[Locke]

Okay, time to calm down and move onto the Wizard portion... My main question is, what the fuck was this trying to say? Much like the show, this isn't really Haruto's gig but the Gate's. Our Gate is a girl so disillusioned by the mundanity of reality, that she'd happily escape to an Underworld that repeats the same day infinitum, where she gets to be a superhero and save the world. What is more interesting, what is more confusing, is that this is presented in a negative light, Haruto and the gang are trying to get her to wake up from this and face reality.

This is a great moral message, "wake up and smell the coffee!" But wait...don't we turn to the repetitive, formulaic toku and its superheroes to escape the mundanity of our own realities? We know that near enough every toku episode is going to be the same, like groundhog day, and yet we happily tune in every week because it presents a black and white world, where things go right more than they go wrong, unlike our own lives. Aren't we all Poitrine? Is being an adult Toku fan the same as being in her Underworld? Is Wizard trying to tell the adults in the audience to move on and grow up? To stop criticising something made for children and just get on with their own lives? I'm probably over thinking this - giving it to much credit but I couldn't quite tell if I was meant to be offended by all this.

It was better than Fourze's portion though, either way. probably because Wizard is so consistently flawed that it is so much harder to fuck up. Haruto was as great as ever, but I wish this badass gunslinging version of Rinko would turn up in the show sometime. She was sexier than anything we were supposed to dribble over in the Fourze part.

Wizard is an insanely cool Rider but his powers are a lot more basic than Fourze's, so I appreciated how they made every moment exaggerated and stylish so he could complete visually, I had so much more fun watching Wizard than I did Fourze in the end because it seemed they put way more effort into his fights to balance it out.

The only thing that lets Wizard's portion down in the action is it seems they just found a load of old monster suits from Fourze and OOO and threw them in there. Bamba was pretty shit, to be fair, but at least he wasn't just an old dusted off costume. Plus even though this assumedly had a bigger budget, the giant CGI monster fights look just as awful here as they do in the show.