Ending dance reminds me of Zyuden Sentai Kyoryuger.

After rewatching with Subs, I can so far say with confidence that this series is trying desperately to capture the flailing failing Super Sentai audiences with the kiddies it revolves around. Man, this was the weakest/lamest KR debut episode in DECADES. I just want to chuck the screaming girl sidekick character out of a bullet train, she’s AKIKO from W levels of Annoying, and this is the FIRST EPISODE....amazing after the dynamo of the first Zero One episodes.

At least it's not totally obvious who Calibur is this time around (like the minute Gentoku pulled out the Bat bottle I was like "Finally" instead of "OH MY GOD WHAT")then again It took me till after I watched episode 2 of Build to realize Ryuga was gonna become Cross-Z(his GF died AKA THE MOST OVERDONE SECONDARY RIDER TROPE EVER, and then I realized Ryuga means dragon in jappanese and Cross-Z is dragon motiffed I didn't even notice the character tag in the preview/op/episode 1 having Cross-Z's colorscheme but that made it more obvious in hindsight, I somehow thought Bloodstalk wasn't gonna be Souichi and in hindsight disappointed because the hints were there and totally obvious tbf those 2 episodes are EASILY Build's best episodes IMO.)

yeah can't say I'm surprised with the reception then again it's episode 1 but the most important episodes to any show are the first few, and it's not that it's impossible for a show that has a weak first few batch of episodes to get popular(Shows My Hero Academia where it's agreed that the beginning arcs/episodes are the worst parts of it) but generally speaking you can tell a show's quality by the first batch of episodes

I don't like this comparison. MHA was quality from the beginning, it just needed to set up the characters and world before it could do anything interesting with them. This first episode was an underdeveloped mess of too many ideas and annoying characters.

I wouldn’t say it’s the weakest, but that’s mostly because of Zi-O. This was definitely rushed, but Zi-O’s premiere was basically three episodes smashed down into one.

Decade S2 is only good because of Decade.

and we alrerady got a meme he is not a normal homosapien why couldn't they just say he's not a normal person I mean this does allow for meme and make this more memorable but you get the idea trying to sound positive but AS SOON As we found out who was writing this my expectations went down a cliff, and my caution went through the roof and for good reason by looking at these posts like someone in a discord told me "oh Ghost's slice of life" ok you still need good writing to make a good show

That line in particular combined with Touma saying that he feels like he's forgetting "something very important" at the beginning already sorta tells me everything I really need to know.

Potential spoiler alert: Touma's actually from the world of books, and the reason why he's immediately good at fighting with a sword is because he actually was trained to use them, but he got amnesia or something after he landed in "our" world as a kid.

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Also, this is only a minor nitpick but after seeing the subs I really just have to say something about it:

Gee, Touma sure seems to make promises a lot, and he considers said promises extremely important. I wonder if there's going to be an arc or event where he inadvertently fails to keep one and gets depressed.

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Aside from that I thought this episode was fine, it suffers in the same way a lot of first episodes do with trying to introduce and setup everything it can in a few minutes, but other than that it was fine.

I mean it's obvious like a question I always have with these shows is how and why does our MC know how to do this/immediately know to do this as soon as he get's the transformation gear.