the show would work better without it, just wallow in the darkness and terror.

I got weird feelings about this show!

Please do not leave your windows open for strangers.

Anyhow, I'm in the same boat of liking Kuuga but I like better the ways the franchise built on what it started. Kuuga's definitely a unique beast in of itself and I wouldn't mind if another series followed it in certain stylistic choices or story beats.

I personally also saw the themes about how gaining more and greater power is actually a burden and curse the first time I watched the show, buuuut I also thought the show didn't successfully convey or carry that theme as well as it could have. I know there's such a thing as reading between the lines, but there were times I felt like I had to fill in the lines myself (especially like how Daguva first appearing to Kuuga happened off-screen!?!)

I appreciate it, though it'll always be a strange in-between of the Showa era of shows and before the more modern style I know today. I consider Agito to be the real start of the kind of Rider I know today, so I look forward to you getting to that!

Kuuga imo is 1 of my favorite rider shows and it all goes back to the intent of the producer. Producer Shigenori Takatera convinced Joe Odagiri to play the role Godai that he wanted Kuuga to “destroy the image that Kamen Rider had until then”. For context Toei believed at the time that Rider was a relic of the past that the kids of the new milenium just wouldn't get with Kamen Rider it had been away from television for 11 years. Takatera wanted Kuuga to be a show that not only show Rider still being relevent but also to bring those older fans something new for the new milenium.

If I were to give a analogy there a old run down house(Showa) vacant for 11 years, and there these construction workers(Kuuga) coming in to clear away debries for the architects(Agito) to create and build new foundation for a new house(the rest of Heisei).

I hope that makes sense. Your right as fan that got into the newer rider shows that it a little jarring for everything that you expect from rider to be frustratingly new and slow but it in this simplistic way of storytelling that I fell in love. Altough I feel Agito maybe more to your speed as it imo has more of Heisei Tropes that were innovated here. But it written by Toshiki Inoue and generally you don't seem to be all that fond of his work.LOL

Yeah, it... I think it's a show that has plenty of space to bring your own ideas into it. Like, for better or worse. It's a show where the conversations tend (at least in my experience) to be very blunt, very informational. There's not a lot of emotional outbursts, rending garments and two-person acting clinics. It's a stoic character talking to a taciturn character, and they are setting up the beats of the current monster plot. That's a deficit, maybe, to a fan like me, who wants to watch a storyteller tell a story I can get lost in, but it's an advantage if you want to reinterpret or expand on what's on screen.

I don't know, it's weird. I feel real weird about it. For a lot of the thematic stuff for Kuuga, I'm kind-of at the stage of Okay But. Like, yes, I think those themes are there. They are completely what the finale of the show is about. Several characters explicitly state it before and after the Daguva fight. But, I don't know if I thought those themes were utilized thoroughly enough, or consistently applied to the series. I can't argue they weren't there, but I can argue they weren't prominent enough to be considered a success.

As always, though, that's just my reaction. If it hardcore clicked with someone else, I think that's awesome. There's nothing, like bad to me about Kuuga, just stuff that didn't work for me. (Okay, well, Jean. Jean is bad. If you think Jean is good, you are bad and should feel bad.)

Ha ha, yeah, that dude. I don't know how Agito's gonna go. I liked at least one of his stories (27 and 28, I think) but holy shit did I not like some of his other ones. It's going to be an interesting winter for me and Kamen Rider Agito!

I like that house analogy. It's weird, looking at Kuuga. I thought I'd find more of the Heisei stuff I know, but it was weirdly crammed with the Showa stuff that I don't care for. As it moved to the end, though, I definitely felt like I was seeing more Heisei Rider than how it started.

Also, hey, welcome aboard TokuNation!

I think watching Kuuga first may have helped me a lot. I didn't have any pre-conceptions of what a rider show even was, so I got the experience the show closer to the way people at the time may have, as a fresh innovative think with it's own unique ideas that hadn't yet become any sort ot standard formula, especially as it intentially departed from the Showa stuff in a number of ways.

Would I have reacted the same way as you if I had watched modern stuff first? I don't know. But I'm glad I watched it the way I did.

Wild guess? I'd assume the less Heisei shows you've watched, the better Kuuga feels. (Cue probably the very next person saying "It was the 18th Rider show I watched and it's my favorite.") It's interesting to me as, like, a historical document, but I'd have to assume the more you can watch it cold, the more the style feels fresh and exciting.

