[Switchblade]

Five things I loved about Wizard:

1. Haruto. I've said it several times now and I'll always happily repeat it: I think Haruto is one of the best main Riders of the Heisei era. He's proactive, he's dedicated to his mission, and he can be very pragmatic when he has to be but still has a lot of compassion.

2. Fueki's plan. Everything he was doing made sense and fit together. His daughter died so he tried to use the Sabbat to resurrect her. All he did was make a bunch of Phantoms and a Wizard. So he had the Phantoms go around throwing people into despair, ostensibly to make more Phantoms but secretly as a plot to find three more Wizards to power his resurrection ritual. The whole thing made sense and fit with everything we'd seen happen, something that was a great change of pace after Fourze's villain and his total lack of convincing motive or rationale.

3. The action. Wizard had some truly great fight scenes. The hero and villain suits looked good and the fight choreography was top notch.

4. Mayu. The first female Rider to actually survive a series. She was also an interesting character with a good plot arc and the actress did a really good job playing both her and Medusa.

5. Rinko's ass. Mmm...

And five things I didn't like about Wizard:

1. Shunpei. Everything about him. I have never seen a more obnoxious and detestable character in all of Kamen Rider. I'd take an entire series of Amane, teen Amane from Missing Ace, and Ozaki from Den-O over two minutes of Shunpei doing pratfalls in his rainbow tights.

2. Koyomi. For a character that was very much at the heart of the entire series, Koyomi was a total failure. The actress was too busy to bother showing up to film anything, which meant that the show never had a chance to develop her as a character. Because of that, any emotional connection we were supposed to have was completely absent, which really robbed the ending of any real emotional impact.

3. Beast. I actually do like Nitou, but the show obviously didn't take him seriously. He's up there with G3 and Delta as one of the most useless Kamen Riders ever. He really didn't contribute anything meaningful to the series until the very end, and he did that by just breaking his belt.

4. The pacing. The two-episode arc structure really fell apart during Fourze, leaving it's overall plot a total mess as the show had to rush through half the Horoscopes and the master villain reveal in the space of about the last twelve episodes. Wizard somehow managed to be even worse in that regard, though, as while I do think the plot holds together well and really does work, it also spends massive stretches of episodes just treading water. We needed to get Mayu earlier and space out Yuzuru and Todoroki more so that the extra Wizards thing was an ongoing development, not an endgame one. We needed Koyomi to be present. The story could have worked so much better, but it was hamstrung by having to have every storyline be a two-parter with a new victim of the fortnight.

5. The Mage suits. I get that they were a way to save money, but Mayu, Yuzuru, and Todoroki deserved proper, non-ugly suits of their own. I think Toei was just afraid to revive the multi-Rider show idea and it left the three Mages looking awful in their recycled movie mook suits.

Bonus #6. Shunpei. Again. Because it bears repeating.