Overall, I felt Super Mega Force was better. Final thoughts:

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

It's a good group! They're all good kids.

This is very smart! I appreciate you sharing this!

When Kamen Rider Saber ended, one of the writers (I think; maybe the producer) went onto social media and talked about some of the early plans for the show that got scrapped or changed because of Covid-19. I would give anything to have some of Decade's staff do something similar. I know it isn't likely, given the culture of company loyalty and refusing to criticize management that's so pervasive in Japan. I would love a really deep oral history of everything that went down/wrong with Decade because I bet it's a really fascinating story. I'd also like to know what the original plans were and how/why everything ended up the way it did.

As far as the movie goes, I don't think I have a lot to say. It's an abject failure as a continuation of the show's cliffhanger that, hilariously, couldn't even manage to get hold of all the AU Riders for five-second cameos. I have no idea what the original version of this may have looked like, but it was hopefully more creative than going back to the "Decade goes bad and is defeating all the other Riders" well so soon after the previous Decade movie played that exact same card (pun intended).

On the whole, it's kind of hard not to see Decade overall as a failure. The plot falls completely apart and its most unique feature - seeing all the old Riders come back again - has been redone so much throughout the 2010s that Decade no longer feels special in that regard. As a tribute show, it was also almost immediately shown up by Super Sentai's Gokaiger playing all of its tricks better, more coherently, and with a bunch of original actors. All that being said, the show does still hold a special place in my heart, especially those first twenty episodes devoted to visiting the various Rider AUs. I am still always happy to see Tsukasa show up again, which is a good thing because he keeps doing it.

I love Decade. It may not exactly make my top 10 Riders or anything, and there might be a few pretty dumb things in there, but... damn if it isn't great at doing what it set out to do. It's a bit hard to get out there what hasn't been said already in very great detail by both Die and Fish, but as long as we're talking about the series looping around to the beginning; I might as well say what I said at the start of this thread: it's about as perfect a tribute it could be to the type of era Heisei 1 was. Where, like Fish said, every show was being something so incredibly unique and stood out as its own wholly different thing that it would be difficult to cobble together; how Decade respects that and in its final movie, straight up says that a big part of what makes them good is that they are their own stories.

Said movie... oh boy, well. Fittingly for Decade it is a mess, and while I appreciated the gusto of '71 Rider having the first commander of Shocker be a straight up nazi and how that conveyed so straightforwardly what Ishinomori was portraying Shocker - a fascist destroyer of life, autonomy and love - as; it maybe does not work so well in 2009 to have one of the main characters put on his costume! And... man, along with everything else in the Decade portion; that really does make me think of how wild it is that we often recommend W as a good starting point for a lot of people getting into Rider when this movie is practically necessary for it, huh?

BUT ASIDE FROM THAT, y'know, I thought it was really good going back to it! It's impossible to deny how straight up cool it is getting to see the whole squad, girl included henshin for the final battle; Decade's acceptance of his role as the Destroyer of Worlds being something both so tragic yet so fascinating; everything Wataru-but-he's-maybe-god-or-the-author says about the nature of the worlds and stories and how Tsukasa has formed his own and how they all bring him back with... gah, I'm rambling. When Decade hits its emotional and metaphorical points it wants to it's just really really good, and always what I think of looking back on it. Wonderful little show. Wonderful little group of weirdos

I think it's super funny that part of the resolution of this series is that Tsukasa is willed back to life by all of the Heisei heroes he teamed up with, because it just makes me go Yeah I Don't Think Skyrider Has Fond Memories Of Decade. The way this show tried to spiral out a Heisei celebration into an All-Rider celebration... man, it's just a bizarre, nearly antithetical choice to make. They spend time in the beginning of the series talking about Kuuga, and Kiva, and drawing lines between these shows, and then it's just I Don't Know Here's Black. I ended up liking some of the post-Nine Worlds stuff, but I really think this series would've had a tighter grip on its series arc if it hadn't brought in Showa stuff for the final act.

Maybe it's just the selection bias inherent in a specific thread on a specific board, but I think it's neat how -- to a person -- we can all agree that Decade is a terrible story that we kind of love. That's rare, you know? Not just the consensus (but that too), but how we're fully aware of this show's flaws while not really caring that much about them.

Man, that moral from Episode 31 was so right. I hate that it's that right.

I personally think it's a good show, but I'd also argue that like... the worst part of watching Decade is the show

That contradiction is what makes us human lol. Decade flops around and meanders in its plot a lot, but it's easily carried by its cast (Inoue especially, even if he says he was bad at acting during the airing), and just how much fun the show is instead. It's like, the plot is hard to understand but it's having fun with it and so was I when watching it.

Although, I wish the opening premise of all the main riders going up against Decade was actually carried throughout the whole show instead of having it be Decade meeting up and teaming up with them.

I'd like that quote to be used by TokuSHOUTsu for promotion whenever they get around to streaming Decade.

It's really weird, that the show shifted from The Riders All Want To Kill Decade to Decade Befriends Riders to Decade Wants To Kill The Riders to The Riders' Friendship Saves Decade. It's (intentionally?) vague on whether or not Decade is making a difference with his Rider friendships, despite those friendships being integral to both the TV series resolution and the Movie War resolution. It would maybe have been better if they'd either a) committed early to Friendships or Extermination; or b) maybe not swung back and forth between those two extremes quite so often in the last month's worth of content.

Speaking of TokuSHOUTsu, you think they will stream all three tie-in movies? Especially considering they're pretty much necessary to get the whole story of Decade when or if they'll release official English subs for it.

I don't know their business model well enough to speak with authority, but I'd say the only Decade movie they'd have to include would be Movie War. The Den-O movie barely includes the Decade characters, and the Dai-Shocker film is nebulously canonical. Without Movie War, though, you don't have an ending.