[Switchblade]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kamen Rider Die

And he mostly is! He?s pretending to be Hibiki, complete with the Hibiki Salute that I assume killed Switchblade stone dead in 2019, leaving his ghost to haunt these boards and remind people that Hibiki was a 29-episode series. It?s terrifically fake, Kiriya?s bullshit. He?s mostly just torturing Team Zi-O, making them do a bunch of physical training in order to distract them from hunting down Another Hibiki.

No, I just blocked that from my memory. Decent chance of correctly guessing what my afterlife will consist of, though.

Quote:

Originally Posted by TheRaizin

But when I saw this guy walk up and say "I'm Hibiki." I went: "Naaaaaaahhh." You don't even look like or sound like him! But I don't hate him either, at least in this one, because I am unknowledgeable about Hibiki as a whole. I don't know this guy, who is this guy, why do people hate him, is he a Kamen Rider, why is he called Transformed Kyosuke but also Kamen Rider Kyoki, is he Hibiki? Probably not! Who and where's Asumu? Where is Hibiki?!

Asumu's actor has retired from the business. Hibiki's actor a) may not have been willing to return to the show given his very public thoughts on its rework and b) was blacklisted in the industry at the time due to a harassment scandal (I've heard a lot of conflicting information about that, including accounts where he was either the perpetrator or the victim).

So yeah, these episodes. Obviously, I am not a fan of who they brought back as the main guest character. The best choices were unavailable for reasons mentioned above, but I would have taken pretty much any other character over Kiriya, including the shoplifter who beat up Asumu or Asumu's CGI dream sheep.
That's not to say that this is a bad Kiriya story; 14 years later and he's still a fuck-up, which is pretty appropriate. He's a failure as a mentor; that also makes sense. It's a story that makes good use of the character, it's just that the show picked the absolute worst character to make a story about. At least we got Todoroki, though, and Todoroki is always a welcome sight.

As a side note, I was not a fan of how this story got started. The kid playing the apprentice just happening to be an old acquaintance of Sougo's who we've never heard of before reminded me too much of the Another Zi-O guy. It doesn't help that this won't be the last time Zi-O goes back to this well.