[Fish Sandwich]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kamen Rider Die

TOKUMEI SENTAI GO-BUSTERS MISSION 35 - “LET MANE LI-OH ROAR!”

I always recall this one as feeling like truly standard Sentai storytelling in a lot of ways it seemed to me Go-Busters used to consciously avoid? It's sort of difficult to really qualify that, and there are plenty of episodes of this show you could also argue fit the same bill (including earlier ones, I'm sure!), so I think the reason this one gets singled out by my mind is mostly... I might mean it as a criticism, in this case?

I feel like that might be connected to why the attempts the episode makes to ground the narrative in the show's established world ended up falling so flat for Die? It's not like I'm saying an episode where the heroes have to tame some awesome new animalistic robot and earn its trust is ever gonna be *not* exciting, but when you try and do that in a show like Go-Busters instead of Gaoranger or even Shinkenger or something, you need to explain why someone would build some weird lion robot that doesn't work the way all the other robots in the show do, and I kinda feel for Shimoyama's dilemma there. The episode makes the effort to give Tategami Li-Oh's existence a suitably dramatic context that you can get some story out of, but for slightly different reasons, I've also always been a little mixed on the execution.

All that being said, *as* a standard Sentai plot, it's got all sorts of fundamental qualities built into it, and being a Go-Busters episode, it's not like it's without its redeeming qualities. I just spent all those words dunking on it, but it's also hard to care too much about the potential nuanced differences in the writing style when all the characters still feel like the characters I love, and I get to see that red robot I adore riding a sick giant lion robot that turns into a tricycle.