[ShyGuy]

Finished Faiz, and what an experience that was. I’m well aware of Inoue’s divisive reputation, and while I did have my issues with Agito towards the end, I enjoyed it overall. Faiz, though, is a mess from start to finish. It has a lot of cool ideas, but the execution is so bad it drives all of the potential this show had right into the ground.

There are a lot of problems with this show, but most egregious of them all is that the majority of the characters are either incredibly unlikeable and/or wildly inconsistent in their characterization. The fact that the main protagonist is one of the primary offenders of this just exacerbates the problem. After three seasons of cheerful nice guy protagonists, Takumi is a very notable break in that pattern. In theory it could make for a nice change of pace to have someone more grounded and with a darker backstory to explore, but like most things in Faiz, it’s squandered potential. In actuality, Takumi is just an ass. His childish temperament and refusal to communicate basic information that would solve so many pointless misunderstandings is incredibly frustrating, because there’s never a real reason for it given. Yes, there’s the stuff later on with the reveal that he’s the Wolf Orphnoch and that’s why he’s hesitant to get close to people, and to be fair he does become more tolerable after this and less abrasive. But again, for the most part he just comes across as an ass, and even with the explanation they give, there are so many instances where his behavior just comes across as nonsensical or, at worst, completely idiotic.

Most of the other characters aren’t handled much better. Mari and Keitaro were fine. Kiba was the one character I actively liked for the most part, up until the end when they absolutely butchered all of his character development up to that point. For most of the show he’s so set in his beliefs and ideals of living as a human and protecting them, it goes completely against his established character the way he becomes a villain. It’s so sudden and basically out of nowhere, and the whole thing about him losing faith in all of humans because of one incident is completely absurd because of how much it contradicts all of his personality up to then. In the span of hardly any time at all he goes from a peaceful guy trying to just live his life, to straight up executing Kusaka in an incredibly brutal manner, and deciding to wipe out all of humanity. But of course, all of this conveniently shifts again back to where he was, just in time for his heroic sacrifice. The way Kiba’s storyline falls apart so hard by the end is honestly one of the worst examples of character writing I’ve seen so far in Kamen Rider. And that’s so unfortunate, because up to that point I thought he was one of the better characters, and his actor was great. It just sucked to see it go down that way.

By the end of the show, I actually think Kusaka ended up as my favorite character, as crazy as that sounds. I absolutely hated the guy, but in contrast to many of the other characters, his characterization was at least consistent throughout the story. It’s common to have secondary Riders who have conflict with the main Rider or are otherwise kind of nasty and antagonistic, but Kusaka takes that to a whole other level. He’s 100% a villain, he’s only on the “good side” in the most technical way possible, and just because he hates the Orphnoch even more than he hates the others. His actor clearly had a great time playing him, all of his crazy-eyed evil smiles and enraged rants were great. He was like a little Dan Kuroto Jr. The worst thing about Kusaka wasn’t so much him, but how the characters around him were so insanely oblivious of what an enormous piece of shit he is. It’s so incredibly obvious, especially by the end when he isn’t even pretending otherwise, but they’re all still talking about him as if he’s some great guy or hero. It’s complete ridiculous.

Yuka and Kaido started out interesting, but quickly developed their own problems. Yuka is completely superfluous to the plot for the vast majority of the show, her story just suddenly stops dead near the beginning and she doesn’t do anything again until the end. And even then, the only point it serves is to further Kiba’s story and cause the travesty of his final story arc. With Kaido, it’s like they had no idea what his personality was supposed to be. At various times early on it almost makes him out to be a villain and treats him kind of seriously, or it plays him as comic relief. It goes back and forth on this for a while before eventually settling on comic relief, and it’s pretty jarring.

For the villains, I thought for the most party they were pretty boring. Their motivations weren’t interesting and Lucky Clover barely ever felt genuinely threatening. Kusaka was a far better villain than any of the characters who were actually supposed to be the main villains.

For the plot itself, I don’t have much to say, other than that it was a story that should have ended far earlier than it did if its characters weren’t all either assholes, stupid, or both. So much of it feels so contrived, but the ending is by far the worst part, the Orphnoch King plot is so rushed and sudden. It doesn’t quite come out of nowhere because there are references to him dropped throughout the show, but his debut up through the ending all feels very poorly paced. He’s also not explained at all, what is his connection to the kid? It seems as if he’s an entirely separate entity possessing the body of the kid, but there’s no effort at all to even provide a bare minimum explanation. And then the final battle with him literally just stops mid-battle, he somehow survived, but everyone else is acting as if it’s over. What the hell happened? It just blatantly skips hugely important context for this, and then the show is over literal minutes later. It wasn’t just the worst ending to a Rider show I’ve ever seen, it was one of the worst endings I’ve ever seen to anything, period.

I wish I had more positive things to say about Faiz, but honestly I thought this show was mostly a total disaster. I do think it had a lot of potential, I loved the suit designs and thought it was really cool how they weren’t necessarily tied to one user, they got passed around pretty often. That’s a concept I liked a lot that hasn’t really been explored much in any series since, but I would like to see again. I also liked the designs of the Orphnoch. But really, those are the only good things I can say about Faiz. I think it had a lot of potential buried somewhere in there, but it was buried very, very deep. At the moment, I can safely say Faiz is the worst KR series I’ve watched so far. Very glad to be moving on to Blade.