[Kamen Rider Die]

REVICE LEGACY: KAMEN RIDER VAIL - EPISODES 2 + 3



Solid middle episodes!

There’s not really a ton worth talking about beyond the romance of Genta and Yukimi, though. The various unconscionable acts of Noah are so boilerplate as to be almost a parody of mysterious organizations of nebulous authority. They’re just trying to harness Giff’s power for some reason, but the only path to success seems to be churning through dozens and dozens of unwilling test subjects, to a degree that even Shocker would find to be wasteful and inhumane. I laughed pretty hard at the implication that Genta’s been polishing off a mounting number of devils solely because no one at Noah thought to run their human experimentation in a room more secure than a well-appointed office, leaving each successive failure to rampage out of the same goddamn office, killing a few guards on their way to freedom. I understand the management tactic of throwing bodies at difficult problems, but maybe someone somewhere should’ve told Noah that it’s just an expression.

(I also completely don’t get the timeline on Noah using a devil to kill Genta’s family in order to motivate him. How Noah’s suddenly controlling a devil feels like a reveal for a future episode, but the first episode of this run made it seem like Genta was a fluke victory for the program, and his parents were already dead. Was he experimented on, and then Noah dragged him home to watch his parents get murdered? I don’t at all get how that reveal fits into the established timeline.)

But Genta and Yukimi! Very sweet at times, weirdly toxic at others. The story is smart to reframe Yukimi’s crush on a smelly, taciturn, dismissive psychopath as her being a busybody, since it both connects back to Revice as a show, and also makes her seem less like she’s just going through the motions of the plot. Genta’s sort of impossible to see as a romantic partner in this stage of their romance, and it works a little better if she’s just trying to help a dude who’s as lost and alone as she is.

I like that Genta and Yukimi are both aching for a family to make them feel safe, and see that absence in each other, and want to build a new family together. I like that they both want the same thing. It makes this less a story about a Kamen Rider falling in love, and more a romance of equal partners, one of which happens to be a murder machine. The way these two episodes never let you forget that Yukimi has goals and desires, that she’s not just someone to be rescued or protected, is really helpful in elevating a story of fairly ridiculous extra-governmental imprisonment and execution.

This thing continues to be greater than the sum of its parts. Yukimi and Genta have always been my favorite characters on this show, and this special just reinforces that decision.