[Fish Sandwich]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Androzani84

Second off, the is the debut of Rod Form’s battle song, which is a remix of Sword Form’s battle song. This brings me to my second issue with this show’s music. 90% of it is remixes. And I hate remixes. Covers? Fine. Re-recordings? Go ahead. But hearing the same song over and over again with different backing music gets really repetitive (which was my issue with the main soundtrack). Heck in an album full of remixes and re-recordings for Heisei’s 20th, Kuuga got a re-recording with a faster pace and better pronunciation of the English words, Ghost’s theme got an idol show-esque cover by the Kamen Rider Girls, even Time Judged All gets a minor lyrical change (from “why did we meet?” to “why did you leave me?”). But the Den-O theme? It sounds the same as always, and that’s not a compliment.

But to be fair, as much as I rag on about Den-O’s songs, the Sentai show for that year didn’t do much better. Maybe 2007 was just a bad year for Toku music.

Oh man, remember that whole conversation I had with Die about beetle horns at the end of the Kabuto thread? Because I am similarly struggling to understand how you can say that Gekiranger had weak music and then put a video right under that starts with Gekiranger's god-tier theme song.

(Though admittedly, the actual BGM in that show isn't any ~huge~ standout to me, I still like quite a bit about it.)

It's safe to say my tastes are pretty different, as I'm quite fond of the variations on Double-Action the show uses. The differences between the overall sound and lyrics are big enough between them to fit the wildly different characters they're representing. It never got that old for me, but obviously this sort of thing is going to be hugely subjective.

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Originally Posted by Kamen Rider Die

Den-O, though, is bringing back Form Changes, and that whole The First Third Of The Show Is About Form Changes would be the formula for nearly every Phase 2 show, on some level. (Not really for Gaim, which went back to the Secondaries and Upgrades style of storytelling.) Like, you can see how Den-O's success in portraying Form Changes becomes a template for W, for OOO, for Fourze, for Wizard, and so on. It's storytelling that generates out from the main hero, rather than being some new external introduction. That was how Kuuga and Agito did it; Den-O's twist is that each new Form Change has a personality!

It's a darn good template! And I can't overstate how much I particularly love Den-O's take on it. "Each form is its own character" is such a perfect fit for what Kobayashi values in her writing, and it also appeals to what I want in a story and massively increases my attachment to each form. Fight scenes in Den-O can be so much livelier and varied because of it. Much like Double would do later, I find having more than one voice in the main Rider's head at any given time lends the show that much more energy. Den-O is right up there with Kuuga when I think of Rider shows that utterly nail having multiple forms, albeit with an approach that's much more specific to the kind of series it is.

Probably worth noting that all of those forms are still just played by Takaiwa, by the way? Like, I'm sure that sounds obvious, but I just want everyone to take a moment to consciously think about how much work and talent that dude put into this show in particular. I'll probably bring this up at least one more time, because I am eternally impressed by how herculean a task he had here compared to usual.