Hold up - I just realized that since RKFs are so modular, you could actually have Saikou's alternate forms(like the shield and the leg) on the other Saber figures.

I've never been so excited for an RKF lol

So wait, the X-Swordman book is bigger than the normal WRBs right?

At least thicker, since it's got twice as many pages.

I think it is quite bigger as it appears to be the same size as the Primitive Book which is shown to enclose an entire regular WRB.

If this is true, I bet we see upgrade items for the side riders (Buster, Kenzan, Slash) that are in this size.

You know what, now I compared it to the Calibur Driver and it appears to be the same height, but closer in width length to Ja-Oh Dragon.

Im not sure, the peg looks different from dragonic knight set or hybrid rise. (Even the balljoint from normal saber RKFs and the one from dragonic knight is different) Its a shame, tho. I wan to mix and match it too

I'm not referring to the little pegs - I'm talking about the entire arms/legs. Since RKF Zero-One, the shoulders pop right off of the torso of these figures very easily. It's how RKF Dragonic Knight works, except they pop off more easily for that figure since the ball joints are smaller. I pop the joints off these figures all the time for fun. Hell, they're even compatible with gunpla ball joints. I've bought extra figures just to mix and match, and I'll do the same with Saikou. Dragonic Knight is the only outlier. Since I don't think RKF Saikou is actually intended to do this, there is no way his shoulder joints will be as small as Dragonic Knight's.

If you wanted to just remove the arms alone(Buster, Kenzan, and Slash already accomodate for the gimmick anyways), you can easily do that on all of the RKF Saber releases, too. I'd rest assured that Saikou won't be an exception.

Oh, I see. Looks like I'm misunderstood your point. Sorry for that.

I do the same thing with my regular saber. Sometime I put Buster Jakkun to Saber, yea you're right. Its fun! And know that the joint is the same with gunpla, I think I'll do some experiment.

Wait, if Saikou's gimmick is parts-swapping then what's the faux-hinges on the chest and shoulders for? Were they just red herrings to throw people off or something?

I think it mostly has to do with Shadow being just a shadow of "Saikou" in its most literal sense. Saikou's main form is a sword with hinges on the chest and Shadow reflects that directly because that's his "main form."

Yep. The sword only has a hinge there because that's where the book's hinge is, and they decided to carry that detail over to Shadow.

I mean...he just has the hinges because he's a shadow of what is shown on the sword, which happens to have a hinge. It was never going to be a part of the gimmick, especially now that all 3 of his new forms are no longer shadows of Saikou.

They really are embracing the comic book theme. This box is great lol
https://toy.bandai.co.jp/temp/64v1dx...p8xy05vrv7.jpg
https://toy.bandai.co.jp/temp/uxinnu...oa4qaxfoo2.jpg

New Saikou's WRB

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PxRV...83%8D%E3%83%AB

Saber's Quarter 1 sales have arrived and uhhh.... It's concerning.

It's pretty worrying that it could only match OOO and lose against the likes of Ghost. It's not looking good.

Although, this makes me think... Would this refrain Toei and Bandai from using multiple riders next season?

Though you must ask if there's an impact from the pandemic. Are sales lowered from the impact of a worldwide pandemic?

God I hope so. If this in any way makes Bandai calm down on the amount of toys they're putting out, thank god.

Though, I mean, I should also probably point out that Zi-O and Zero-One had huge marketing behind them as the 20th Heisei anniversary rider and the first Reiwa rider respectively. Saber is really the first time we've had a more 'standard' Rider show with nothing particularly special like that since Build.

Yes, I guess with ZI-O being the anniversary rider and Zero-One being the "new gen" rider would make them have big marketing compared to the likes of Saber.

Although, didn't Build have the somewhat marketing of "sticking to the roots"? Or did it sell well purely on the merit of the show and Cross-Z and toys?

Probably a bit of both.

I'd assume it just done very well, because Build is amazing

Either way... Saber having the worst 1st quarter sales in 10 years is pretty shocking.

Build was envisioned to be the last Heisei era show and was designed to be a "return to the roots" of Kamen Rider. This is because Toei, as well as most of Japan, thought Heisei was gonna end in 2018.

These eras correspond to the reign of individuals who choose to abdicate when they want, so it's not always a clear distinction you can plan around with a
show that operates with a 1+ year lead time.

