[Kamen Rider Die]

TOKUMEI SENTAI GO-BUSTERS MISSION 2 - “A PROMISE MADE 13 YEARS AGO”



Bickering siblings! I love it.

I can’t imagine a premise like this existing in larger Sentai casts. The idea of three survivors of one tragedy creating a found-family bond over 13 years… like, that just wouldn’t feel right if there were five or six of them. That’s just a support group, and its got a different metaphor attached to it. With these three kids and their three helper robots, it’s clearly a story about how families can fight, but they never stop drawing strength from each other.

It works to drastically reframe the previous episode’s Hiromu story from New Go-Buster Finally Answers The Call To Heroism into something more like Estranged Brother Returns To His Family. It’s a more nuanced and approachable version of all of the characters, especially Yoko and Hiromu. (Ryuji continues to be the best older brother imaginable, and this show never lets me forget it.) Hiromu’s dedication to his biological sister’s very reasonable fear that Hirmou will suffer the same fate as their parents if he decides to combat the Vagras now looks like an untenable rejection of his found family, and something that he’d eventually need to rectify. Similarly, Yoko’s petulant dismissal of Hiromu’s presence is less her being a bratty teenager, and more her spending 13 years wondering why her brother reneged on a fateful promise. There’s a deeper context to everyone with this episode, and it even made last episode work a little better for me in retrospect.

It for sure doesn’t hurt that the small-team spy ops stuff continues to be a highlight! The battle against the Burneroid (please don’t make me go back and check to see if that’s right) feels robust and strategic at the human scale, and then bombastic and ridiculous at the Zord scale. I don’t really love the CG versions of the Ace robot, but the beefy suits and model city stuff really clicked for me. Felt appropriately epic, and worthy of this team coming together for the first time.

The weirdest part of this episode for me, and the thing that’ll probably always feel a little slight to me, is the one-and-done of it all. Kamen Rider shows that ran with single-episode stories to kick off their runs (Ghost, Saber) were a rougher start for me, and ones that took me longer to warm up to. It honestly isn’t until the more complex two and three-parters that I would grow to love them. I… don’t feel like this show is going to do those types of multi-stage serials? It’s not hurting them now, for sure – I loved this one, and retroactively appreciated the last episode more, which I liked a lot to begin with – but I wonder if it’s going to make me feel like I’m getting less narrative that way. We’ll see!

For now, I can’t really think of anything that this episode did wrong for me in that one-off format. Enter is a cool mouthpiece for an unknowable villain (All the French! So neat!), the support staff strikes the right balance of Exposition and Warmth, the team really popped as we learned their weak points, and the backstory was succinct and meaningful. A+ episode for me.



IT’S TIME FOR BUSTER Red!

Honestly could’ve been any of them this time out, because no one character felt slighted, but I really came around on Red in this one. Hiromu’s guilt about choosing his biological family over his found family was a unique beat for a genre that tends to completely ignore that tension (mostly by making sure the characters have nothing but their found family; also they’re all orphans YAY I NEVER GET TIRED OF THAT), and I dug his little character flaws. The chicken thing comes back after Mission 1 and finally gets explained, while his brusque honesty continues to make things worse with Yoko. Solid episode for that guy, even if I still think he’s the weakest actor of the trio.