[Kamen Rider Die]

KAMEN RIDER DECADE EPISODE 21 - "GOING THROUGH THE COMPLETE RIDER ALBUM”



I really, really, really dislike the Decade Complete Form.

I mean, I love the powers. Seeing Decade call up a bunch of Final Forms, and watching those Forms mimic his movements as they bust out cataclysmic finishers? Very cool. It's an incredibly fan-servicey sequence at the end of this episode, to see Decade so massively overpowered.

I didn't really love how Tsukasa gets the Complete Form, though. He doesn't really go on much of a journey, if you'll pardon the expression. He's skeptical of this world from the first scene, and he treats all of its temptations as minor distractions. He doesn't really learn any lessons, because he wasn't really ever going to make his home here. He was always going to keep journeying, once he figured out how to leave.

You could maybe say that Tsukasa sort of became his own Rider, finally, with the speech he gives about Protecting People's Journeys. It's his standard final-act speech, where he sums up the story's lesson, but this one's... I don't know. It's something that I want to see as uniquely Tsukasa, something that he would value more than another Rider. People trying to figure out where they fit in, trying to find a place that makes sense to them, that is 100% something Tsukasa would care about. That's a mission that I can see him undertaking.

In this story, though? Eh. He's outside of Natsumi's storyline, not counting him telling her This Isn't Your World, and her going But It Looks The Same, like they hadn't been on a multiversal journey through alternate Earths for the last five months. (Natsumi's aggressive dismissal of all evidence that this is a world of monsters is unbelievably frustrating. It's just her going NUH UH for a few minutes, and it makes her seem like an idiot. I get that she wants to feel like she's at home, but I think the minute you meet your battle-damaged doppelganger, it's time to stop lying to yourself.) There's a move Tsukasa makes, where he's trying to get Natsumi to realize that it's okay to keep trying to find yourself, even if the path is uncertain, but it's a scene that doesn't really connect to this story so much as it connects to the series. Tsukasa immediately felt uneasy in this world of success and flattery, so it's not like this was a hard-fought realization he had. Trying to impart it to Natsumi, it's just not how Tsukasa does things? I feel like he needed to hit some rock bottom before he'd be so vulnerable. Like, I don't mind Tsukasa making that speech - I really liked it! - but I don't think this particular story did enough to validate it emotionally.

...okay, there, I talked about the episode and its themes. Now I'm going to dump all over Decade Complete.

I hate those cards. I hate that Decade is wearing a suit of not only other Riders' faces, but he's wearing a picture of his own helmet on his helmet. He looks like Kamen Rider Ben Cooper, and I hate it. He looks like he glued his card collection to his shirt. His stupid PDA is the opposite of how cool the Decadriver is, and I hate it. It's all belabored button-presses rather than the fluid swoosh and chunk of the Decadriver's manual mechanism. I hate that he's ruined his gorgeous magenta/pink suit with a ton of grey. I hate it so much that I audibly groaned when Negative Natsumi gave him back his new upgrade instead of burying it in the ground where it belonged.

What did you think of the costume?



NEXT! We're off to the World of A Blade Movie, with returning co-host and amateur card shark AkibaSilver!