[Fish Sandwich]

Fish Sandwich also watched Kamen Rider Saber Episode 14

Two more reasons I'm not as big a Dragonic Knight fan as I should be:

- It was always marketed as a set with King Lion Daisenki, and anytime I see those two in an image together, I realize King Lion Daisenki is even more up my alley. (A testament to how good the suits are, because again, Dragonic Knight is already amazing.)

- Dragon Alangina! What a beautiful payoff! The way the Swordrivers work meant everyone immediately wanted to see one of those three Riders using the other two's main Books, and while we don't get both of them here, just Touma using Kento's Book works on so, so many levels. Storywise, it's obviously great. It's also a perfect conclusion to Touma's shtick of using all the story Books on top of that. (Plus, thanks to King of Arthur, Saber dual-wielding swords also has precedent.) And then design-wise, I mean, Lamp Do Alangina is gold, so it inherently looks the part of a big power-up, even though it wasn't particularly meant to. It's a very memorable little form. And apparently the fans aren't the only ones that thought so, because Bandai later went ahead and produced a set of gashapon figures seemingly inspired solely by how cool this stretch of Saber was.

And like, yeah, it's pretty sweet! I think you can see it in how glowing my praise of it at the time was, but the series as a whole was REALLY starting to click into place for me as we reached the end of the year. Nothing but good things to say about it. From the whole 弔い合戦 vibe with everyone fighting to honor Kento, to the cool menace of Calibur, to just how much Ishida clearly loves using Mei (recall also Fantastic Lion's debut, with the comedic falling bit). As well as he should, because Mei is great! I mean, it's not even just in Ishida episodes, of course, but I feel like he in particular always seems to have extra fun directing those moments.