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Originally Posted by Locke

Hey all,

I was a poster on here a really long time ago but kinda fell out of the Toku loop for reasons I don?t really remember. I have been kinda lurking in the shadows, I watched big chunks of Build, Ex-Aid and Zero One, but I never finished any of them. I have also watched a couple of episodes of shows like Ghost, Sabre and Drive but didn?t really vibe with any of them.

Hey, good to see you again. I remember chatting about Wizard with you back in the day.

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Can anyone give me like a watch or skip consensus from like Drive to present? (Does it age me to say the last Rider series I watched start to finish was Gaim?) And maybe like rank the watches in that list?

I can at least give you my own thoughts, for what they're worth.

Drive: I feel like Drive is almost two shows. The beginning very much felt like a reaction to Gaim, going back to more episodic stories and swerving very hard into wacky comic relief characters. Then about halfway through it really finds itself and we get a more serialized story with some really good villain arcs and development for the main characters. I love the second half but have a hard time recommending the first.

Ghost: I fucking hate this show. It is basically all of the problems with Drive's first half but none of the successes of the second. The show burns through its main plot hook in the first 13 episodes and spends the rest of the series with no idea of what it's supposed to do now. The main comic relief character is easily the most obnoxious character we've ever had in a Kamen Rider series.

Ex-Aid: This show's aesthetic looks really weird, but it's one of my all-time favorites. The story is compelling, the characters are great, and it's the only modern series I've enjoyed enough to keep up with most of the spin-off material.

Build: Very solid show. The main villain is really good and I liked all of the major characters, even if there are a couple where it took awhile for the show to figure out how they best fit in. The story is fairly serialized and has some effective gut punches.

Zi-O: If you're going into Zi-O looking for fun tributes to past Kamen Rider shows and returning actors, it's really good and has some fantastic moments. If you're watching Zi-O to see it tell it's own engaging story with interesting heroes and villains, it is a major disappointment. How much you like Zi-O is going to depend a lot on how much you do or don't want to strangle the main character.

Zero-One: Zero-One starts off really strongly but runs into some pacing problems. Coronavirus hitting it about 2/3s of the way into the production also throws some major wrenches into its execution. Generally a good show but with some caveats.

Saber: Saber is like Drive for me. The first block of the show really suffers from having so many ideas and characters introduced almost nonstop, but once it settles down it becomes really good. It's very guilty of the action scenes being mostly just actors standing around throwing CGI at each other, though.

Revice: Revice is a show where your personal mileage is going to vary based on which characters do or don't work for you. It has a very Den-O gimmick and its version of Momotaros can be very off-putting. I think that the side characters are often more interesting than the main ones and the villains are all pretty bad.

Geats: I'm still making up my mind on this one. It made the unorthodox decision of making the title character more of a side character while focusing more on the secondary Riders' POVs. I'm still not sure how well that worked, but the recent plot developments have been really interesting.