[Sh Ranger]

I watched Paradise Regained yesterday with Earthly Subs, so I'll share my thoughts.

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Originally Posted by Mesnick

I watched Regained Paradise. What can I say. First things first: thank you for avoiding Ankh and Grid Eiji's sex for a decade of OOO. On the good side: if you wanted to see Inouye go off on a tear and familiar actors twenty years later, you'll get it. It is also very interesting that the saving gimmick is an old toy, and not a new one.

Surprisingly, I haven't talked about the Next Faiz suit before, but I thought the heaviness and overdesign lost the practical feeling that I appreciate about the classic Smart Brain Rider suits. So I love how Takumi actually agrees with me at the end, that the old Faiz is way cooler and shows his development from not wanting to be Faiz to now seeing it as part of his identity, which is of course a major theme of the show. While predictive AI is useful, Takumi is always going to favor hard punches with strong feeling.

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Originally Posted by Mesnick

This smacks of ludism, but the film is clearly not aimed at new fans. And while you watch all the content of Faiz and with Faiz, in any case you will feel like an old man. Also the final scene at the table was cute.

I recall Frontier mentioned before about the possibility of the Takumi/Mari ship. While I didn't see them like that in the show, I respect that 20 years is a long time, certainly enough for a platonic relationship to turn romantic offscreen. Like how Ryu/Kaori happened in the 3 years epilogue of Jetman. I think it's clever how Inoue uses time skips to justify such changes, while leaving the events of the interval to the viewer's imagination.

For me, the biggest surprise of this movie was Mari becoming an Orphenoch! This is actually the third time she's died, but Smart Brain's genetic technology has advanced far enough now that they can trigger the mutation manually. Probably the same technology that stopped Takumi's decay in the ending. Kusaka seemed conflicted about whether to accept Mari as an Orphenoch, but this is only a robot programmed to mimic Kusaka behavior, so we can't be sure how the real Kusaka would've reacted to this development. Protecting Mari and destroying Orphenochs were his 2 main goals after all.

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Originally Posted by Mesnick

And due to their frequent appearance in the franchise, it didn?t have the same effect as with OOO.

I think the OOO characters had pretty regular appearances as well though, often focusing on Eiji's quest to revive Ankh. Ironic how Medal of Resurrection killed the Primary Rider, while Paradise Regained revived. In any case, I think both anniversary movies effectively captured the themes and morals of their respective shows. Honestly, I had come to terms with Takumi's death in Kamen Rider 4, after hearing how Takumi was happy with his fate, but I cannot deny my happiness that Inoue decided to keep him alive in the canon. Takumi suffered for so long, but finally he gets to live happily alongside the people he cares about. It's just like the ending message of the show, that in a world of despair, it's important to enjoy the small happiness in life.

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Originally Posted by Switchblade

Action bits were pretty decent. The new Faiz suit still looks a bit weird, but I like the way it works. Axel and Blaster being built-in abilities was a nice touch. Muez was pretty cool, too, and we got some good Kaixa stuff in here. [spoiler]Delta had a pretty poor showing, but do we honestly expect anything out of Delta at this point?

I love how Muez throws an Edge to start the Azure Smash (Riderwiki doesn't even give a name so I'm just calling it that) before pulling the enemy towards her other Edge. And yeah, Delta performs exactly as we should expect at this point, especially now that he's not even the strongest Rider anymore. It's cool how Axel is part of the package for the Next System, making it available for other Riders and reminds me of the S.I.C. version of Faiz. I prefer OG Blaster though, due to the awesome sight of the Photon Blood overflowing from the Streams.