[ShyGuy]

Speaking of Hibiki, I finally finished it myself. The first half is some of the best Rider material I’ve seen. It was a very unique and refreshing take in a franchise that can sometimes get pretty stale and repetitive, and I really appreciate a show that tries to do something different, especially when it succeeds as well as Hibiki did. It had an incredibly likable and well-developed cast, great suit designs, and a fantastic sense of atmosphere with its more traditional Japanese aesthetic and the use of the mountains for so much of its setting. It started well and was really becoming something special, but then here came Inoue to clumsily stumble into the show, bringing with him all of his usual type of nonsensical story developments, plot holes, awful humor, and the absolute destruction of multiple characters’ entire story arcs and personalities. It’s almost impressive how effectively he managed to completely trash something that was set up so well, and I have plenty to say on that, but let’s start with the positive.

Of all the many positive things there are to say about the first half of the series, the characters are the best part. I really liked the decision to have someone besides the main Rider be the viewpoint character. It helps further differentiate this series from the ones before it, and Asumu and Hibiki have great chemistry. The gradual building up of their relationship and clear path it’s taking towards Asumu becoming Hibki’s apprentice was really well done, and it’s a shame we never got to see where exactly it was leading to under the show’s original vision. The way it actually ended is legitimately one of the worst story developments I’ve ever seen in a Rider series but I’ll talk about that later.

Despite the focus on Hibiki and Asumu as the central characters, I actually think the character who ended up as my favorite is Todoroki. We see him go through a lot, from a clingy and somewhat insecure apprentice to a confident and independent veteran. He really felt like the star of the show to me, with how much development he gets and just how generally likable he is. The show does a great job of articulating his insecurities about how he compares to Zanki, and I liked the dynamic they had a lot. Todoroki’s storyline even managed to survive Inoue’s blundering mostly intact, leaving it the one kind of tolerable thing left after his disastrous arrival.

The one major character I didn’t really care for all that much even before Inoue showed up is Ibuki. He just never seemed that compelling to me, he was kind of bland and just generally didn’t do much or have anything interesting going on. He wasn’t bad or anything, just an unfortunately average character in a series full of great ones. Considering his age I thought there was a lot of potential in exploring his status as someone who is so young but already a mentor, and the complications and difficulties that can come with that. But while his relationship with Akira is interesting, it never really delved into that specific element of it and was really more about Akira anyway, his role was mostly to enable her story.

And on that note, Akira’s story is one of the major victims of Inoue showing up. Akira’s entire storyline was about her being an Oni trainee, and it was blatantly obvious it was heading in the direction of her eventually achieving this, but if there’s one thing Inoue can’t seem to stand, it’s letting women have their own storylines other being stereotypical emotional support. The reasoning for why Akira gives up her goal of being an Oni is flimsy at best, total nonsense in reality. It goes against her entire established character, but it doesn’t matter because it wasn’t about the story, it was about Inoue’s inability to allow women to be strong characters in their own right. The way women are treated in Kamen Rider is an issue across the entire franchise, but it comes across as far more mean spirited in Inoue’s work than others and it’s really apparent here.

And then of course there’s the single worst thing Inoue brings to Hibiki: Kyousuke. There was absolutely no reason at all for this guy to show up in the first place, but regardless, he shows up and he’s awful immediately. He’s an enormous asshole, obsessed with Hibiki to a stalker-like degree, and no matter what happens to him or how many people try to correct his thinking and behavior, he never changes even in the slightest bit. Worst of all though isn’t the character himself, it’s the way the show completely validates him. A character like that isn’t necessarily bad, but it’s a major problem when other characters can’t recognize that he’s bad. It’s like Kusaka in Faiz, everyone seems completely blind to the obvious fact that this guy is actually terrible. But it’s even worse here because in order to make it work, all of these great characters had to suddenly become enormous morons and/or sudden terrible judges of character. It’s completely absurd that Hibiki actually takes him as an apprentice, while Asumu is suddenly completely shafted and just quits for literally no reason at all (And that’s not even getting into the disastrous mishandling of Asumu’s entire character in general in the second half). Everything about Kyousuke is so terrible that I was actively angry while watching this show any time he was on screen.

Hibiki has to be the most frustrating Rider show I’ve seen so far. It had such a good first half, only to be suddenly handed over to the absolute last person who should ever be allowed near this franchise. The second half isn’t just bad, it actively spits in the face of everything the show was doing up to that point, to the degree that it actually felt like a deliberate decision to trash the show out of spite. I now understand why I’ve seen Switchblade often refer to Hibiki as having only 29 episodes, and it’s a sentiment I can get behind 100%. What we got after episode 29 was not even the same show, so we’ll have to accept the fact that Hibiki is essentially unfinished and only made it halfway through its run. I’m just glad I can finally move on from this mess, and on to Kabuto. I don’t know what I’ll think of Kabuto, but it can only go up from here.