[Switchblade]

I think Gaim is as "dark" of a series as we're going to get now. Toei's current approach seems to be to move away from gory deaths and high body counts like we got around 2000/01. I'm not going to pretend for one second that I don't kind of miss that (Kuuga and Agito are two of my favorite Rider shows, after all), but recently Toei's been more into monsters that try to make people feel bad rather than kill them. We seem to be getting a bit more mindless rampaging in Gaim, but we're not going to see a bunch of dudes get stabbed and then dissolve into sand anymore.

Storywise, Gaim is shaking up to be pretty dark, but it's more of a psychological darkness than a violent one. We're dealing with a show where a big corporation is handing out powerful weapons to teenagers to see what will happen. There's no monsters eating people, but that's still pretty fucked up. I think that's what we're going to see from "dark" Rider shows - stories with more mature plot twists and creepy motives rather than mountains of corpses.

Personally, I'm largely fine with that. I do miss the days when monsters seemed like a legitimate threat to everyone. It gave the show a bit more edge and made the monsters more terrifying. I will always maintain that Ryuki had the scariest set-up of any Rider series - behind any reflective surface there could be a horrifying creature that could suddenly reach out, grab you, and then drag you off to be lunch. Stuff like that always felt like the stakes were higher than "we have to stop that Phantom from smashing that little boy's model airplane or else he'll be sad!" But we're not going to get that anymore. I think Gaim is a good compromise, though; the beasts rampage, but aren't going on killing sprees, and the real horror is what the people behind the monsters are up to.