[Kamen Rider Die]

KAMEN RIDER HIBIKI HYPER BATTLE VIDEO - "ASUMU, TRANSFORM - YOU CAN BECOME AN ONI, TOO!!"



"Hey, remember when
We could save kittens from trees
Or lunch on skyscrapers
Bring the villains to their knees"

-Say Hi, "Back Before We Were Brittle"

I want to like this video! It's goofy and sweet and, sure, it's 80% clip show stuff, but it's a story that's about Asumu!

It's just, it's a story about Asumu's burning desire to become an Oni that concludes with him using Armed Saber to destroy a reused monster suit and maaaaaaannnnn no.

As with the last story, there's some fun surface stuff. Asumu's interactions with the disk animals are great, and make me sort of long for a version of this show where the disk animals had discrete personalities. I like how the snake one's an enthusiastic kid that the others don't like, or how the blue wolf/whatever one is all about carb loading. There's a lot of little goofy personality traits that made the recap stuff easier to stomach. (It is constructed in the most boring way possible, though. It functions like someone's reading a Wikipedia entry on these characters.)

But the crux of this whole story is that Asumu's training hard to live his dream of becoming an Oni, and, no? Just, no? It could not get off on a worse foot than if Asumu was training to live his dream of being a cannibal, something that's roughly as supported within the last 33 episodes of Hibiki. It's such a dumb hook for a video, and while I can't ever get that mad at a story where Asumu rides a tricycle to impress judgmental toys, it just never ever worked for me. The whole premise feels ripped from a version of Kamen Rider Hibiki that never got made, and it's baffling that this was the story they went with for what's nominally a marketing outreach attempt. I get that it's a dream sequence or whatever (zero time given to how this even vaguely fits into continuity), but it's just not anything that the show ever put stock in, so it falls flat for me. If they want to steer Asumu's character in the direction of wanting to be an Oni, fine, but you can't just say He Really Wants To Be An Oni Now. Gotta set it up better than this.

I mean, points for having Asumu need to bail out Sabaki, who had already broken Kogure's record by defeating 31 Makamou that day, but that's about all I can give this one.