Yeah, Kanzaki's story, it's a good one. It felt weirdly disconnected for most of the two-parter (there is an astonishing amount of whiplash I get between Kuuga scenes, where it's, like, a guy drinking tea pondering his life's choices, SMASH CUT, Godai is getting choked out by a monster) but I really appreciated how, to paraphrase the Simpsons, Godai was the cause of and solution to this guy's problems. It felt, for the first time since the first couple episodes, that this show was telling one story. It also shed light on why Godai is the way he is, allowing several characters to reflect on what Godai means to them... it all just felt meaningful, like there was a reason to tell this story at this time.

Also, I hope Sakurako and Godai get Kanzaki real, long-term help. It feels like that dude is still holding on by a very thin thread. He is allowing random events he can't control to decide his fundamental worth as a person. That is not a good headspace to be in!

MASKED RIDER KUUGA EPISODES 13 - 14

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Aaaaand I'm less optimistic about Kuuga after these two episodes. A whole bunch doesn't work: Sakurako is stuck behind a desk for two episodes, the body count is ludicrously high, the emotional plot for the week is misguided, several characters come off as total assholes, a bunch of the subplots move incrementally without in any way impacting this story's plot... I felt real sour after this one. Yikes.

The big flaw, as usual, is that the emotional plot for these episodes doesn't work. It really, thoroughly, infuriatingly doesn't work. It's a guy who wants to be an Unidentified Life Form because he's got an unspecified, presumably end-stage disease. For some reason, despite the public knowing nothing about them except that they are murderous monsters, incapable of communicating with humans, he's decided that they're immortal and can make him immortal, too. Insane, but, y'know, a jumping-off point for a story. After that, though, it gets dumb. Godai tries to befriend him, mostly by spouting platitudes about the preciousness of life to a clinically depressed person at the very end of his short life, a person Godai has spoken maybe three words to prior to this. It's like the Mika story, where Godai's one-size-fits-all Protecting Smiles outlook is not just unequal to the task, it's condescending and tactless. Worse, the medical examiner shoves the guy's face in a dead body, tells him that death comes for us all, and then gives a potentially suicidal man his switchblade back, basically daring him to use it to end his own life. And these are two of our heroes? What is wrong with these people?! And to end the story, the Grongi Fan nearly gets eaten by Merman Grongi, gets saved by Kuuga, and then runs off, terrified, into the city. The end! What... what exactly is that resolution supposed to make me feel? Team Kuuga ignores this guy's pain, tells him death is inevitable, and then saves his life to abandon him. Heroism!

If that were the only problem... I mean, it'd still be bad, the emotional plots are the main point of these episodes, it's basically the only thing that differentiates one monster attack from the other, but the rest of the show could maybe make up for it. No dice! Sakurako is completely sidelined, spending scene after scene talking to Jean about some ancient beetle-themed device that won't show up for at least another episode. All set-up, no payoff. The Nana scenes are cute but pointless, since she has a maybe one minute interaction with Godai in the first part, and no interaction in the second part. Like too many other things in this story, it all just exists in isolation, nothing connecting to make this feel like a complete story. It's like five writers each wrote five random short stories, and the producers shuffled the pages together and called it two episodes.

The Grongi are maybe the only thing that comes out of these episodes without making me salty, but it's close. The bodycount for these episodes is getting grotesque. I'm longing for the days of Wizard, when the monsters only tried to gaslight victims into wanting to die. This, it's too much. I don't need a razor-toothed merman eviscerating and devouring his literal boat-load of victims. I don't! It's been interesting watching the weird struggles within the Grongi Gang, as they get closer to whatever their master plan is, but the violence is starting to get overdone, and it makes Team Kuuga look laughably outmatched. Uh, well, I guess the Grongi stuff made me salty, after all. Yay!

This story was an all-around miss for me. Sorry!

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Welcome to Toshiki Inoue! You've technically already seen him on the OOO portion of W x OOO and the Ghost/Ichigou movie, but this is his first episode in a very long saga of writing for Kamen Rider. He's a very love or hate it-type writer and I, um... I'll just say I tend to not like his stuff.

"It feels like five different writers done this" is definitely one way I'd sum him up. You'll see him get much crazier after Agito but his stuff's always been pretty wild.

Chouno is definitely one of my least favourite parts of Kuuga. He's just so deeply out of place and terribly handled, and bundled with him being done by a different writer I like to just write this stuff off in my head. Didn't happen! There was no episode 13 and 14! Don't know what you're talking about!

oh god no

It was so bad! Even the monster fights were just two dude shoving each other in knee-high water. And the violence, I mean, I felt gross watching that boat attack. I don't watch Kamen Rider to feel gross! Why were there two scenes that took place during an autopsy?!

