[Kamen Rider Die]

KAMEN RIDER W EPISODE ? - “A BOWL OF α - FAREWELL TO THE RECIPE OF LOVE”



I don’t know if it’s a good thing or a bad thing, but the weirdest part of this HBV is how easily you could slot it into the regular series without making basically any alterations.

Like, I think this special is actually less weird than the last two-parter? The biggest HBV flight of fancy is the Iron Chef riff in the middle, and that’s less strange than both a seven-hour Dopant-directed fantasy film, as well as all of Team Double (and several cops!) dropping everything to make an amateur film as a form of drug rehabilitation. What’s here is, frankly, a fairly standard – if brief – W adventure. Someone in Fuuto is in trouble, Shotaro and the gang suss it out, a Dopant fight, some hope for the perp, closeout gag, credits. This thing is basically the template for all of W.

Which isn’t so bad? If it keeps from ever going as enticingly off-the-rails as the best HBVs (Faiz, Zi-O, lemme know which other ones I’ve forgotten), at least it all feels like a legit W Double adventure, that might as well be canon. It’s actually one of the stronger recent cases, because it goes back to the strength of the show’s beginning: this is small-stakes stuff that is so intrinsically Fuuto that it’s worth the time of our heroes. Shotaro’s look of determination when he vows to bring the villains behind the Fuu-Men cart’s destruction to justice? That’s as invested in a case as I’ve seen that dude in a minute.

But the heart of this thing for a lot of folks is probably the Iron Chef sequence, which is good, if maybe a little overlong. It’s trying so hard to ape that cooking competition's approach that it kind of forgets to be weird, and settles for being characterful. The three chefs are exactly how you’d expect – Akiko is clever, Terui is efficient, and Shotaro is so committed to his cosplay detective aesthetic that he forgets to make an edible meal, but in a sort of charming way. It’s a cute bit, if maybe a little too into its homage.

As a result, what might’ve been a bizarre pseudo-canonical entry for another series is a fairly on-point W mystery. Not sure if that’s good or bad, but it sure was surprising.