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Quote:

Originally Posted by Kurona

About halfway through now and I can't disagree more; this is easily within the upper echelon of Rider for me and is fueled with so much emotion and character drama to ever leave you wanting for more. There's flaws, sure; but no more than other seasons - even ones I like more - have. Why are people always so so so quick to say Ghost was bad whenever it's so much as mentioned?

Did someone light the Switchblade Signal?

Okay, so first of all, how insane do your priorities have to be if you're going to bake a fucking child's birthday cake when the city is being threatened by...

No, wait. Sorry, wrong rant.

Why Ghost is terrible in short bullet points because I don't feel like writing a full thesis at the moment and I've yet to arrange these points so they fit the tune of the countries song from Animaniacs.

- Onari. 'nuff said.

- Takeru is a terrible protagonist. He doesn't sulk in the bath instead of fighting monsters, but he's still far too passive. He's facing a 99-day countdown to his death and he spends most of it waiting for someone else to give him clues to find the next Eyecon. Whole weeks pass between episodes with him accomplishing exactly nothing.

- Makoto certainly looks like a character and acts in ways that you would expect a character to act, but he has very little in terms of personality or development.

- The show burns through its entire premise in thirteen episodes, then clearly has no idea what the hell to do next so it just does the same thing again.

- Onari again.

- Alain is generally fine but who thought a lime green knit poncho was something anyone should ever wear?

- The show has no idea what to do with some of its villains. Alain's mentor, legendary suit actor Seiji Taikawa, is introduced to great fanfare and then disappears until someone remembers that he exists.

- Alain's brother is a blatantly unrepentant villain for most of the show's run whose actions include killing his own father, trying to kill his own brother, and making his own sister just kind of sit in a chair and do nothing for several episodes. Despite all of this, Takeru insists that he must be redeemable and spends several episodes complicating the final showdown by insisting that there must be some way to destroy the Gammaizers without killing Adel.

- After spending all that time trying to save and redeem Adel, Takeru then IMMEDIATELY turns around and kills him when the Gammaizers possess him, which makes the whole "We must save Alain's brother!" thing feel even more stupidly pointless.

- The Gammaizers themselves are not even slightly threatening. Takeru is able to easily destroy them in Mugen form and the only reason the show doesn't end there is because they keep reviving to stretch things out to 48 episodes.

- Onari again. This time specifically all of the times when a story's plot is reworked to force in more stupid Onari antics.

- What the hell was up with the twins from the web videos showing up in some of the later episodes just to say that "Takeru is the key" and then leave? In what world did any of that make sense? I only barely understood it because I'd seen those web videos; if I hadn't I'd have no idea who the hell these girls were and where on Earth they came from. Even knowing that, it still never made any sense.

- I don't know if it's true that the show lost a big chunk of its budget to Amazons, but the monster suit reuse was really egregious, especially in the last quarter of the show where Takeru just keeps killing the same Gammaziers over and over and over again.

- The budget thing may just be a rumor, but it was definitely true that Takuro Fukuda did not invest much time in his role as head writer. I don't expect the same writer to do every single episode, but Fukuda didn't even do half of the series and he barely wrote anything between the show's halfway point and the finale. That's a big part of why the show's plot sometimes feels so aimless and disjointed.

- The show spent a lot of time trying to develop some of the Eyecons as characters while completely ignoring others. Some of them were at least based on their historical inspirations but others were just complete ass-pulls (looking at you, Brothers Grimm).

- They did an entire two-parter focused around Takuya Mizoguchi's character and time travel, yet he never pulled out the Den-O belt. That would have done so much to redeem this entire series.

- Theme song sucked. Almost as much as Saber's.

- Onari in a wig. First time I've ever just straight-up fast forwarded through entire chunks of a Kamen Rider episode on first viewing.

Edit: Remembered a few more.

- This is the show where Bandai and Toei officially gave up on trying to make weapons that looked like anything but gimmicky roleplay toys. This is a big problem that I have with modern Kamen Rider and I source my real frustrations with it to this show and Specter's stupid grabby hand staff.

- And yet somehow that weapon was cool enough that Necrom's big final power-up was the same damn toy painted white.

- Pink Necrom setting a new record for shitty treatment of female Riders by barely lasting longer than DekaGold in a fight.