[Switchblade]

I was both incredibly hyped up for and nervous about the prospect of Paradise Regained. We've seen some other attempts to revisit the characters in the past, but this was going to be Inoue's chance to come back and do a proper return to the world. I wasn't entirely sure what to expect. Inoue's most recent Rider work was on Zi-O, where we got the massive bummer that was Rider Time Ryuki and the joyfully bonkers manhole cover murderess arc on the show proper. The Kamen Rider 4 miniseries went all-in on "yeah, Takumi is 1000% dead for real." I was very much gearing up for this to be a real bleak tragedy.

I was caught pretty off guard when this whole thing veered in the other direction and became a relatively upbeat coda for the original series. I mean, yeah, several teenagers die - most in a way that looks incredibly painful but mercifully quick - and Mari even gets killed for what I'm pretty sure is at least the third time, but for a series that very famously ended on a "the good guys won for now but are living on borrowed time" note, this was a much more optimistic place for Takumi and Mari. It was really fun, but man do I wish we could have gotten maybe another 30 minutes. There were a lot of moments that I really felt could have benefited from just a little more runtime, especially near the end of act 2. I don't remember anybody falling into water, either, which feels like a huge oversight for a Faiz reunion.

The Faiz suit still feels a little off, but given some recent events I think it's in a lot better shape than it could have been. May just be the different build of the new suit actor or just the suit not being made for HD cameras. It's definitely held up better than some of its contemporary pre-Decade suits, but I still feel like Toei needs to either do full remakes of these older suits or start retiring them. I don't want to be sitting here in two years' time lamenting the sorry state of black and blue Hibiki from that anniversary special (not that Toei would ever make a Hibiki anniversary, of course).