[Kamen Rider Die]

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Originally Posted by FreshToku

For me, just about every Kamen Rider show has either weaknesses or big gaps in its overarching story, but that's never why I chose to be into any of them. Like so much about things like the Bugster Virus or Nebula Gas etc either contradicts itself or is obviously being made up as the show goes along, but I look past it because actually watching things unfold and seeing the characters do stuff in those shows is engaging and appealing.

Yeah, I'm scratching my head to remember an endgame story that really did it for me... Wizard? Which is ironic, because the exact things that made it such a fantastic endgame were the things that made the middle section incredibly boring. There's no winning with me!

But, yeah, the series-arc stuff really only works when you care about the characters it's effecting, and the Sakurai stuff just doesn't do that for me. It's a mystery with no emotional payload.

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Originally Posted by Switchblade

Honestly, I’ve always thought that Den-O’s endgame was pretty weak. It’s not, like, Ghost levels of bad, but it ain’t no Blade. I used to blame it on Kai, but this time through I’m definitely seeing it more as a byproduct of having a “tell, don’t show” mentality when it comes to the whole Sakurai part of the series. The bits of it that make sense, at least. Den-O is really at its best when it’s being a madcap romp; its attempts at a deeper narrative tend to fall flat.

I don't know if I'd go so far as to say that Den-O can't tell a deeper narrative. All of the Ryotaro/Momo stuff (and a lot of the solo Sakurai stuff) is enormously affecting, and some classic Kamen Rider storytelling. It's just the weird decision to put all of its chips on Ghost Of A Sister's Ex-Boyfriend's Memory, and there's just so little there to invest in. If I'd watched Den-O in a vacuum, I'd probably have been convinced I missed an entire Sakurai series that explained who this guy was and why he was so important.

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Originally Posted by Sh Ranger

I enjoyed reading it since I pretty much feel the same way. Like I said about Yuto being a big plot character, I think that's one of Kobayashi's flaws, that she writes plot at the expense of characters. In contrast to Inoue's works, which are usually all about the characters and how they affect the plot, not the other way around. Not that Yuto doesn't fit with the themes or anything like that, since he has some presence as a character and a comedic routine with Deneb, but his entire existence creates this big mystery that has little relevance to how others feel, or even how he feels. Like he's supposed to have this connection to Airi in the future, but that doesn't exist. He's like a ghost, on a different wavelength to everybody else in the present. If he was a POV character, maybe it would be more interesting, but he's not, so it isn't and the result is a dissonance between the amazing comedic characters and the plot that comes to kill the mood.

Like, if a character has not had a single line of dialogue in 44 episodes, I'm probably not going to be too fired up about their death. I would maybe have been more invested in 45 if it was Ozaki who got monster murdered, because at least that dude is a character on the show. Threatening Sakurai's existence is like threatening Airi's coffee grinder: theoretically disappointing for Airi, but nothing I'm going to shed any tears over.