[barnstenchfartface]

Wrapped up Den-O yesterday. For having struggled through its early episodes, I think the final stretch of episodes was pretty strong. Of course, the villains were weak as hell and there's a lot left unexplained, and getting the ending necessitated a few asspulls and odd contrivances, but, it was still a fun and satisfactory ride at the end. I enjoyed it.

Climax Deka and Final Countdown blow, though.

Deka just felt like it was sloppily cobbled together to capitalize on the hype while it was still hot, nothing about it really makes sense or is explained at all and it really feels like it's missing the heart that made the show succeed. An enjoyably ridiculous premise and a few really good gags are pretty much all it has going for it.

Final Countdown isn't nearly as fun, but it does have a little more of the emotional backbone the series did. Not enough to make it good, I guess just enough to not make the movie feel as much a wasteful, unnecessary addition to a story that had wrapped up ok enough. Still, some odd choices. I'm just really flabbergasted by the decision to have Ryotaro basically completely absent from his last appearance as Den-O. He can't have had more than 10 minutes of screentime altogether--and Yuto was somehow even worse off (but at least he keeps coming back). The fact that both movies wasted a bunch of time on teaching some unlikable new dumbass a lesson was not lost on me and I didn't really like it. Hopefully Kotaro is less annoying in whatever other moves New Den-O shows up in. Also pretty confused by why they decided to go with not giving Teddy a personality when that stuff's literally the only reason Den-O was so successful in the first place.

In the meantime I've also been watching the Imagin Anime, though turns out I underestimated how late some of these came out, had to stop mid-season 3 because I guess some characters from the Trilogy show up. I'll get to it later. They're...pretty damn pointless and most rather humorless. I liked the one about Den-O's production though. (also whew, TVN is really bad at Den-O).

That reminds me I also watched the Shin-chan episode with Den-O, and for that, I have regrets.

Ended up watching the Kiva net movies more than a year late, since in typical fashion the fact that TV-N doesn't properly label their torrents meant I missed them when I first watched Kiva. They were pretty great though. I choose to believe the Nago episode is canon as hell.

And all that ends with me finally having watched everything that came before Decade, which means I can finally watch Decade. Yay.. Well, yayish. I watched the first episode just now, and it was pretty rough. I'll admit the opening sequence with all the different Riders and stuff was fun, but the rest of it may as well have been a blank screen for how much it did for me. Well, I'm trying not to expect much from the series, based on what I've heard. But, the dumb cop from Climax Deka being Kuuga does not bode great.