An Interview with Ryuta Tasaki, Director of Kamen Rider Gaim
 

A recent magazine interview offers several key insights on the newest Hesei Rider from the excited new director, Ryuta Tasaki.

Highlights from the interview include:

Man, this does not bode well for happy endings. :(

As the dancing is symbolic, I hope that means the choreography gets better, because although brief, the dancing in the first episode was still terrible.

I personally love the idea of more than 2 Riders, again, but so far Rider seems to have had a minuscule budget compared to sentai, with Wizard being probably the first Rider show that even felt close to the scale and flash of the sentai running at the same time. So I'm having reservations about this whole multiple Rider business, especially as it appears they'll all be like their own mini version of Os rather than Ryuki/Dragon Knight where they just gave the Riders unique costumes and moves, and they weren't actually like flipping through ranges of forms and weapons on the fly. I mean if the projected Riders does come true, then what, are we going to have like forty five Rider suits for this show? It just seems ridiculous. And as epic as that sounds, I just can't comprehend how they'll afford to put it on screen.

I will be looking forward to more plot focus though, as Wizard presented a cool story and a cool world, then pissed it away by focusing all its effort on Gates that were ultimately meaningless.

Also, whose head is being bitten off then?

I like those bullet points. Can't wait to check out the first episode soon.


:lol

This man is my hero. Between him and Urobutcher this could shape up to be one of the best heisei series! Ryuki for inspiration works for me :D

This, all of this. I cannot wait to see these twists instore. Though.. I see bad things in store then for Yuumi/Mai.

I don't think anyone has been expecting one of those since the writer was announced.

As long as dancing does not stick to being Beyblade-esque, I'll be happy. No idea what he means about tearing down expectations, but if he actually does it right, I'm good with that.

I'm glad we're getting more than just 2 Riders in this series, I was getting disappointed in them. Blade and Kabuto are some of my favorites with lots of Riders and I hear Ryuki is excellent so that sounds promising.

Sounds good, not seen any of urobutcher's stuff so I guess I'll just have to wait and see =D

I dunno if it's just a cultural thing or what, but the dancing in Toku always seems to suck =/

At least this time, the dancing has a little contribution to the story, not just a random dancing sequence & gimmick.

Blade kept it at a nice 4 riders. Kabuto kept bringing riders left and right though to the point that it felt forced in. The series could have done without the pointless Hoppers (regardless of how cool they were), Sasword, and Drake.

Another interesting interview.
And it seems Uorobochi does plan to go his usual way with Gaim.

I'm glad they ditched the 2 Rider element. The shows were becoming copy paste of:

15 episodes on main Rider
5 to 10 episodes on secondary Rider
Remainder of series on relationship between 2 Riders and a "big bad" reveal with quick conclusion

Just out of curiosity regarding the dancing in Toku....was everybody expecting Stomp the Yard or So You Think You Can Dance? levels of performances? Since when did the fandom become so attuned to dance routines?

Its in the show, I'm not really bothered by it but some of the comments about the dancing feels ridiculously over-critical.

Anyway as a big Ryuki fan this sounds good to me and if they choose to stay with a smaller core of Riders (4 always seems to be a good number thus far) I don't see anything wrong with it. Ryuki had some pretty weird tragedies...Satoru coming to mind. But my biggest concern is that they try to to go overboard with an Ouja/Asakura character. Asakura worked because he was an extremely unique character. Its tempting to try and replicate it but because they've kind of dropped too many Ryuki hints it might feel a little too tacked on.

Eh, but then again, it's a Kamen Rider series and Toei has the last word on it. So as long as we're still at the begin, everything's still open.
(But then again, I don't think Urobuchi is THAT messed up to turn Gaim into Kamen Rider Madoka anyway. Let's say he BETTER NOT because I don't like Madoka...)

:lol

I uh, I don't think I see it.

Don't see what? That the character worked or that he was unique at his time?

Asakura was far from unique, and was a terrible character. He was a cartoonish psychotic moron who just gleefully did evil acts for no reason and had no depth or motivation. He just killed and killed and smiled all the time and it was boring and stupid.

Ryuki was awesome, but Ouja was a black mark on the series. Not until the final episode did I ever give a shit about what happened. He was a lazy tool of the writer to be a boogeyman for the other characters to be scared off, and had no personality outside of "boy do I love killing." And he just looked up with his head down like a typical psycho. Flat as a board that character was. I kept expecting him to do something but it never happened.

You just didn't notice. In the episode with Reiko he talked about he he almost starved to death and if you notice in other episodes he actually does nice things like offering food to other because maybe despite being a psycho he doesn't believe in people starving.

He was carnage to everyone's ambition. When he found out through Reiko that he missed his brother when he set their house on fire as a kid he lied through his teeth and played a victim all so he could finish the job.

That made him different from any and every Rider to date. Lazy tool for writers? Give me a break. This is why we can't get nice things. He wasn't the strongest Rider by any stretch and his character was a perfect foil to Kitaoka's. He made Kitaoka's character look good.

I mean why do you think Kanzaki offered him the belt in the first place and gave him so many chances? He was Kanzaki's ringer in the Rider War to thin out the herd. Ren was stoic but hesitant when it came to killing, Shinji was never ever going to kill in the first place and Kitaoka was sickly. Asakura was Kanzaki's safe bet.

Boy wouldn't it have been cool if they in any way explored that?

But they didn't.

And?

That doesn't tell me anything about him except that he's a psychotic.

Maybe if all you've ever seen is Kamen Rider, but Asakura is basically every bad guy from every episode of Criminal Minds.

He was absolutely a lazy tool, you basically admit it in your last paragraph.

Kitaoka was ten times the character Asakura was. He was actually multilayered, unpredicatble, and had every right to be an irredeemable scumbag... yet had all this different sides to him that fleshed him out and made him more. Asakura had no other sides. He had no interesting relationships, he had nothing to describe him as beyond "psychotic."

All you've done is explain why Asakura was there, and validate my claim of him as a lay tool for the writer. He existed to do things, but had no character. He was a mad dog, but even a mad dog has the ability to be tamed and understood. We know nothing of why Asakura is what he is. He's just lazy. Tiger was everything Asakura should have been. An actual psychotic not just obsessed with killing with his own twisted motivation. Asakura had no motivation. He was a child's idea of what a villain is. Beyond that, he was boring and predictable. I never asked what he was gonna do each episode because I knew. He'd smile, hurt or attempt to hurt someone, and... actually, he never did anything beyond that, besides escape the police in ridiculously contrived and stupid ways.

I will say one thing, though. The actor himself did really well for the character he was. It's not easy to make a character so flat convincing. And his death was perfection. And that's not me being sarcastic or petty, but it was one of the best done scenes in the show. But then I thought the entire last episode was perfect minus the last five or so minutes. (you know what I mean)

Ouja was brilliantly wild and chaotically neutral. Loved everything about that guy. Tiger was perhaps the worst of the Ryuki riders aside from Scissors.

"Brilliantly wild?" He... wasn't. He was actually very tame as far as wild guys go. He screamed and ran around, but it was all very... dictated. I never felt like he could fly off at any moment. I felt he could fly off when dramatically convenient.

But hey, he looked awesome, so. And from what I hear his actor is a top notch guy. He's hardly without positives, but he over-rated for sure.

But at least he was a convincing headcase.