How different do you think Kamen Rider would be if Ryuki didn't exist?
 

No matter how you feel about Ryuki, there is no denying that it forever change the entire franchise in more ways then one. The most important change being the idea of a Kamen Rider.

Prior to this, every Kamen Rider was more or less a good guy. While certain Riders started out evil, such are Riderman and Another Agito, even they were more or less "good guys" by the end of the show.

Starting with Ryuki however, Riders suddenly became much more varied in their morals. While the Primary Rider is still a good guy, more or less depending on the character, every other Rider is pretty much fair game.

My question is, how different do you think the Kamen Rider franchise would be without Kamen Rider Ryuki, which more or less opened a Pandora's Box that would forever change the entire show?

Not too different, to be honest, at least in this particular respect. Because I mean, yeah, Ryuki did introduce the first evil Kamen Riders, but that's just labels. There had been evil Riders before, several of them. They just weren't Kamen Riders, specifically because a Kamen Rider was by definition a hero.

All Ryuki really did was remove that as a requirement to be a Kamen Rider. If it hadn't done that, all it would mean is we'd have a lot more evil "Rider-like-but-not-quite-a-Kamen-Rider" type characters. Heck, last couple of shows have sort of steadily been moving back in that direction, with all Kamen Riders in the shows (not so much movies and other extra stuff) being or becoming heroes, while still having evil Riders-in-all-but-name like Gord* Drive and Igor.

Gaim probably wouldn't exist then. Gen Urubutchi was inspired by Ryuki iirc

I don't think the franchise would be much different tbh. Very few Rider series have utilized the rider vs rider concept to the extent of Ryuki. Most series just have the inevitable "Rider fights anti-heroic rider until they become partners" thing which is something from V3 and popularized with Agito.

As far as the evil Rider thing goes, technically it started with Ryuki, but we've had villainous Rider-like characters before. Shadow Moon comes to mind.

Well technically Shadow Moon wasn't evil though.

Technically Shadow Moon isn't even a Rider. At least not officially.

That said, villain Riders go back as far as the original series and manga. Two words: Shocker Riders. While not Kamen Riders, they are still Riders and literal evil repaints of the heroes. Furthermore, in the manga Rider 2 was their leader.

While Ryuki was the first show to do a lot stuff. Card gimmick, CGI creatures, a butt load of Riders, I feel those ideas were going to happen at some point if Kamen Rider was to ever get out of the Showa era's shadow. Ryuki is important, but it's removal wouldn't change that much in the grand picture.

Even if Ryuki wasn't there, there would have been some point in the franchise where they would have made a Ryuki-like show and made those elements (including heavy toy-marketing) an established part of the franchise. Ryuki brought some fresh-air, but it wasn't as ground-breaking as Kuuga.

I like how Ryuki is so influential that apparently saying "it's not that important" comes with the caveat that a show exactly like Ryuki has to exist anyway. I get what you're all saying but that's like saying Kuuga wasn't a big deal because "they would've just brought back Kamen Rider eventually anyway".

The thing is, Kuuga IS the show that brought Kamen Rider back, and Ryuki IS the show that kicked the door open for a whole bunch of stuff. Multiple Riders with different motives in conflict throughout the whole series. Motifs that very blatantly have nothing to do with insects. Gimmicks that are blatantly toyetic in nature.

All that stuff is still important today and it can all be traced back to here. It was a pretty bold show and if you like anything that came after it, you owe it in part to Ryuki. I don't think you should diminish that by saying any show could've done it. What if it WASN'T Ryuki that tried this stuff? What if the merch didn't end up selling? What if the show actually DID get cancelled (which is why Episode Final was made)? Ryuki didn't just try new things, it proved they could work.

The thing is that Ryuki could have been anything, it doesn't have to be Kamen Rider. Didn't they plan it as a Metal Hero show at first?

Kuuga was a show that came to be as the comeback for Kamen Rider and Ishinomori took part in the production during his last years (concepts and such).

So if Kuuga was explicitly planned to be Kamen Rider and Ryuki was just some ideas, Ryuki is more a trend of the time for toku, something that would eventually come to the franchise anyway. For example, the Rider vs. Rider already existed in Agito and the Hero vs. Hero was also in Sentai before. Agito also had multiple Riders, just not as many. Toy sale focus was in Sentai since Gaoranger etc. Ryuki was more of a gate for those elements to be established for Rider, rather than an innovation.

