[Fish Sandwich]

Fish Sandwich also watched Kamen Rider Saber Episode 45

I feel like I kind of have to restrain myself from writing too much here, because this is such a hype episode of Saber it'd be easy to get carried away and go on some huge disjointed rant like I did with Super Hero Senki where I say way too much and yet still only say like 1% of all the nice things I could say about this particular Saber thing. Which I guess is maybe the story of every post I've made in this thread, but...

It's just, this episode and the last one, it feels to me like Saber hitting another sort of level-up moment like it did around Primitive Dragon's debut? I'm not sure if other people see it that way too this time, but the execution of both that calm before the storm and the start of said storm feel like they're going above and beyond what the show even seemed capable of up until now, and those standards were already raised high up by this point.

For 45 in particular, I mean, it feels like an event, for sure. It's a fundamentally well-structured script brought magnificently to life by a director who always seems to forget his job is directing tokusatsu and not drawing anime storyboards -- which is a huge compliment, because I love that about Teruaki Sugihara's style, and this episode is peak Sugihara. (I skimmed through just enough of the episode to be reminded of that bit at the start where we transition to Blades off of a reflection on Espada's sword, which is *exactly* the kind of not-traditionally-live-action sort of thing I'm talking about.) Not to downplay how much I like Hasegawa's writing here, of course. On top of how nicely it puts all the characters in place for all the cool action, there's still plenty of great drama in there, and as you can tell from my old post, this is where Storious truly, fully clicked as me thanks to his chat with Luna here, but like I said, I should probably not try and get too deep into every last thing all at once! There's a lot to love about this episode!