[Kamen Rider Die]

KAMEN RIDER ZERO-ONE HYPER BATTLE VIDEO - “WHAT WILL POP OUT OF THE KANGAROO? THINK ABOUT IT BY YOURSELF! YES! IT MUST BE ME, ARUTO!”



This was… pleasant.

Is that enough for one of these HBV installments? I feel like it probably is. It may miss out on the undeniable mania of the Faiz HBV, or the shocking poignancy of the Build HBV (still maybe my all-time fave for these specials), but it’s agreeably corny and threaded with thirteen weeks’ worth of nostalgia. That’s not nothin’.

This was a nice story to come back to. (My COVID’s not gone, which is causing me to cancel some long-awaited plans, but I’m feeling way better today than I did the last few days. There’s a mend happening, even if it’s a longer one than I’d hoped.) It’s a predictably low-stakes deal, with Jin making a new Magia out of three reused suits… just, literally reused, no crazy alterations or combinations or anything. Izu’s accidentally let the Vice-President take the case with all the Progrise Keys, so Satellite There creates a new Hopping Kangaroo Progrise Key – based on the cartoon mascot for the Vice-President’s Australian travel guide – to allow Aruto to defeat the new three-form monster. It’s small. It’s a small story, even by the standards of these HBVs.

It’s cute, though. There’s always a bit of budget-stretching when it comes to what’re essentially bonus episodes. There’s some money for a kit-bashed exclusive hero form, but everything else needs to be a bit more… thrifty than normal. So we get the usual backstage lots and warehouses that signal We Had To Do This Fast And Cheap, but we also get some incredibly charming effects work. Like, the gimmick for Hopping Kangaroo is that Aruto gets a fourth-dimensional pocket that summons helper Humagear from past adventures. We get an initial effects shot of the sushi Humagear growing out of Zero-One’s chest, but every subsequent use of the power is just some dude pressing up very close and very low to Zero-One. It’s my favorite kind of tokusatsu thing. My FAVORITE. I love dumb little practical things like that, and they made this story more memorable to be than any other ingredient.

Because the other ingredients… I mean, again, pleasant, but also pretty by-the-numbers? It’s a story about how Aruto draws power from the Humagears he empowers, which is what basically every Zero-One story is about? That’s a core theme, and I’d be shocked if it wasn’t a part of the HBV outreach thing, but it’s sort of all that’s here? We’re nominally talking about Aruto not realizing that his partners are all of the Humagears, but a) the idea of Aruto having a comedy partner that he’s been abandoned by is introduced as a concept maybe twenty seconds before it becomes even vaguely relevant to the plot, and b) it’s not like Aruto didn’t already consider the Humagears to be his family. There’s no real original conflict to this special, which keeps it from being anything more than a fun little diversion.

I feel like the biggest drawback to this HBV special is how early in the series it’s appearing? Not sure why they dropped this episode around the winter movie, instead of what feels like the more traditional summer slot (unless I’m remembering it all wrong), but it seems to have worked against them here. (I mean, knowing how Summer 2020 worked out… probably for the best they filmed this earlier!!!) The late-series HBVs have an accumulation of weirdness that’s available to be leveraged: deeper casts, underexplored nooks, better chemistry, loopier actors. There’s no energy that this thing is playing with or against, you know? This isn’t Nago teaching you calisthenics or Tsukuyomi turning into a sadist to torture a teammate, this is just a cute story for Zero-One and Izu, that’s it.

But it was a cute story, and that’s okay. This wasn’t a normal episode of Zero-One, and it’s weird to hold it to normal standards. I wish it had been as bold in its storytelling as it was with its practical effects, but this was all very enjoyable to watch.

(Oh, and I never paid extra for the assumedly-exclusive Hopping Kangaroo SO-DO, so no new figure review. I liked the shoulderpads becoming boxing gloves, but that was about it. Too much of Rising Hopper’s COLOR for my tastes!)