[dreamcastegirl]

Cat on lap, I finally watched the entirety of Kobayashi Yasuko's Kamen Rider Ryuki, which is full of unnecessary grimness, punctuated only by moments of tiresome slapstick. Having re-watched Den-o last year, I find myself increasingly convinced that Kobayashi's better work is certainly on the other of Toei's big franchises, her Super Sentai shows; Ryuki is barely a Kamen Rider show, a conceit that it openly admits in the absurdity of its dream sequence Hyper Battle Video special, Kamen Rider Ryuki vs. Kamen Rider Agito. For much of what this show is, I understand the thinking behind why it happened, the Heisei shows were three series in and beginning to find their feet, to work out what kind of stories they wished to tell—it's just a shame that these stories are only really tangentially related to the idea of what a Kamen Rider represents and the kind of stories that had gone before them. Having said that, I'm not sure what is worse, the idea of these standalone shows as their own contained things where the term "Kamen Rider" is used but means something very different from the Showa era, or the later attempts by Toei to connect the dots in these shows and fashion a new multiverse of Heisei Riders. Perhaps I should not be too judgemental regarding this approach as the DCD and Zi-o arcs dealing with Ryuki's story are the only times I really enjoyed being in this world.

For the most part, Ryuki is a dry run for its successor, 555, another show that fails to present the audience with any traditional Rider characters but does a slightly better job of it. The story of Ryuki details the machinations of Kanzaki Shiro as, in order to address his personal loss, he opens the door to an alternate dimension glimpsed only through mirrors and offers a chance to thirteen different individuals to become "Kamen Riders" and compete in a battle royale against one another for the prize of reshaping reality. For 50 episodes, one movie, one TV special, and one video tape that came free with an issue of the magazine, Terebi-kun, Ryuki presents a number of iterations of the events that comprise its story, but none of them really add anything; in different versions, there are glimpses of different characters who each make their specific timelines notable—Sakakibara Koichi, the former Ryuki in 13 Riders, Kirishima Miho in Episode: Final—but for the most part, the story is a bland back and forth as main character, Kido Shinji, struggles to convince other Riders to not fight, and they ignore him. Every episode, there is also a considerable amount of time wasted on the supporting cast of Kido's workplace, a internet news site named Ore Journal; every character in these sequences could have been expunged from the narrative and it would have made no difference.

I disliked the heroes of Ryuki so much that I actively began to sympathise with minor antagonist, Asakura Takeshi, and major antagonist, Kanzaki. For a Kamen Rider show, even after watching the whole thing, I find that I still don't actually know half of the official aliases of the Riders, and now they will forever be stuck in my mind with names such as Scissor-Man-Crab-Hands.

Ah, you might be thinking, but dreamcastegirl, we know you of old, and we've long since learnt not to trust your opinions on things. Well, fear not friends, because Toei have just uploaded the first episode of Ryuki to youtube, which you can now watch to form your opinions of, safe in the knowledge that I specifically went out of my way to go and play that video and spitefully give it a thumbs down. Take that, you 19-year-old TV show (Jesus, really?).