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Originally Posted by Kamen Rider Die

Solid episode for Kusaka, maybe?

More of a powder by the end, really.

First of all, I'd like to give a big shout out to the massive fight scene between the Riders, Lucky Clover, and the Riotroopers that ends off-screen during the opening credits. You're doing the lord's work, son.

So, aside from the iconic death of Kusaka, this episode has one of my favorite plot turns in Faiz: the idea that the Orphenochs are an unstable evolution who will eventually be burned out by their own powers. This is what Murakami found out that made him freak out over the course of the last few episodes. I don't know what it is about this, but it's one of my favorite things about the Orphenochs, that they're an evolutionary dead end whose entire goal is based off of a tragic misunderstanding of their own nature.

The other thing I want to comment on now that we've gotten to that point is the rules that each belt uses and how Kusaka was able to wear all three. The Delta belt was the original prototype and one of its features is that anyone can use it. I'm not sure if this is what the show intended, but I feel like that was considered a design flaw. It's like someone at Smart Brain realized "hey, the clasps we use on this thing are really crappy and it just keeps falling off. We'd be in a lot of trouble if it fell off during a fight and ended up in the hands of, I don't know, some random guy on a motorcycle." The thing that occurred to me recently is that Faiz and Kaixa comes across like there were two different designers who tackled how to solve that problem. The Faiz belt won't allow anyone with less than x% Orphenoch DNA to use it while Kaixa just straight up kills undesired users. It really does feel like two different approaches to fixing Delta's compatibility issue.