At least that's how I view it. Also, unlike Kuuga and Agito, which opened the path for Heisei Rider as we know it, Ryuki didn't set a certain standard. Faiz and Blade have more in common with Agito than with Ryuki, from a mere concept standpoint.

Yeah I think some people here are vastly overstating the multiple Rider thing in Ryuki yes Ryuki had a crap ton of them but how many weren't just throw away characters? In my memory Ryuki,Knight,Zolda and Ouja were the only ones who stuck around for a majority of the show's run and got any significant focus. So technically Ryuki also had 4 main Riders like Agito.

It's not the number, it's the way they're written. The three guys in Agito were all explicitly heroes who occasionally got into fights early on because *misunderstandings*.

In Ryuki you had more anti-heroic/villainous Riders who CONSTANTLY butt heads with our straight-laced hero. Guys like Kaixa and Chalice couldn't exist without guys like Ohja and Knight. That's what I was trying to get at. The concepts in Ryuki would've happened eventually, sure, but the way Ryuki did them really marked Heisei Rider moving into to its own style after the more straightforward stuff in Kuuga and Agito. Faiz and Blade in particular I feel are very close to Ryuki stylistically.

Eh. Kaixa and Chalice are sort of like how Another Agito was. Kaixa never came around to really being a "good" guy though, but he wasn't outright villainous like Ouja save for a few moments.

This idea is mildly misled. From the very beginning, Kamen Riders were forces of evil being used for good. There was always the place and setting for a villainous version of the characters. Ryuki may have created the first purely villainous Rider, but the idea doesn't exclusively come from Ryuki. Ever since the creation of Riderman, a pure villain Rider was always going to be an eventual creation. Ryuki being the one to do it doesn't actually change anything.

If the Riders in Agito were willing to get into fights over misunderstandings, then Chalice or Kaixa don't owe anything to Ohja when it comes to their eventual creations.

Yeah, but Another Agito was introduced relatively late in Agito and is still ultimately, distinctly, a good guy.

Yeah, but is yours any better? I don't mean to be rude but I fail to see how the changes Ryuki made to the formula can't be credited TO Ryuki just because they were the result of outside forces or evolutions of existing things. Of course they were. Most things are. Kamen Rider has always gone with the times because of course it does, that's how it stays successful and relevant.

This is a more subtle point than the other ones I was making so let me try and explain. It's a difference in tone and style.

In Agito, two Riders actually getting into a fight was an event. It didn't happen too often (and basically not at all after the halfway point). Most of the time you just saw the Riders fighting monsters, and a lot of the time individually.

In Ryuki onwards, it's a frequent thing, and the Riders have beef as people too. Faiz and Kaixa may not actually fight a whole lot, but Takumi and Kusaka are constantly bickering. This didn't happen AT ALL in Agito. The whole dramatic irony at play in that show was that the three leads didn't know each others' identities at first, and actually got along just fine.

Sure a card game was probably going to be jammed into Kamen Rider at some point, but I refuse to believe this would've. Yes, multiple Riders and evil Riders are all things that would happen with or without Ryuki, but the very specific WAY that Ryuki did it directly informed the way almost every show after would do it. Even a show as different from Ryuki as Ghost still does stuff like this.

I think the franchise would be pretty close the where it is now but it would have taken longer to get there. Kamen Rider Ryuki gave us a lot of things that were pretty monumental - a Kamen Rider being the final enemy, the multiple Riders, Riders who have their own unique, often selfish, reasons for fighting. It added an interesting layer of depth to the franchise, building upon the dramatic character interactions Agito gave viewers.

But yeah, Ryuki was, at least very early on, a Metal Hero series, it has a couple of traits of the franchise as well: giant ally monsters and heroes fighting in different dimensions.

Yes. Yes they are.
Kamen Rider has always been evolving and changing. It should be without question that we'd hit the point that we'd have a villainous Kamen Rider. Just because Ryuki was the first to have it doesn't make it that momentous. It goes without saying that, considering the basic idea of Kamen Rider is that it's heroes from justice birthed from evil, that eventually we'd hit a point where we get a character that starts and actually stays evil.

As an aside, no, I'm not staunchly placing my feet in the ground for this counterargument. All I meant is that evil riders was an inevitability. Ryuki having the first one is a big deal, but the franchise wouldn't be that different if Ryuki didn't.

