[Kamen Rider Die]

KAMEN RIDER DECADE HYPER BATTLE VIDEO - “PROTECT! THE WORLD OF TELEVI-KUN”



Fun night playing around with this special!

It’s not some deep, stunner of a story. It’s this cute thing where Dai-Shocker wants to replace Televi-Kun’s mascot with an evil(er?) version, and You The Viewer need to succeed at the following tasks to help Team Decade save The World of Televi-Kun:

-have good manners
-be able to know which one Diend is by looking at him
-know a non-zero amount of a foreign language!
-watch a bunch of Decade episodes
-remember a thing Tsukasa just said

After that, it’s a little bit of product placement from the Papercraft Industrial Complex to generate a Decade Bazooka, and you’ve triumphed over mascot-related villainy. It’s a pleasant enough time-waster, but… man, I don’t love this era of interactive HBVs! There’d eventually be a swing away from this type of gamified viewing experience (Fourze was sort of light on them, but I remember Gaim bringing it back), but at this point in time, they’re REALLY into padding things out with trivia contests and binary options. The Maze section is the toughest one to get through, because, like, just look at the screen! One of them is Diend! You have multiple seconds to decide which is Diend and which is Rising IXA! There’re only a couple jokes across the entire Maze section (Ura asking Natsumi out was legitimately funny, though), and the other couple sections aren’t a ton better. The Hero Class shorts are real basic lessons for kids, and the Riddle section is just trivia from the show that they give you huge hints on. (One of the hints is literally just Tsukasa saying the answer, and Natsumi shrugging!) I know these are for kids, but the level of difficulty and follow-through here comes off as a little lazy.

Luckily, the endings are hysterical. I adore the use of the magazine to solve the dilemma in the DVD. Having kids build a papercraft bazooka, just like Onodera, and then Decade uses a bigger version of the same papercraft bazooka to destroy the monster? Love it. Then there’s just the wacky incongruity of Decade and Diend getting mauled by bad guys while Onodera tries to figure out his paper folds and Natsumi unhelpfully stresses about it over his shoulder. Onodera might not have lived up to Kuuga’s legacy over the course of Decade, but he sure did become a reliably funny part of the team. Making Onodera’s paper-folding skills what victory hinged on? Again, I loved it.

Overall… I mean, it’s an HBV that’s 70% games for children. It’s not the best HBV you’ll ever watch. Honestly, I probably could’ve saved myself half an hour or so and just watched the beginning and end. As a complete package, though, it’s a fun enough time-waster. The ending is funny, and the rest of it’s a nice diversion. Nothing that feels essential, though, and nothing you need to go out of your way to watch.