[Fish Sandwich]

Yeah, so GoRider is real good. I made a point to go back and watch it over the past few days, and even after like five years, it totally holds up. Remember what I said about those Legend Rider shorts from Ghost being great because they took a completely pointless, extremely tenuous tie-in to the spring movie released on some random platform, and tried to use that to do something with some degree of substance anyway?

GoRider is like a movie-length version of that, meaning it gets to have way more than just "some" degree of substance.

It's a legit really interesting mystery story that somehow takes a completely random assortment of guest stars and manages to build them up into a proper team by the end, to the point where you'd almost forget how odd it is to see these people standing together. And all while staying true to who those characters are, even when they're surly loners who would never join a Sentai in a million years. But GoRider makes it happen! It is going above and beyond the shallow requirements of why it exists (as far as I can tell, 1:Have GoRiders, 2:Remind people Kiriya exists, 3:???) to a degree that's almost comical.

(There was also one detail in particular I loved that I only noticed rewatching it now that I'm more familiar with Japanese, and it's that "Kenzaki's" dialogue is written exactly how Kuroto always talked, back when he was playing the part of the helpful CEO early in Ex-Aid. It's like he's doing the laziest possible impression of Blade, but the viewer might just assume that's how they're choosing to characterize an older Kenzaki or something, so it's only a clear tell in retrospect. Just one more way the script for this miniseries impresses.)

This was right around the time Kazuya Kamihoriuchi started directing all kinds of cool things, between this, the Specter V-Cinema, and then directing episodes of the TV shows proper starting in the back half of Ex-Aid, where he would handle things like the debut for Cronus. He's' become an indispensable part of Toei's pool of directors for these shows, and it's not hard to see why. His involvement tends to massively improve whatever you give him to work with. Meanwhile, Kento Shimoyama wouldn't write for Rider again until Zi-O came along, but once again, it's not hard to see why they'd pick him for that job. But I suppose we can get more into that when we get there.