[Kamen Rider Die]

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Originally Posted by FreshToku

Funny (also sad) to think what kind of ideas were floating around yet they settled for 'extended epilogue where the bad guys try to perform an evil experiment on hitomi'.

Yeah, man, I can't even conceive of a stupider final story. It's almost worthy of praise, it's so jarring and pathetic.

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Originally Posted by Androzani84

I’m in much the same boat as you. The second half does have its ups and its downs, but I wouldn’t call it objectively terrible. That tweet I quoted a while back? He later said that Hibiki had become his favourite Heisei Rider series (displacing Kuuga) partially because of it.

It's Not As Awful As Its Reputation is probably the best way I can distill the second phase into one thought.

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Originally Posted by Deepsea

I just want to say this before the thread ends, but 38 and 39 were written by someone named Shōji Yonemura not Inoue. I'm not sure what circumstances lead to the episodes being so bad though. I don't have experience with his other writings. (He wrote Smile Precure though, so that's a thing)

Yeah, that came up. The basic problem with those episodes is that they feature a couple characters acting wildly out-of-character, and the story tries to do way too much. It's about four episodes worth of ideas done over two.

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Originally Posted by Fish Sandwich

There's a joking defense I like to make about the later part of Hibiki, which is that it's a lot better if you just pretend it's Inoue's Todoroki fan-fiction. I've been meaning to find some excuse to bring that up in here, and I guess you confirming for me I'm not just misremembering the (excessive?) amount of focus he gets is just that. It's not some particularly clever thing, but I love describing it that way because it straddles a fine line between sounding like genuine apologist talk ("you just need to adjust your expectations") and an outright condemnation ("it's about the quality you'd expect from your average fan-fic").

That ambiguity expresses my conflicted feelings on what happened to this show pretty much perfectly; I don't actually hate it anywhere near as much as I think a lot of people do, but even then, I wouldn't exactly say I'm fond of it on any significant level either. Except maybe those first two Inoue episodes, which, again, I legitimately mistook for part of the old era somehow.

There's a part of me that wonders if the show wouldn't have been... not better, but more successful in marrying the coming-of-age storytelling with the demands of the superhero genre if they'd made Todoroki the POV character for the whole series. He ends up going through a lot of the same tensions that Asumu does (confidence, independence, apprenticeship), but he's also an Oni, so he gets to apply those lessons directly to detonating a monster. I don't know that you'd get as much sweetness, but it'd probably make some of the writing easier.

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Originally Posted by Sh Ranger

Y'know, the funny thing is that I remember being very disappointed by Hibiki's second half. After rewatching the show, I've re-evaluated my opinion to mildly disappointed. I've seen Inoue do better, he wrote my favorite show, but I've also seen him do worse. I can tell he was at least trying to do something here. Maybe it didn't totally work but the stuff that worked was worth watching for.

For sure. I think the ending especially landed the themes of the series, which is maybe enough to say that the second phase is worth experiencing.

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Originally Posted by GrandComplete

The main reason Inoue and Shirakura were brought into the 2nd half was because Agito,Ryuki and Faiz were all critical and commercial success. The higher up probably were thinking along the lines of these guys made us alot a cash a couple of years ago let them have Hibiki in order to get our ratings and sponsers back. Without thinking about how there style of writing and producing clashed with Taketera style.

It's fun to think that Inoue took one look at the previous scripts and went But What If We Do More With The Kid Not Wanting To Be A Superhero Though.