For me, I would've never started with Kuuga if that's what was presented to me. It was the garish designs and ludicrous plotting of Ex-Aid that, like, colonized me for Kamen Rider shows. Something this dark and serious and slow.. I mean, it's pretty clearly not that much my thing.

Really cool to read your thoughts on the finale. Kuuga's ending has always been so odd that it provokes a lot of strong reactions - from the show skipping Yusuke's first fight with Daguva to the very non-flashy final fight, these last few episodes usually get a pretty poor reception. I'm always curious to see what people think of the ending, especially when it's not just complaining about the lack of a big dynamic boss battle.

Well, it WAS my 18th rider show, and it's my 3rd favourite! Does that count? lol

Thanks! I admit to being a little thrown by the start of episode 47, with how the fight against Daguva was already lost. At first, I was like, "Are they flashing forward to the end of the episode? That's an unusual storytelling move for the Very Present Tense type of thing Kuuga is normally all about." But, no! Fight happened, Daguva won big, we're moving on, this story is really about Godai and the people in his life. The final fight was doing a lot of the same stuff, keeping The People Godai Fights To Protect as the important part of the story.

I feel like my favorite conclusions to Rider shows, the ones I feel most concluded their stories, it's not the final fights I focus on. It's getting Philip back at the end of W. It's the fight before the final fight on Ghost. It's the New World on Build. That emotional stuff... it's so much more difficult to do than the fights. Fights are pretty easy! Making the fights matter, having them be in service of story, it's substantially harder.

As long as OOO and Build come out ahead, sure. When anyone else calls a Rider show their favorite and it's not OOO or Build, I assume they're just avoiding saying "my favorite non-Build, non-OOO Rider show" out of brevity.

This exchange is getting scarily accurate because, yes; my Top 5 in order is OOO > Build > Kuuga > Den-O > Fourze! Quit spying on me! :p

OOO is a great show, no doubt about it. For me it's only real fault is following W. Kiva-W was the "Golden Age" of Kamen Rider for me, and was truly the time in my life when I enjoyed Kamen Rider the most. My Xtreme love of W just kept me from being able to really get into OOO when it originally aired (I rewatched it a few years later with my roommates and enjoyed it a ton on my 2nd go-round).

It wasn't until Gaim that I even started watching Kamen Rider regularly again, then Ghost almost derailed that train. Thankfully, Build came along and has truly renewed my love for this show.

I don't know if "reading someone's signature line" counts as spying! I'm just being observant!

In order to not be scared as much in 2020, I'd recommend thinking about changing your signature to "just someone who loves NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS LET ME SPEAK TO YOUR SUPERVISOR so much her heart might explode".

OOO is the best Kamen Rider show. It does everything right! (Maybe maybe maybe not the theme song, but that's being pretty nit-picky. I eventually liked it okay by the end, but, yeah, huge drop song-wise from W.)

And that is why it will never be among my favorites. It’s a great show, the first I've rewatched in its entirety, and it was still as good as the first time. Yes, it does everything right. From start to finish.

But that's exactly what robs it of the potential to truly shine for me. It stands with lots and lots of other completely solid entries in the franchise, is absolutely enjoyable to watch with everything one could want from a Rider show.

Yet after finishing it nothing stays with me except "It was fun". As far as Phase II goes, only Gaim and Build really left an impression on me.

Although, Gaim - I have to rewatch it at some point. I'm a little bit afraid of it actually. Will I still like it now that I watched so many other Rider shows? I mean, I openly stated many times that I have watched superior shows since. I wonder what it's like rewatching the show everything started with for me.

In fact, I played with the thought of opening a "Kiwami rewatches Gaim"-topic in a similar manner as your threads, but I must admit that I don’t feel like I can live up to it. Knowing me I will just not bother after a few posts. It really takes a whole lot of passion to write down your entire journey with a show like that. Your threads are the most dedicated and impressive I can think of around here really. I feel bad for not even having the time to read them along as much as I want to.

Maybe I’ll make an actually fun new year’s resolution and try to follow the next one you’re coming up with. Maybe it’s actually a show I haven’t seen yet and I can watch it alongside you.

Aw, thanks! That's super kind of you to say! I'm glad I've landed on "dedicated", when a lot of times it feels like I'm at "what if you didn't type out every weird Kamen Rider thought in your head". Y'all have been very gracious in tolerating me the way you have.

