[DreadBringer]

I said that Revice got disappointing after ep. 25 and never recovered, and the good thing about it is mainly in the side contents, like Revice Legacy: Kamen Rider Vail.

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Originally Posted by Kamen Rider Die

REVICE LEGACY: KAMEN RIDER VAIL - EPISODE 1

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.

Unrelated (and likely an obnoxious nitpick) but there's this oversight that can happen for shows that is meant to be set in the past as Revice prequel. As ep. 30 of Revice claims, the photo of NOAH executives (with Akaishi) are set decades ago... but one of the cars shown, the one he looked at the window as others call him devil, was 4th generation Honda Fit, which was a 2020 release. Sure the tech in KR world is far more advanced like NOAH, but this is still lacking an effort to make the past is really the past.

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Originally Posted by Kamen Rider Die

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.

So Genta in the past, a.k.a Junpei, or a.k.a Subject 071, did the Demon hunting on his own instead of Vail. Vail has less significance by only a partner to talk with. And Junpei's anti-hero kind of a Rider, as he didn't do anything bad (but NOAH is just bad) by killing devils, but he only fought the devils for revenge of the death of his parents to a red devil, and him losing his soul as he fought more and more unrelated devil shows that he didn't really care about protecting others.

Junpei learns to use the ViStamp and Vail Driver quickly, while he at first goes to fight the devil in his human form, after Masumi tells him to use both devices he did it without struggling, or making use of Vail's tools afterwards. And while NOAH treats him as a captive, his fighting style is also really brutal, as if he's mindless. It even got him to destroy the bridge at his final fight and buried him under rubble, so he's a really destructive folk which have NOAH quite justified in their cruel methods of restraining him.

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Originally Posted by Kamen Rider Die

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!

As Vail in the main series is shown to be able to destroy a Giftarian without a finisher, I wonder if the devil in the past was all the stronger one compared to the ones present in the main series, the general MOTW ones (not Phase 3 or above).

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Originally Posted by Sh Ranger

Takeru and Ikki are both saying similar things, that Adel and Olteca have done unforgivable things. But that's where it ends for Ikki, since he wasn't around to hear the exposition about Olteca's tragic backstory. Takeru's father was murdered by Adel, a fact that Adel exploited to try and make Takeru lose sympathy for him, but even that couldn't stop Takeru from reaching out to him and wanting him to stop suffering. So, it leaves a bad taste to me that Ikki, the Ultimate Busybody, makes an exception for unforgivable people and it leaves Olteca's arc without any closure since he got swallowed by Gif.

There's also Kamen Rider Revice's declaration that, "We're not devils, we're Revice!", which sounds dumb and fallacious. The show spent a lot of time preaching how devils aren't inherently bad and can actually be beneficial for development, only for them to be like, "yeah, we're not really devils, cause we're good guys, haha". Not very convincing at all, especially since Olteca's accusation wasn't even difficult to rebut! Everything Ikki says to Olteca here rings hollow.

I think it's may be fair to expect and have Ikki try to understand Olteca, but, what if after Ikki actually tried, Olteca's proven to be irredeemable? Would having tragic backstory means they're free from any blames and it's still the only other party's fault? (e.g. Ikki is too much of an insensitive egotist thus he's complicit in being unable to redeem Olteca and keeps him going). What should Ikki do next after it's proven that he's beyond redemption? Tragic backstory to explain aside, Olteca is just like Asakura and Kitazaki in evilness - of which Shinji tried for Asakura but it's revealed that he's truly beyond redemption.

And I agree with the declaration sounding like prejudice (though he shouldn't be condemned for rubbing someone the wrong way), but, about you, didn't you think that it's only ok for someone to resort into for example, killing when they've given up their humanity such as turning themselves into monsters? I'd also think that while perhaps humans (normal, outside of KR) can be more neutralized, it should be also acknowledged that there can be human villains who are much worse than any monster, also not judging good/bad by species alone.