[StardustWhip]

- I really enjoyed this episode! I don't think it gripped me in quite the same way that Geats or Zero-One did (to compare it to past Takahashi-written series), but it's still really exciting, both on a simple "new Rider season" level, and because the episode itself was just really well written.

- I like Baku as a protagonist. The early trailers had me thinking at first he'd be a suave cool guy hero like Ace or Tendou, and that would've been interesting enough, but I really like this approach where he's just a generally nice and rather dorky guy that really just wants to help people, and becomes a suave secret agent in his dreams. It goes well with the dreams motif of this season, I think, and I'm interested in seeing where he goes from here.

- On the negative side, I'll echo the complaints that the nighttime fight wasn't very exciting, in terms of first-episode Rider fights. Not bad, but it was hard to tell what was happening at times, and the fight choreography wasn't as dynamic as it could be/often is; presumably to keep it from being too hard for the suit actors to tell what's going on. Holding out hope that future fight scenes will be better though; we've already seen a few daytime/indoors fights in the trailers, and I'm hoping that the fight choreography will be better when those come around.

Quote:

Originally Posted by GoldenXtreme

Minor quibble to start with: I kind of assumed that TokuSHOUTsu would have like some kind of "episode starting in X minutes" countdown after the prior episode ended, that way each episode airing would start at every half hour on the dot. But they literally run back to back nonstop, so for someone trying to catch the new episode after the initial airing it's pretty much impossible to get on the stream at the right moment. I'll probably just try to jump on the premier next time, even if it is a little late for me.

- Yeah... I remember waiting 'til 11:00 PM to put on the stream since I wasn't there in time for the premiere, and ended up jumping in when Baku was in the hospital. Luckily I wised up pretty quickly and just waited fourteen more minutes, but it'd be nice if the episodes were aired at 30-minute intervals, rather than back to back to back like they did for premiere.