[Black Fang]

The issue is that a show like Kamen Rider, by its nature, requires a specific tone and specific elements. You can go up and down the scale of how much you want to have, but you can't go too far into the light, wacky nonsense side just because "it's a kids' show" and that's as far as you want to think about it.

Fourze's lighter tone ended up hurting it because of the story it was telling: you can't have a setting where an alien-worshiping cult is running a school seeking out recruits and treat it happy-go-lucky. (I like Fourze for the most part, by the way, but I do think it underachieved.) You can't have a Liveman-esque "Friends, why have you sold your souls to the devil?" setup (where the heroes' fellow classmates are becoming Horoscopes) and not do more with it. Yuki vs Aquarius, JK vs Capricorn, Pisces as a rogue, Ares, Taurus, all could've gone places if they hadn't rushed through the Horoscopes to get to the ending, and used these characters for longer arcs.

This whole "be light in the face of real-life bad stuff" is the argument for Ohranger's schizophrenia. I think that was a missed opportunity also: a "hope over adversity" message with maybe some tweaking of the original story (but not to the extent that they did) could've worked and been much more meaningful.