[AkibaSilver]

Just to spite you all, I'm going to listen to some two-tone and ska right now.

Ren is a weird one, in that he feels like he wandered in from a completely different show. The rest of the SOL feel like a coherent organisation - sure Calibur betrayed them, but they're profesional, reasonable people devoted to the protecting people cause. Then Ren is just over here being a gremlin ninja, the shonen rival character in an anime obsessed with strength and being the strongest and Hokage (I have not seen Naruto). If I were being generous, I'd say it's interesting to shake up the protagonists this way, bring in someone to aggravate the others and have some kind of story hook, except he doesn't goes that far, he's too minor a role (how many Riders are we on right now?), so he's just here to be annoying and give Dezast someone who will happily play along with his "enjoying fighting" schtick.

Meanwhile, Rinataro suffers his first bit of character growth... by getting his ass beaten. A good bit both for actually making the Megiddo feel like threats to our heroes, and giving a more personal stake to one of our heroes. Compare that to the Avalon thread, which even for a Fukuda script is kinda nebulous in how it works or what it is, and there's a that you have to hope will pay off if/when they get there.