[Fish Sandwich]

Great episode. Hiiro's still more or less my favorite Rider in the show (though Emu's worked his way back up there and with Kiriya coming back he's liable to steal my heart all over again), so it's nice seeing him get all this attention.

It turns out his betrayal was indeed a legit betrayal, but his reasons make a ton of sense for his character. He's clearly in an extremely unstable place emotionally right now, and while he seemed to start to make some peace with the situation after Graphite "died", his angst over Saki was always portrayed as the one thing that could distract him from his usual principles, so, especially since they've been heavily building it up for a while, it's totally reasonable he'd come to the conclusion he did. He always was kind of a hypocrite about this. You know, basically the exact opposite of a Mary Sue?

As for complaining I can actually get behind though, the "Game World"? Ex-Aid, how many times do I have to tell you can't just throw these concepts out there and then not actually explain them? When you abruptly cut to Parad and Graphite going on a wacky VR adventure and saying they've found Gemdeus' data I'm just left sitting there going "oooooooookay then". It's not the smoothest storytelling. Like I'm not saying it's doesn't make sense, it just doesn't make sense to me, the viewer. Basically the point I'm trying to make here is WHAT THE HECK EVEN IS THE STAGE SELECT I MEAN SERIOUSLY?!

Whatever, can't wait for somebody to try justifying this stuff as some brilliantly thought out, topical tribute to the early days of video gaming where most of the background information was in the instruction manual.

Anyways, I'm getting so sarcastic I'm not even sure which parts of this post are meant to taken seriously so before I go too crazy I should probably get to the minor stuff:

- One last bit of nitpicking first though. Why are they asking to borrow Shin-chan's Driver? Is that even an option? I assumed, with how big a deal the show has made about there being five Gamer Drivers and that's it, that his new one was just some kind of like, virtual construct tied directly to him now that he's a Bugster. Can he just take it off? I mean it's a non-issue now but dang it why does this show always have to raise these questions?

- Speaking of Shin-chan, I must admit it's a cute twist having the hero's nemesis be the guy to make his last power-up.

- Also I've been meaning to mention this for a few weeks now but I don't know how I feel about the numbers spelling out his name in his "room". That's Nago-san's shtick, man, get your own!

- Hey, I thought Chronus controlled time, not weather? Is he the guy who made it rain back when Kiriya "died", too?!

- On that note, it's a tribute to how great Kabuto's visuals are that its take on a battle in the rain from over a decade ago is still cooler than this.