[Kurona]

God, it's -so- cool to see Yaiba finally break free and embrace who she's always been! Those lines about her pride as an engineer; and about how technology should only ever be used to help people, that even if she doesn't have a dream herself she has those beliefs! That's just fantastic, and a wonderful embodiment of the core facets of her character that she...

...

that she hasn't even been hinted towards having in the past 32 episodes.



Now it's a very cool character concept, I'll give it that; even if it hasn't really been that long since Sento. It's a very good route to go down especially when she's under someone like Gai, and shows a quite clear path she'd go on after leaving him. I just, you know, really wish she had that character before? And it hardly explains why she was still with ZAIA all this time -- I was so waiting for this episode to give me something, anything to prove me wrong; that I was jumping the gun in saying she was far too ruthless and far too willing to go along with ZAIA. I wanted them to show me that her brainwashing was much more extreme than we thought; that she was protecting something else; that there was some other turmoil; that she was a humagear; something! But instead what we get? About her beliefs? It just makes her position up till now look even worse, and beyond that, makes her words in this episode almost ring completely hollow.


I really really hate saying this, because I WANT to like her. I was interested in her towards the beginning and I spent the beginning of this post going on about how I like what's presented about her here. But she is so poorly constructed and so poorly written that it's hard to feel bad calling Yaiba a bad character, and possibly the worst of Zero-One's entire cast. I don't think I've been this disappointed in a Kamen Rider character before aside from like, the entirety of Kiva's cast.


Hell, there's precious little else in this episode that works for me either. The one-off Humagear story we got this time is probably one of the weakest and badly fleshed out of the entire show; with their attempts to connect it to the story's other plot just coming off very weak. The revelation about Fuwa feels kind of unnecessary? I don't hate it, but I hardly feel it advances his character and just feels like excess bad-things-Gai-did. Oh, right, and after a whole episode that gave us Naki finally becoming their own character, they don't get a single line in this episode. Like, seriously? You're even having Fuwa development in this episode, you mention Naki by name and make it Gai's plot this episode, you showed Yaiba feeling very effected by Naki's words in the last episode and her revelation here follows the same kind of train; but you're just not gonna have Naki be in it at all? I... ugh, I don't like being this down on an episode, but the more I think about it the more of a trainwreck it feels like.


Fights were nice though! As said above, some lovely choreography; even if I'm starting to get a little tired of Metal Cluster constantly fighting the AIMs duo. I'm also a big fan of Gai's ambitions being framed as a dream and that being a source of conflict for Yaiba; it's pretty simple but it's still a clever way of doing this and continues Zero-One's take on dreams being one of the best in Kamen Rider so far. I'm hopeful that'll get played out more in future episodes, but for now it's a nice little dash of grey.