[Kamen Rider Die]

RIDER TIME: RYUKI EPISODE 1 - “ADVENT AGAIN”



It wouldn’t be a year-long tribute to Heisei Rider without a celebration of the most Phase 1 thing imaginable: Inoue Summer Movies!

This was a stunningly accurate recreation of the entertaining-but-inessential Inoue movie versions of various non-Inoue series, or at least the first twenty minutes of one of those movies. It’s the general premise of Ryuki, but with an emphasis on fight scenes and betrayals, rather than anything more decompressed and nuanced. TATAKAE, right from the jump.

On that level, it’s pretty fun. We saw more Riders here than we did in the entire Ryuki TV series, and a bunch of ‘em got to do cool stuff. Unlike Shinobi’s smaller and newer cast, we’ve got a ton of big-name actors here, including the returns of Shinji, Ren, Tezuka, Asakura, and GODDAMN GORO-CHAN. Just a stupid amount of fan service in this first episode.

(Real quick: boy has it been seventeen years. I was constantly flipping over to the Wiki to see if the characters were being played by the same actors, because it’s really hard to tell on some of them. I’d just seen Shinji on Zi-O, and Asakura ALWAYS looks like Asakura, so those were easy. Goro’d turned up in Kabuto, so he was an instant pop for me. Ren, for all the world, looks like Geiz’z dad, or at least how I'd imagine Geiz’z dad would look like. Put him in a big collar and you’d think you were looking at Future Geiz. But Tezuka! Tezuka don’t look so great! Would not have known it was the same guy without the Wiki.)

It’s a good thing they stuffed this first episode full of so much fan service, though, because there ain’t a lot more to talk about. Inoue opts to give almost everyone amnesia (without even throwing them in a river first!), so there’s very little explicit continuity with the TV series. It’s Shinji, for sure, but none of his previous relationships have carried over. It’s a reboot, which isn’t as much fun.

There’s echoes of the past, though. There’s a man that Shinji needs to see, and it might be Ren. Goro’s possibly confused Asakura with Kitaoka. (I think he’s scamming Asakura until he can take him out.) We’ll get back to where we left these characters in 2003, I think.

It’s just… I wanted this story to have the weight of history behind it. If you’re going to drag Shinji and Ren and Goro and Tezuka back into the Mirror World to TATAKAE, let it feel like they’re revisiting Hell. Ryuki was a series that talked about how individual choice and societal good intersected, so it’s weird for this reunion special to rob these characters of their bonds and their decisions. There should be an additional weight to these interactions, but there isn’t. It’s fun for the audience to catch these echoes, but the characters themselves are just going through familiar motions.

It’s not bad, though. Shinji, Ren, and Asakura all act like themselves, which is great. (There's an incredibly funny bit where Shinji discovers that no one in his group considers him the leader, and it's perfect.) There's a ton of action, and the premise is crystal clear. But it's not really saying anything, and it doesn't feel like it's built to, either. It’s the standard Inoue Summer Movie: bigger and faster, but rarely better.



also literally the first thing tezuka does is flip a quarter, validating "kamen rider quarters", and i have never loved inoue more