[Kurona]

I felt these were the best V-Cins... ever, really. By a long shot. To the point they're some of my favourite Kamen Rider movies ever made, and to a degree I finally have something in 01 I can like it for and really consider it the hallmark in Kamen Rider history it was presenting itself as.

They're depressing, but, well... it's kind of the point, it's not meant to be a cool action movie. It's a tragedy framed around the core conflicts of the show and the relationships of each character to get at what it really means to take up the mantle of Kamen Rider and what it means to use violence to achieve your goals and what that does to a person. MBJR finding themselves in such a hopeless, rock-and-a-hard-place situation with the status of how Humagears are treated that they find the only option is to turn themselves into a killing machine; Yaiba having no hope of standing against that just as anyone else but has grown to be a defender of humanity from her early days; Fuwa facing down people he considers friends and laying down his life to save both the world and them from themselves...

It was beautiful to me, really. A bit clunky in execution at times but there was a real intention and will behind it all that stood out to me. I really, really like these movies for what they were able to do, and while I am of course very sad that Fuwa, Naki and the rest of them all ended up dead... there was a point to it all and they died for something important. So far this is the greatest thing they've done for the 50th anniversary in mirroring Kamen Rider's core themes