[Fish Sandwich]

Quote:

Originally Posted by HenshinTrouble

I'd read that in a snap. My enjoyment or lack thereof of those two episodes had to do with how much I knew of the "guests." Kikaider I didn't know much about, so it was just okay. ToQger I knew and like a lot so I enjoyed that one more.

Well I don't think I have that level of energy right now but I will say a couple things.

The ToQger crossover is basically the Sentai/Rider teamup everybody had been asking for. They meet a minute in, are instantly on the same side, and they fight bad guys. It's simple and it works, and while the Gaim characters are admittedly a tiny bit off, I think they deserve credit for taking two very different shows and putting them together as well as they did, like making Gaim's darker tone a plot point as Kouta basically tells the ToQgers to skip town. It's not even close to perfection, but taking two shows with polar opposite tones should've been a total trainwreck (pun not intended), and it wasn't, and for that I think it deserves a lot of credit. The Drive/Ninninger crossover was actually worse in my mind, and those shows lend themselves way more to doing a crossover.

The Kikaider crossover is mostly just a neat done-in-one side story. I won't stick up for it nearly as much as the ToQger one, and it suffered from poor timing too, but I think they were clearly having fun with it. You get to see Professor Ryouma put his brain in a robot death machine, and if that isn't in character for him, I don't know what is. I'm also personally fond of how many scenes in it involve Kouta hanging out with Akira in their apartment. Kouta's domestic life was an element of the show I always liked seeing because I felt it really grounded Kouta's character in a way other Rider protagonists usually weren't.

I also really like all the movies Gaim was in, although the Movie War with Wizard suffers from Kaito being massively out of character, but only because the writer made the same assumptions about his personality early on that audience did, so even that I find hard to hold against it.