[Switchblade]

Well, that was stupid but at least it's over now.

Good to see that Build's finale is still getting work. I assumed it was going to enjoy retirement, yet here it was again for an encore performance.

I haven't posted any Zi-O reactions in awhile because I fell behind and it took a few weeks to muster up the enthusiasm to actually watch the show but I figure I'll lay down some final thoughts. Zi-O wasn't Ghost-teir bad, but it was not a good show. It had some really high peaks (Agito) and some lows (Kiva), but on the whole it was just really bland and mediocre. Most of the characters were underdeveloped and uninteresting, with a lot of abrupt objective changes and unexplored motivations (seriously, why did Woz betray the rebels to follow Zi-O? This was never explained). I enjoyed Woz because it was hard not to and Sougo grew on me, but the Time Jackers, Tsukoyomi, and especially Geiz never did anything to grow on me as characters. This was a show that I watched primarily to see the returning faces and that was rarely rewarding because most were effectively playing different characters. The show's real bright spot was the point where they stopped erasing past shows and started bringing in the modern versions of these characters (Blade, Agito, etc.). That's still not really to the show's own credit, though, as fanservice and plot are not the same thing.

As far as the finale itself goes, it barely made coherent sense. Like I and several others have said, it was ripped largely from Build. The parts that were uniquely Zi-O didn't make a ton of sense, though. I know that Tsukuyomi, as a character, was only slightly deeper than a small puddle, but I doubt anyone would seriously think she'd betray her friends (apart from that time when she randomly decided that Sougo had to die for two episodes). Zi-O finally turns into Oma Zi-O by... just doing it? There was no explanation at all for that. Grand Zi-O got curbstomped (again), Geiz died, and then the new belt just manifested out of nowhere. I liked the bit where Chekhov's Watchmaker finally paid off, but the actual Oma transformation came out of nowhere. Oh well, at least all of the Heisei Riders are back on their own separate worlds again, even though W through Ex-Aid were explicitly shown to coexist on numerous occasions. Hooray for whatever.