[Kamen Rider Die]

MASKED RIDER RYUKI SPECIAL: 13 RIDERS




I like alternate universe stories. I think they're fun. It's a chance to explore characters in new, unique ways. You can be more brutal, surprise the audience, make huge changes that'd never work in a regular setting. It's a chance to try new things, and I'm all about that.

So what a goddamn bummer it is for this special's huge swing to be What If Masked Rider Ryuki Wasn't Really About Anything. Like, it's a surprise, I'll give them that!

I'm only 2/3rds of the way done with Ryuki, and even that much of the show couldn't get crammed into what's basically a two-episode story. Trying to do an entire season's worth of plot was out the window, I get that. Stuff was going to have to get cut to make room. Dropping the whole idea of the Contract Monsters, it's not a huge loss. It's a level of complexity that you need to strip out to keep this story humming. Card Decks That Give Magic Powers is, like, it's fine. It's enough of the core concept to make an hour-long story still feel like Ryuki.

Stripping down the Ren/Shinji relationship to just a couple beats, that's harder to forgive. The Ren/Shinji frenemy thing, it's maybe the best part of Ryuki, and reducing that to the most basic We Aren't Friends/You're Too Naive/I'm Weak/Avenge Me arc for Ren... it's the most boring way you could approach their story. I mean, at least Ren gets an arc, it's more than you could say for anyone else, but it's still a shitty arc. There's no room to let the performance help out the dialogue, so it plays pretty unconvincing to me. I've spent 30-odd episodes watching Ren start to believe in Shinji, and for Shinji to start to understand Ren, but I didn't buy their decisions in this one at all. It's all echoes of more interesting stuff from Ryuki, but without the valuable connective tissue of why the characters make these decisions. Here, it's just hitting marks. Dull. Predictable.

But, man, the greatest sin of this thing is taking the entrenched ambiguity of Ryuki and making it Good Guy Versus Bad Guys. That's... ugh. You've got all these different motivations and goals and schemes in Ryuki, and you just have Shinji plus Ren versus Everyone Else. Why? When you have a blank canvas to paint on, why do a monochrome version of a rainbow? It's literally the thing that makes Ryuki special. It's not the Rider Battle, it's the why of the Rider Battle. With this, you just get a bunch of Riders fighting, and I could not have cared less about it.

There's a few interesting changes to the plotting, though. Nothing that makes up for what was taken out, but I did enjoy Kamen Rider Geico and his insane finishing move. (Being swung like a pendulum by his monster, and then doing a spinning piledriver? Amazing! And the legs of his victim sticking up out of frame is the cherry on top.) It's fun to have a successful businessman as a Rider, a dude who feels like his business accomplishments mean nothing next to the visceral thrill of proving his dominance in combat. That's clever, and I hope he shows up in the main series. Also, hey, nice to see Tezuka and Shibaura, even under diluted circumstances. (The changes to Tezuka's character... why?! Why rip away his interesting motivation to give him a thinner version of Ren's?)

This whole thing just felt like a fool's errand to me. In order to tell a semi-coherent version of Ryuki's story in under an hour, you've got to strip out all of the nuance, all of the ambiguity, all of the interesting moral dilemmas and hard-earned warmth and questions and grit... so that all you're left with is a lot of suits and a lot of fighting. I... I don't want that to be what Kamen Rider is? I want someone to use masked superheroes and rubber monsters to say something worth hearing. With this, it didn't feel like anything I hadn't heard a better version of before. This was like a bar band cover song of Ryuki.