I mean I'm really sorry if I'm coming off a bit aggressive, I'm not wholly committed to what I'm saying either, but that's why my point about Ryuki's exact style being influential is important.

If we're talking about pointless hypothetical realities where Ryuki doesn't exist, what about the one where in 2002 Toei decided to have Rider become an ensemble show with 2 or 3 (i.e. not quite Sentai still) explicitly, generically heroic Riders from the start, fighting a series of equally generic villain Riders who had no real depth beyond "doesn't like the good guys".

Still the same basic concepts, but because Toei decided they wanted something more kid-friendly/less ambitious, the franchise heads in a completely different direction.

I'm sure things would more-or-less even out eventually, but the fact that Ryuki exists, and that it exists as it does, is significant. Maybe not as much as a couple other shows, but more than like 90% of them.

Chalice wasn't really evil though. His Joker form was out of control, sure, but Hajime himself was a good guy through and through.

Kaixa is more debatable but he was ultimately on the "good" side, even if it's only by comparison to the actual villains.

The reason why the Riders had beef in Ryuki is because most of them were objectively horrible people outside of Shinji and Ren. The whole point of Ryuki was that, this time, the Riders were the monsters. That's not really a trait that's carried on into other Rider series (outside of Gaim). Modern Rider series follow the mold of "We fight at first, realize it was all a big misunderstanding and then team up in the end", which is moreso a trait from Agito.

There's a big difference between how Agito does it and how Ryuki-Decade did it. It's only more similar to Agito on the surface. The morality of the Riders in Ryuki isn't the important part. I can't stress that enough.

In Agito there's a fundamental disconnect between the Riders and their alter-egos that, outside of Kiva and Ixa, simply isn't there in the other shows. That disconnect is the root of everybody's problems and once they figure the truth out they quickly patch things up.

Consider Tachibana's whole "traitor" phase early on in Blade, for example. Him and Kenzaki actually DO talk to one another a bunch and while misunderstandings are still at the heart of their conflict, there's more to it than just "Agito may be one of the monsters!/killed my girlfriend!" and the way it plays out ends up being very different. Their problems are with each other.

It's not exactly like Ryuki either but it owes way more to that show than it does to Agito. Ryuki really cemented the kind of melodrama that drove the next half-decade or so of Kamen Rider, even if the seeds were planted in Agito.

I can sort of see your point, though I'm not sure about Blade since it's been awhile since I've seen the show. I thought most of the conflict between Tachibana and Kenzaki revolved around misunderstandings moreso than actual beef between them as people though.

Really though, I'd say that the trend you describe stems more from an overall trend with toku than specifically Ryuki and mostly because of more anti-heroic characters being introduced, something that dates back as far as V3 if we're talking specifically Rider.

And if we're talking purely villainous Riders, Shadow Moon is the template for that concept I'd say. While not outright being a Kamen Rider himself, his power pretty much stems from the same source as Black (at least in the first Black series, he was definitely a villain). Really, if Shadow Moon was created in modern times, he'd be called Kamen Rider Shadow. Thing is, back in the Showa Era, they were a lot more picky about who got to be a Kamen Rider.

Well Ryuki, is the series that made Dragon Knight possible, and Dragon Knight proved to me that 4kids isnt all trash

TMNT proved that in 2003. Dragon Knight (along with TMNT at the time) just proves that 4Kids treats anything that's not trash like trash.

I'm kind of having trouble finding the right words to describe it, so I'm glad you're at least sort of understanding what I'm saying. :o

I guess I'm just a bit too confused about what exactly the question this thread is asking even is at this point. I never was good with speculation like this. I understand that a lot of the stuff in Ryuki was influenced by the times and/or derived from existing base concepts, but my whole perspective here is all of that is why Ryuki HAS to exist.

Like, we're pretending Ryuki didn't happen and then...? A show that's basically the same thing takes its place? Because that's just calling a rose by another name, right? I feel like every Kamen Rider show was directly inspired by something or another but does that mean they're not special?

Think about how often the concept/style/hero of a show is directly made to contrast with the last one in some way. Like, Gaim was a very deconstructive kind of show that tried really hard to gray its morality and they immediately followed it up with Drive, a show that played up the idea of Kamen Riders as real heroes in a way we hadn't seen in a while. It was even said in interviews they were going for a more Showa kind of flavor, as I remember.

