[Switchblade]

I've not been the biggest fan of Saber so far, but I definitely think it's been steadily improving as a show. It's gone from being what I thought of as "interestingly bad" to "decent but flawed." There's definitely still a lot of room for improvement, but I feel like it's moving in the right direction.

For me, the biggest issue is still pacing. When I was in college there was this webcomic I used to read called "Bob and George." It was a sprite comic - all the art assets were just edited sprites from Mega Man games - but that wasn't the original goal. The artist wanted to do a hand drawn comic but wasn't ready to launch it yet so he used the sprites as a placeholder. When the hand drawn comic started he intended for it to be this really slow burn comic about a couple of brothers who, ultimately, would turn out to have super powers and be each other's nemesis. This would play out over several years, starting as more of a slice-of-life strip before gradually introducing the superhuman elements. In practice, the superhero stuff started about five strips into the run because the artist was too impatient to go through all the build up and establish the world and characters before getting to the main plot. I feel like this is Saber's problem, too.

Saber is a show with a lot of lore and a lot of characters. That's not inherently a problem; as others have pointed out, this isn't unheard of in Kamen Rider. The issue with Saber is that it wants to get right to the good stuff with lost memories, betrayals, hidden identities, rivalries, personal struggles for power-ups, etc. without setting much baseline for who these characters are first. We have the entire team of Rider in place by episode 12 where it took shows like Gaim twice as long to really bring in everyone. Nothing is given time to breathe and it often feels like we have two or three episodes crammed into 23 minutes, minus credits, Tassel scenes, and transformation stock footage. Basically, the show has a lot of interesting ideas, but it's been trying to run before it learns to walk.