[Kamen Rider Die]

REVICE LEGACY: KAMEN RIDER VAIL - EPISODE 1



There’s so much in this Vail series that turns me off as a viewer: dour explorations into the dehumanizing effects of violence; prequels; narratively convenient amnesia; one-note characters whose dialogue could mostly be summed up as Anguished Screaming. It’s a recipe for me checking out emotionally, and maybe literally. But, boy, I actually really liked this first Vail episode?

It helps that it’s sketching in the backstory of Yukimi and Genta/Junpei, two characters I am enormously invested in – but it weirdly helps more that it’s all so inessential. It’s not something the show desperately needed to tell me (there’s really nothing in here that we didn’t learn from the last couple episodes, aside from– well, we’ll get to that), so the pressure is less on upending my expectations or setting up some huge reveal, and more on trying to tell an emotionally coherent backstory for two integral, but largely-background cast members. It’s just this little story about Kamen Rider Vail, and the woman who fell in love with him.

Or, it will be; this episode is basically the origin of Kamen Rider Vail, and it’s bleak. Like, Showa bleak, appropriately enough. Junpei’s found dead in a ditch (for non-suspicious reasons) and Noah decides to experiment on him enough to maybe make a Kamen Rider. He loses his memories in the process, except for one traumatic event: the death of his family at the hands of an unseen devil. Now, it’s about 99.9% likely that Vail is the culprit, but that kind of doesn’t matter here. It’s more about how the absence of family has robbed Junpei of an anchor to the world. He doesn’t have the memory of a family, he has the memory of the loss of a family. He’s avenging a thing he can’t even remember, which makes his goal as hollow as his pursuit.

The bulk of the story here is the monotony of Vail’s activities, where he’s detonating devils, and then screaming out for more devils to detonate. Eventually, it makes him indistinguishable from the devils themselves, a mute weapon that endangers civilians. The cliffhanger, though, is him being trapped under rubble in the aftermath of the latest collateral damage-heavy outing, and the woman who might free him from the zero-subtext weight he’s trapped under: Yukimi!

Hopefully, the next one of these will delve more into her story, but I’ll be happy either way. I like how much Genta still works as a character, knowing who Junpei was 25 years ago. It doesn’t feel incongruent, the subhuman maniac and the vlogging papa. They’re both motivated by the desire for family, and the clarity of that across both iterations really draws this story together. That went way better than Revice Flashback About The Enormity Of Revenge And How It Poisons The Soul would’ve lead me to believe!