There's a whole meta narrative going on with Kamen Rider and I think you could argue a lot of things in it were "inevitable" in some way or another.

The premise of the thread is if Ryuki didn't happen. Kuuga to Agito to Faiz. There is no replacement, there wasn't just a "Kamen Rider not-Ryuki" in it's place. It's as simple as that.

That's my whole point though. Ryuki is the connective tissue between Agito and Faiz. I'm sure they could've gone straight to Faiz from Agito, the possiblility is there, but I doubt they would've felt the impetus to without Ryuki testing the waters the way it did. At the very least, I feel Faiz and Blade would've been pretty different without it.

I'm not so sure this is the case.


I mean, you have to consider that Agito and Faiz were both written by Inoue and he LOVES to have at least one total jerkass character that is "technically" heroic. In Agito, it was Hojo who was actually a part-time Rider in that show. In Faiz, it was Kaixa. In Blade, the 3 non-main riders took turns being jerks.

As such, the progression to having a full-time Rider that is also a jerkass was pretty much expected. I mean, maybe the Ryuki influence is there, but it's probably a stretch to say Faiz would be drastically different if Ouja and Knight never existed.

Yep. They hadn't yet figured out: More Riders = More Genkin!

I think it's overstating a bit to call Hojo a "part-time Rider" (pot calling the kettle black, I know). He was G3 for about an episode or two, and then a Metal Hero that one time. And once again, he's fighting monsters, not other Riders.

And just like everyone else, his problems are strictly with "Agito", the weird monster guy who keeps picking fights with other monsters, and not Shouichi, the guy selflessly fighting monsters to protect people.

This is what I keep trying to get at about the relationships between Riders being so different. In Ryuki, Shinji doesn't get along with so many of the other Riders because their personalities are so different. Takumi and Kusaka don't get along for the same reasons. Kenzaki and Hajime don't get along for the reasons. Tendou and Kagami have a rocky relationship for the same reasons. In Agito, the other guys all have problems with Agito specifically because they know nothing about him. He's just another mysterious creature in their minds.

The way you're talking about it you could pull out pretty much any one show without it affecting "the big picture", but I think it'd be easier to make the case that isn't true for Ryuki than it would be for most other shows. It was the result of the brand being in kind of a weird place and I don't think you can just "skip" to Faiz because without that year spent experimenting they might not have felt comfortable doing a lot of the stuff they did and calling it Kamen Rider.

Oh trust me, I'm not trying to say he had any significance as a Kamen Rider. I'm just saying that the idea was already sort of there with Agito.

Not necessarily true. Hojo was a jerkass to pretty much everyone, rider or not because he had a massive ego and hero complex (something that also came up again with Another Agito later in the series). Plus one of the big conflicts in Agito was his rivalry with Hikawa, which was very much the type of conflict you described earlier.

I can see this being true of Knight and Zolda, but Shinji clashes with the other Riders, not because they're strong personalities, but because all of the other Riders are genuinely evil and are actively trying to kill him on behalf of the big bad. They clash because he's the protagonist, and they're all antagonists, not simply as a result of them not being able to get along.

Compare that with your other examples. The other Riders actually DO bicker with each other because they're different personalities, not just because one Rider happens to be on the villain's side (well, except for Hajime).

That's because there's very few series that I would say have a huge impact on the big picture to begin with. Some might disagree, but I've found that many Rider series introduce some very interesting and unique things, but it doesn't really spill over into other series like that (which I'm perfectly fine with, since it just gives me something to love about each show).

If anything, I'd argue that Faiz itself was the experiment here, at least in regards to what you're talking about. That's when the franchise started edging into J-Drama territory.

Would Kamen Rider be any different if Ryuki never existed?

No. Due to the simple fact that something of it's kind would have eventually been made. Something like Ryuki was a inevitability in some form or fashion. Short, sweet, and simple. No need for long over drawn debates over reasons as to why. The answer is simply "inevitability".

Well excuse me for being passionate! :p

No really though, I'm sorry I've dragged this out so long.

You know, I think my opinions here are actually really similar to everybody else's and we're just arguing semantics at this point. Allow me to just parrot this...

...and call it a day. I feel Ryuki's biggest significance is that it really dove head first into all those inevitable concepts all at once, due to the nature of its production history. I think without it the incorporation of all that stuff would've been a lot more gradual.

Nothing wrong with being passionate. I, personally, just hate long over drawn debates. :lolol