[DreadBringer]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kamen Rider Die

The fights and finishers, it's... this goes back to the need for balance, it's like punctuation when it's used correctly. If they've told their story well, with recognizable emotions and coherent themes, if they're saying something worth listening to, when they HENSHIN and brawl and detonate a monster, it feels like the exclamation mark on the sentence. When the villains get the upper hand, when the heroes get the floor wiped with their faces, that beating becomes an ellipsis, the story holding its breath or teasing out a pause.

For the collectibles, I got mad at Ghost for doing them badly, not for doing them at all. Like, I love that shit. I unironically love Gashats and Eyecons and Shift Cars and all of that. It's totally for kids, but, y'know, so is Kamen Rider? What keeps me coming back to Kamen Rider, what keeps me watching series and falling in love all over again, it's how it's a franchise designed to sell toys to children AND a vehicle for exploring the need for empathy, the horrors of war, the value of cooperation, and a limitless number of other themes. I wouldn't want a Kamen Rider show to sacrifice either one of those ingredients to add more of the other.

Nothing wrong to me too for more collectibles like Shift Cars (as a car enthusiast), Gaia Memory, Gashat, etc. What I dislike is doing them badly like underutilizing the diverse powersets provided by the collectibles (well, all the Rider powers are provided by the collectibles, so more collectibles = more power) which means just bring up that collectible to use once, then never use it again, especially for more advanced forms that has cool combinations like Fourze Cosmic States.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kamen Rider Die

Like, I think calling out Makoto's development in the first dozen episodes is maybe another way of pointing out what really didn't work for me in those first string of episodes: Makoto isn't the main character, Takeru is. If the secondary Rider has the most complex, exciting storyline at the beginning of your show, something went real wrong. There's totally a place for the non-title Riders to take the spotlight, and that's after the winter movie. I mean, the Alain arc! That's when you want to see more from the other Riders, because you've already shown the audience why they should care about the main Rider. With Ghost, I feel like they didn't really start making Takeru interesting until after they made Makoto interesting and as they were making Alain interesting. Takeru, for me in the beginning, felt like a secondary Rider who was inexplicably given more screen time than the primary Rider.

More like that for KR formula, the primary Rider should be the goody-two-shoes, the secondary one is more free and commonly filled with darker, grim, more anti-heroic character, even if the secondary is more interesting and fleshed out. Well, there are series that doesn't follow this like Kabuto or Faiz (Tendou and Takumi are jerks), but most do.