[Kamen Rider Die]

TOKUMEI SENTAI GO-BUSTERS MISSION 1 - “SPECIAL-OPS SENTAI, ASSEMBLE!”



Ha ha, five minutes after saying that Sentai shows just never seem to have serious stakes, and here’s the first 40 seconds of Go-Busters, with an army of giant robots incinerating an entire district. I love it! I love getting this stuff so wrong!

(Genuinely not sure if that scene is Hiromu dreaming of what could happen, or remembering what did happen 13 years ago. I assume it’s meant to be ambiguous? There’s no time stamp beyond the next scene happening in the modern day, so… I figure they’ll nail that down in a future episode!)

I thought this was a fairly solid first episode of a toku show, if not a perfect one. It moves a little quickly, condensing what feels like incredibly important dramatic arcs into a single scene, as well as just powering through the introductions of literally a dozen characters. It’s overstuffed, is my feeling as a Kamen Rider fan.

It helps that the superheroic action is both a focal point and incredibly fun, though. The Blue and Yellow Go-Busters have what amounts to an episode-length fight scene against Enter and the Vagras, across multiple sets and at increasingly complex scales, while the eventual reveal of the Red Buster feels appropriately grandiose and epic. (Not sure I’d like to be in the building that he launches a convenience store-sized car off of, but I guess we all have to make sacrifices for the public good.) There’s a steadily rising tension, complete with an actual onscreen ticking clock before our Megaroid shows up to introduce me to the concept of giant robot fights. It’s just a robust, intense action story, and that’s a fun way to lead an audience in on this thing.

Because the characters are a bit of mixed bag for me in this one, sadly?

Blue and Yellow – Ryuji and Yoko – came off the best, and it’s down almost entirely to their easy camaraderie and unflappable competence. They’re just here to work, and it sort of made this thing click as far as a Spy Kids-esque toku story. They don’t mug or joke, leaving that instead to the Buddyroids; the Go-Busters just excel at their missions, and that’s sort of all you want to know to start with. They’re good at what they do, and they work well together. It’s not a lot to hang your hat on – there’s literally nothing that springs to mind as far as a cool catchphrase or idiosyncratic beat, beyond Yoko eating some candy – but it makes the concept and world feel like the spotlight, and I wonder if that’s a major difference for Sentai? How the premise needs to feel bigger than the characters?

It certainly showed in Hiromu’s arc, at least for me. We’re told via other characters that he lets himself be coddled too much by his sister, who appears to have raised him, and then the first non-flashback scene we see with her he’s saying that he has to protect other families by becoming a Go-Buster and she's going to have to be okay with that. The scene works okay-ish (Hiromu kind of never finds a note for his performance beyond Earnest And Sort Of Awkward, which feels less like a character choice and more like a young actor who is overmatched by the demands of the scene) but it feels like a major motivation for a guy we barely know just got checked off before the beginning of the third act of the first episode. I’m sure we’ll see more of this relationship, but it already feels like this episode squandered a few weeks worth of subplots in about two minutes.

But that’s a minor criticism, even if I’m saying that the emotional core of the Red Buster’s story felt like it was shortchanged. Because I sort of don’t care, for better or worse – this episode was a blast to watch, and as solid a premiere in the field of action as any Rider show I’ve seen. If this show is just watching competent spy heroes going on thrilling adventures against differently-scaled adversaries, I will consider this show a winner.



IT’S TIME FOR BUSTER Blue!

Hey, how about a little space at the end to highlight a single Go-Buster character that popped for me? And we’re starting with: Ryuji!

It’s not a lot that he did in this one specifically that I could call out, but I liked his energy in the few maskless scenes he got. He’s never bossy, and he’s always just this side of flippant. Him and Yoko feel like a team that probably could’ve taken out the Shovelroid eventually, Hiromu just sped up the process. Ryuji’s just a solid dude that doesn’t need to be showy, and that was something that kept catching my eye. I like him!