To your point about OOO, I see what you're saying. Like I've mentioned (probably too) many times, it's not the best at anything, but it's good at everything. Every other show does some aspect of OOO better. Even Ankh, and he's amazing. (Maybe not Ankh. I don't know. Ankh's real good.) I guess, for me though, I'll take Excellence Through Competence over a lot of the other series that have indelible moments mixed with frustrating errors.

Gaim, yeah, I get what you mean. Ex-Aid's my first show, and I love it to pieces. (They're all such assholes to each other! I never get sick of it!) But, yikes, I've watched so many more shows now. What if Ex-Aid sucks and I just couldn't tell the difference back then? That would break my heart, to have to discover that.

I genuinely don't know what I'm going to do when I finish out the Heisei shows. (I mean, shit, I've only got ten more to go, probably got some time to think it over.) I'll catch up to the present by the time whatever's after Zero-One wraps, then start watching weekly, but... what about the rest of each week? Am I going to rewatch the Phase II Heisei shows? It's not going to be the Showa stuff, I don't truck with Showa, so what am I going to do? Am I going to... go outside or something? This is a nightmare.

That's what I fear even though I must acknowledge it's unlikely. Even more so for you because Ex-Aid is just great, there's nothing to discover that could change that even upon revisiting it.

Be patient with Showa. When I first started watching Rider I treated Showa like the plague. Didn't want to watch it, didn't even want to see it mentioned.

At some point I was kinda sorta bored with Heisei though, so I just tried it. I didn't particularly fall in love with it but it has its charm.

Maybe start with a newer one first so the shock isn’t quite as hard, Kamen Rider Black perhaps?

"OOO isn't my favorite because it's too perfect."

Kiwami, remind me which one of us is the contrarian here. :lol

Also, just to add my own perspective, OOO was my first Rider show, I just rewatched it in full for the first time this year after having seen the entire rest of the Heisei era since, and I have a couple dozen posts showing my opinion on it only got better.

Ex-Aid is top tier awesome, and if you're looking for flawed beauty, you can do no better than Gaim. Both of you have nothing to fear.

Noted! Thanks, both of you!

I guess the easy answer is that Kuuga just left a lasting impression for me because I was so shocked at how brutal the Grongi were. Some monsters in these shows are practically harmless while others may consume a few humans as a food source, but the Grongi kill thousands as a game. There are untold casualties in newer ones (especially when towns are wrecked) but Kuuga's show telling the death count was very impactful and kept me on my toes. It gave a sense of urgency for Godai and the others to defeat the bad guys.

You don't get to talk to me like that after your pick for the best suit design of 2019 :lol

Plus, I was kinda shocked to see how society adapted to these monsters in the show. The mini-arc with Nana's acting audition for example, were she's asked to portray someone who is under attack by a Gorungi (I think) and a competitor tells her she got an easy task because Nana's teacher has been killed by one. Damn.

And that's just what I remember from the top of my head, I haven't seen this show in years.

Personally I mostly remember how society didn't adapt to these monsters. Just about every arc, the body count is anywhere from a dozen to hundreds. If you tallied it all up, there had to have been over a thousand or so causalities in this isolated area of one Japanese region. And yet most people are still living their day-to-day lives like everything is normal, except maybe being just a little bit scared of the monsters. It's hard to take those numbers seriously after a certain point.

The numbers definitely. But humans still living their daily lives - I don't know, that doesn't seem so unrealistic to me anymore sadly.

...

Y'see. The thing about that is. I'm really really dumb

The body count is alternately terrifying and completely ludicrous, depending on which episodes you watch. Like, the ones where it opens with a Grongi already racking up a death toll in the hundreds, horrifying. My mind fills in the blanks and I'm unnerved. Or, when a little kid in the finale is like, "Are my mom and dad going to be killed? Am I going to be killed?" Not scared, just curious. Everyone else is getting killed, so it's probably just their turn. That shit is chilling.

But the ones where a Grongi just runs around Tokyo killing a dozen shoppers in a plaza, or swimmers at a beach, it's just... why are you living like this in the midst of an ongoing, months-long monster attack? It's not like later series, where it's a guarded secret or an urban legend that monsters are killing people. This is all over the news! At a time in history where people believed in the news! Monsters exist! They are killing hundreds of random people each week! Nowhere is safe! The police are powerless to help you! LEAVE TOKYO FOREVER!

Look, I should be the last person to chide someone for forgetting something they wrote. These things happen!