[NGW]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Talisman

Not gonna lie, what I read about Ren in the Secondary Riders thread really piqued my interest.

Ren is definitely one of the better main/secondary riders. And his growth over the show is fantastic.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Powerman293

Ryuki has really good story arcs. The one with Gai and Raia was pretty good but the one in the 30s with Alternative and Tiger is fucking amazing.

Agreed. It's such a character driven show and many of the arcs the characters go through are incredibly satisfying.

AAAAMAAAAAZOOOOOON!

...what the hell did I just watch?

So, as I said, Amazon is my first showa era season of Kamen Rider and having just finished the first episode I..really don't know what to say haha.

Being over 30 years old, yeah the show does show it's age. But I mean, it's over 30 years old, I can't imagine the budget was all that high, so yeah it's not going to look anything comparable to what we're seeing with shows like Wizard or Gaim, or even some of the older heisei era shows.

Plot-wise, again not really sure what to say. This was only the first episode, some very very basic things were..narrated, I do wish that we actually were shown a bit more early on rather than it just summed up and narrated to us, but I digress. Basically there's a 10-faced demon that wants this armlet, a wizardy science guy from the Amazon gives it to our titular hero, performs a ritual, says a few last words and then dies. Amazon makes it to Japan where the demon is doing demonic things and the guy he was told to meet that would explain things to him dies, he tears apart the monster and then howls into the setting sun, continuing his fight alone in his confusion. Oh and he sorta made friends with this kid who is the nephew of the guy he was supposed to meet up with.

We didn't really get too much characterization out of Daisuke, considering his dialogue is almost exclusively wild man sounds and howls that was kind of expected at this point. I'm hoping that he at least starts to learn a bit more Japanese or at least scales back the screaming a touch, wearing headphones while watching was giving me a bit of a headache. He seems like an alright dude though, all things considered.

Masahiko was your typical era kid, the kind you get used to after growing up on old Godzilla flicks. He wasn't annoying, which as about the best thing you can ask for in something like this.

The villain, well he's the villain. Not really sure what else to say about him at this point.

The fights were interesting. Having the rider literally ripping apart the monster with his hands and teeth was something else, especially given the use of blood. The only other season I know of to really do anything quite like that was Hibiki, and beyond blood now and then they dropped a lot of that fairly quickly.

Amazon is a really cool design too, far and away one of the most unique in the entire franchise. Aside from being an obvious body suit, not something I'd personally nitpick given the age of the show, it definitely has a much more organic look and feel, something only really attempted again in the failed Shin Kamen Rider. It's a nice change of pace and it's appreciated.

So yeah, it's a fairly short season and I liked what I saw, even if I don't really know what to make of it. So I will be sticking with it. Plus the music is that classic old Japanese toku kinda music that I grew up on in my Godzilla movies and Giant Robots and all that.