[Gold Ninja Drive]

Ok, so I'm not used to typing out my thoughts like this so sorry if I end up rambling a bit.

I've been a fan of KR for a while now, but most of my experience with the franchise has been with the post-Decade shows. I've watched Den-O all the way through Ghost (in fact Decade was what started me on this oddly enough), and while I have watched Kuuga and parts of Ryuki, I haven't seen any Showa stuff yet partially out of the fear that the older quality will mean I'll get bored or disinterested. But with the Amazons trailer grabbing my attention, I figured now would be a good time as any to get into the Showa era, starting with Kamen Rider Amazon. And since I should probably DO something with the account I have here, I'll try to give some of my opinions on the show as I go along. So here's my first impressions on the first episode:

...wooooow. That video quality. It's not bad, in fact it has a bit of charm to it, but it's definitely a bit jarring at first. It felt like a mix between an old war documentary and a children's cartoon... wait nevermind, that demon just puked acid blood on a forest, definitely not a children's cartoon. Eh, I'm sure I'll get used to it though. I got used to Kuuga pretty quickly.

As I went along, the characters didn't seem too bad, but the guy who played Kousaka seemed... like he wasn't particularly interested in what he was doing. It didn't help that it was kind of obvious that the voices were from a recording booth. The others were fine and engaging though, even the kid surprisingly. Though the fact that right after Kousaka mentioned "enemies" the kid's sister just let the kid outside on his own without a second thought was a little funny. And I liked the bonding moment that happened between him and Amazon. For some reason, I was silently hoping that he wouldn't get killed.

...Oh no, this is much worse. Traumatize him with a monster nearly killing his new jungle buddy. Speaking of which, was the monster on the boat with Amazon? I wasn't really sure but it looked like it had followed him all the way from the Amazon, so were they fighting on the boat the whole time it was at sea? Oh well, whatever. The action's pretty good and very primal feeling (duh). The sound effects everywhere were a little weird, but not too distracting. Except when it was during a non-action scene, that was a little weird.

One downside to the episode is that it felt like there wasn't much of an overarching plot, and the characters were just meandering around with occasional monster attacks. Also, it felt kind of annoying that he kept fighting it without transforming, even though it was obviously not working. I can let that slide though, since it's only the first episode.

Overall I found it quite enjoyable, and while there wasn't much that really grabbed my attention so far, I still want to keep going and see what happens with it.