[Fish Sandwich]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kamen Rider Die

trying to give Meteor a moral victory over Leo in a final speech felt forced, but whatever

One of the many distinct yet scattered specific memories I have with this finale is watching it again on a whim, I believe sometime during Wizard (maybe before Ultimatum was subbed too?), in that period I've probably mentioned somewhere in these threads at least once where my overall passion for tokusatsu had cooled just a tiny bit compared to how it usually is, now and before.

I was so invested in Fourze from the beginning, it should go without saying that I found watching the last episode a very emotional experience the first time. It shouldn't be a surprise that I found it very emotional that second time either. The thing about that second viewing that I remember most though, what really caught me off guard, was that it was actually that little mini-finale for Ryuusei that pushed me into that territory of just being like, destroyed, before I even got to the much more emotional graduation bit that I expected to do me in all over again. I'm sure it had to something to do with the distance from the show -- it now being an old show versus the newest one -- but I just got so caught up thinking of how much these characters meant to me, and all the joy I felt, not even just watching the show, but simply knowing the show was there for me to watch, that the really simple and obvious idea of Meteor turning his catchphrase around like that in the end suddenly hit me like a truck. Like I hadn't really been giving it the space in my mind it deserved, but all of a sudden, yeah, that whole Leo/Meteor rivalry really had a great payoff, didn't it? This show had a really great payoff.

If I ever tried to do an episode-by-episode deep dive on this show, it scares me to think how long I'd end up feeling the need to go on about this one episode. There's just something to say about pretty much every last scene, and even trying to just hit the major bullet points in this thread is a little overwhelming to think about.

Like, the letter-reading scene's pretty great, right? I believe there's a whole anecdote about how the staff deliberately made that all those actors' final day of filming, letting the KRC all be in one room with just each other, which is appreciably sentimental but also just cruel? I haven't checked the exact facts on this in a while, but I'm pretty sure at least Yuuki's crying there basically involved no performance at all.

And then like, the graduation thing is the big showstopper, and you'd think Die writing all that he did so eloquently would about cover it, but there's so many layers going on there! I know Switchblade mentioned when it was used earlier that he doesn't like that Kamen Rider Girls cover of Saite at all, and I think back when 25/26 aired, I didn't like it either, but here, I thought it worked fantastically to add to the emotion of the scene. I really appreciated how well edited the whole sequence is to match the gradually ramping intensity of the song itself. And like, of course I love that Fourze ends with Gentarou shaking the main villain's hand. What else could it be, you know? There's a very strong overlap between Die's taste in Rider finales and mine there, so that's the part I don't need to repeat too much. I appreciated each and every week of watching Kamen Rider Fourze for that whole year, but this conclusion in particular is extraordinarily special to me. I don't know if it's like my favorite Rider finale or any concrete way like that I could try qualifying it, but I think about this episode a ton, and it's certainly something that comes to mind almost immediately when thinking about Fourze.