Partly, it feels like someone who thought they were doing something Serious and Mature with a kids' action program, and, what is the smilies code for "jerk-off motion"? You're not cool or edgy for making something inappropriate for your audience! It all just felt miserable and cruel for no particular benefit, and it trafficked in deeper themes without sensitivity or the ability to pay them off.

Looking at the Wiki, I am now substantially less excited for Agito, 555, and Kiva.

I'll tell you as someone who just does not like this guy's writing at all; Agito is a series that just barely misses out on my top 5. I like it for a lot of the reasons that I like Kuuga and it weirdly stands out as something that is just not like how Inoue usually writes at all. I don't know what happened but I'll happily take it.

I should also note it's not quite just those series, either. He's responsible for almost the entirety of a certain character in Kabuto, and he had a substantial effect on Ryuki. He also penned all the movies before Kabuto's, and he took over Hibiki after Episode 29 in what is regarded as a, um... ahem. Not generally liked production thing.

It should go without saying, Inoue is a -massive- part of pre-W Heisei Rider. You'll either learn to love him or hate him.

I'm hating him even post-W but that's beside the point.

I've never looked up the writer(s) behind Kuuga before because all the individual stories were mostly cohesive in tone with each other, but I wouldn't have been surprised if the people on that boat also brought aboard their babies and puppies.

I'll try not to hold these episodes against those shows, then. I remember thinking that the Nobunaga OOO movie was pleasantly bonkers, so, I don't know, maybe he wrote these two Kuuga episodes on a bad day? Maybe he gets better? Maybe I'll forget these episodes happened and not feel this visceral rage during those other shows? Who can say!

Maybe it's just my subs (could be a recent scrub), but the boat captain does mention that everyone onboard the boat was one day from retirement.

I tried to watch Kuuga but I couldn't continue. I think it has good concepts that fall flat. I love that the monsters actually kill people but it escalates way to quickly like every couple episodes swaths of people are mowed down and it becomes moot. The action scenes are really good but I think every interaction outside fighting was boring as sin and I didn't care.

I can't really blame you. I'm enjoying parts of Kuuga, but nothing's really blown me away yet. If you can dial into the "X-Files, but superheroes" vibe of Kuuga, there's a little more to like, but between the languid pace and dour tone... yeah, it's not going to be for everyone.

MASKED RIDER KUUGA EPISODES 15 - 16

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The Grongi story in this one is a whisper of a sketch of a gossamer dream. There is nothing to this one. A Grongi is running people over in a truck, Kuuga catches him and blows him up. That's it. There's a little bit of a feint in the first half, when the Grongi escapes, but he immediately gets a new truck and keeps doing the same thing until Kuuga blows him up again. There's no mystery to what's happening, and no strategy to defeating it. It's all empty calories.

Luckily, the other two threads deliver. The first, obviously: NEW BIKE. I like the design a lot. Way more than TryChaser, which is just a dirtbike. TryGouram (thank you, wiki) is this beast of a machine, regal and dangerous. It looks weighty, menacing. If a superhero showed up on TryChaser, I would assume he got lost on his way to a touring stunt show. If a superhero shows up on TryGouram, I am running for my life because a deadly monster attack is imminent. A big, beefy bike is exactly what I want in a motorcycle-riding superhero.

Bikes in modern Kamen Rider series are, at best, an afterthought. Most Riders just leap into frame to start a fight, or run up to a monster and then henshin. There might be a few scenes, especially in the early episodes, where a Rider shows off their bike, but there's rarely an origin story to where the bike came from. (OOO and Gaim had one, Build sort-of had one.) It's cool to see how big a deal the bikes used to be, how integral Riding A Bike was to these series. I don't, like, miss it in the newer shows. I don't care if Kamen Rider as a franchise has outgrown actually riding anything. But, still, it's cool that Kuuga devoted a full two-parter to Godai's new ride.

Well, "devoted". I mean, there's still the other major part of this story, where we get a bit more insight into Ichijou's dedication to his job. Some if it's because he's honoring his dead cop father (ALL DADS ARE DEAD). Some if it's because that's how his whole family is, where his mother collapses while on-shift as a nurse and then gets out of her hospital bed to continue her shift, even though no hospital on the planet would be okay with her doing that. But, mostly, hilariously, that's just who Ichijou is: someone with the single-minded focus to work on after-action paperwork instead of visiting his hospitalized mother. Like, it's not even as though he's tracking down a dangerous monster, he is filling out paperwork about a monster who just blew up. That is not dedication, that is obsessive-compulsive disorder. That is an illness. It's not some wacky character trait. It's not "oh, Ichijou takes his job seriously." It is way beyond a lack of work/life balance. It is troubling.

I'm scared for Ichijou, you guys!

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