[Kamen Rider Die]

RIDER TIME: KAMEN RIDER DECADE VS ZI-O - “DECADE MANSION’S DEATH GAME”



Ha ha, you know what? Okay.

It’s Inoue to the highest degree, and that’s always a good and bad thing. This series makes about 70% sense, with 15% Good Nonsense and 15% Bad Nonsense. It’s vaguely looped into Decade’s role as protector of journeys, with him specifically not being thrilled with folks getting kidnapped from their worlds, while still feeling like this story could’ve been handed off to four or five other Legend Riders. (Kabuto, for sure.) The Zi-O stuff is basically nowhere, with a villain whose appearance actively works against both its core metaphor and the end of the TV series. It’s a gigantic mess, this thing.

The 15% Bad Nonsense… let’s get that out of the way first since, while it’s worth mentioning, I can’t say it super bothered me. I legitimately do not understand why an alternate version of Sougo is still Zi-O, and he didn’t bother to Henshin until the very end of the story. Does he not care about all the people who were getting murdered? Could he not have tried to defeat Another Ryuki? This is an incredibly dangerous situation with monsters! If you can turn into a superhero, maybe do that! Just a thought!

The 15% Good Nonsense more than made up for it, though. When Onodera is revealed to be the killer, I had that brief flash of anger that I sometimes get in an Inoue story, where I think he’s being an asshole. But then Onodera Is The Killer rolls into Sougo Is A Robot (!), which rolls into Heure Is A Space Ninja (!!), which rolls into Mizuki From Amazons Was A Ghost This Whole Time (!!!), and I’m just laughing my ass off. It is the perfect conclusion to a Kamen Rider mystery, to just make everything impossibly dumb and unguessable.

So, yeah, the mystery or whatever… no one in this story or behind the camera cares about it. The important thing is to get a ton of Kamen Rider actors into the house where ZECT held Gon hostage, and then do a Stupid Squid Game on them for about half an hour. And it was super successful on that level! We’ve got the returning Zi-O cast of Sougo, Heure, Ora, Swartz, but playing brand-new-ish characters. (Heure’s still a whipping boy, Sougo’s still enthusiastic, Ora’s still a teenage monster, and Swartz is Complementation Weirdo Swartz.) Along those lines, we also get Sid from Gaim as a gangster, Bravo from Gaim as a housewife, the aforementioned Mizuki from Amazons as a student, Onodera as no one special (typecast!), and Narutaki as Narutaki. It’s a bonkers roster of Legend Riders, and they all seem to be having a blast. (Bravo and Sid, more than the rest.)

This was dumb as hell and fun as shit. Seeing Decade treat a murder mystery as substantially easier to solve once everyone’s dead, that’s kind of perfect in its needless PG-13 cruelty? And the guest cast proves that everyone who’s willing to be on a Kamen Rider show, any Kamen Rider show, is a nut. Everyone involved seems like they’re relishing a chance to go as far over the top as possible, knowing that Inoue has their back.

This probably wasn’t good, but it was unforgettable. (Heure was a SPACE NINJA and Tsukasa’s like Of Course.) Inoue Forever!