[Fish Sandwich]

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Originally Posted by Dr Kain

Not every rider has to be able to save someone every time. Kotaro wasn't able to save Nobuhiko from becoming Shadow Moon. If the story needs a loss to happen to advanced, it should happen, and Wizard definitely needed that. It also doesn't help that Haruto's entire point for being Wizard was for Kiyomi and not only did she do absolutely nothing but sit in the background like wallpaper and stare at a crystal ball, but was barely even on screen except for when the plot needed her to be in peril for Haruto to save.

It did? The show all about holding onto hope needed an episode where somebody actually loses hope? Again, there's definitely a lot of potential there, and I don't mean to say I disagree with you about that, but it's not what I would call a necessity.

You're also brushing off all the character stuff with Koyomi throughout the show, and of course she's also exactly the kind of loss you're talking about. Haruto spends the whole final arc talking about how he's definitely for sure going to save Koyomi, and then he can't.

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The lack of emotion isn't the problem, it's that he had no development. He was the same in the final episode that he was in the first. He didn't have any backstory outside of one moment in one episode with his soccer friend.

And that's just flatly bulls***. A bunch of the episodes in Wizard were devoted to exploring Haruto's past. The flashbacks throughout the show. The episodes where he gets Flame Dragon. The ones with his old teacher. The aforementioned soccer ones. Haruto is one of the more fleshed out protagonists in Rider and the show was always very distinctly his story. He absolutely has development, too. Even just with Koyomi in the end, that's a big moment for him because he's forced to accept the loss of the single most important person in his life. Haruto has some pretty crippling self-worth issues and he basically defines his entire life by A. being Wizard and B. protecting Koyomi, so it's a HUGE deal for him to move on. There's all sorts of other bits throughout the show too. Haruto was a very unique and relatively subtle main character and I refuse to accept he was anything but a strength for Wizard.

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Originally Posted by Kiwami

What made it repetitive was the constant build-up from the Phantoms and/or the people themselves which started to lose any meaning as soon as it became clear that the worst case would never happen.

I guess? This is getting into the concept of "stakes" I've never understood but, again, isn't that true of every other Rider show? They're always trying to convince you the whole world's in danger but, outside of Blade and Gaim, how often does stuff ever actually get that far?

I think your real problem here is simply that you didn't find the stories the show was telling very interesting, which, again, I do get, even though I'm getting pretty heated about this.

I guess Ghost isn't the only show I'm unnecessarily defensive of...