I also think we'd all be surprised at how the Pandemic impacts sales. Globally, we are seeing people spend more on entertainment and merchandise- things that lend themselves to escapism and nostalgia. Video Games are booming and there is an increased demand for TV shows, Movies, and things to watch/consume. That being said, it's less clear how the Pandemic specifically effects kids toys, as nostalgia is really an adult thing.

Something that's interesting to me looking at these sales is that, like... okay, Saber's first quarter is the worst first quarter for Rider in ten years. So, pandemic negatively impacts sales, right?

But then you look at the other two quarters that were completely caught up in the pandemic and its restrictions -- the third and fourth of Zero-One. And Zi-O aside they done better than almost every third and fourth quarter to date, in fact eclipsing both of them.

Maybe it was like the US were sales actually really good during early months of the pandemic but really tampered off during Fall to early winter because people didn't have much in the way of disposal income at that point. I don't really know the economic situation over there so all that could be bogus.

That is true! I'm not sure if their government was actually competent and gave people stimulus checks to keep the economy going.

From what little I know, Japan didn't really have a nation-wide lockdown, so the businesses big or small wasn't tremendously affected, unlike other countries. I've only heard of certain prefectures getting the lockdowns.

Don't want to open a can of worms here, but maybe people aren't just big on the Saber merchandise ?

Oh, totally; but it's still an unusually sharp dip especially at a time of high economic uncertainty. So it makes sense to look at other factors!

Yeah my statement was leaning in favor of the idea that Saber itself is not performing well and the pandemic likely doesn't make for a good explanation.

I personally note that this the first primary henshin belt that is a sword and therefore much more dramatically out of scale. Bandai definitely took a risk with that one.

also selling three glorified roleplay weapons as henshin devices.

I am very okay with this lol
https://i.imgur.com/EJtVFLw.jpg

You fool! You leaked his final form!

Actually, I think Bandai themselves did that

https://youtube.com/watch?v=2Nlat7iZlJY

Been looking for an excuse to post this video for a while.

That’s far from the first time they’ve done that. Drake and Sasword also used singular weapons that didn’t become belts to transform, and there were also several times that a non-primary rider’s main item or the primary rider’s final form item came with their weapon (for example, Chaser, Fourze, Wizard, etc).

Of course, it’s also likely that they largely abandoned that practice due to it not being profitable, and I do think it was a bit of a stupid bet on Bandai’s part, but this is still something they’re used to doing. It’s worth noting though, that, iirc, Kabuto performed rather well even with Sasword and Drake using ‘role play weapons to transform’.

The thing is that since there were no single weapons this time around, technically Saber was actually selling less 'big items' than Zero-One in its first quarter. Swordriver, Gekido, Hayate and Suzune vs Zero-One Driver, Shotriser, Forceriser, dorito sword and suitcase gun. Like I think that is important to note when we talk about Saber pushing out more content than ever -- they didn't actually, they just gave more importance to the content they were putting out.

RKF Kamen Rider Saikou

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-UPOravCHfU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Bi1ENyiEnc

Does anyone know what they are using for the chips in the DX SworDriver and the Wonder Ride Books? I'm curious if it's NFC or something a phone can read as I was unable to actually scan it with my phone's NFC capabilities.

I do believe they use NFC chips. It makes sense since the candy toy and gashapon Ride Book have no electronics in them at all, but they can still be read by the sword.

I don't have one to take apart sadly, but I'd put any amount of money on it being some form of NFC (or at least RFID more broadly). As for scanning it via a phone, my assumption is that most phones will only permit communication with certain types of devices that are considered safe - other phones, payment machines, maybe generic tags/cards. I don't think regular smartphones can act as general purpose NFC readers (though I might be wrong)! Either way, if you did manage to read a WRB you'd probably just end up with a garbled mess of data which only the SworDriver's software knows how to interpret.
That said, if you had a few different WRBs to cross-reference, you could potentially try to decode some features of the data... the kind of project I'd love to play around with if I had the time lol

I opened an SG WRB and its an NFC tag

Thanks for the responses, everyone. I have an app on my phone that I use to read and write to blank tags. It can read some tags so I kind of assumed it would be able to at least sense the ones from the Wonder Ride Books.


I might have to mess around more and see but that's exactly what I was thinking. I don't really have an end goal, though, and was more curious about what kind of data was being passed around and how it all worked. I wonder if this kind of thing hasn't already been done yet somewhere.