[Kamen Rider Die]

TOKUMEI SENTAI GO-BUSTERS VS BEET BUSTER VS J



I don’t want to keep calling these installments of Go-Busters “cute”; it’s lazy, and slightly dismissive. But they are! They’re cute! And that’s about it!

This DVD pack-in story is made on a budget of about 700 yen – the entire command crew is gone for Reasons, the only Buster costumes we get for the heroes are Red and Beet, J’s the only Buddyroid, and a big chunk of the first five minutes is archival footage – and it’s a pretty quick story of an Enter scheme to steal Beet Buster’s power. (There isn’t even a Megazord!) I feel like we’re lucky to even get Jin to show up, instead of having J tell us that he’s stuck in hyperspace or something. Once we get past the background info on the Energy Management Center, which is interesting without quite being entertaining, the remainder of the video is as solid as a one-act Go-Busters story can be, with virtually everyone gone.

It’s maybe one of the better Enter plots? I generally dislike Enter plots that are more about hurting the heroes than stealing Enetron – I like this show best when both the heroes and villains feel like cogs in adversarial machines, and everyone’s just sort of doing their jobs – but I thought this one had some nice moves on it. Enter’s got an established rivalry with Jin, so stealing Beet Buster is a solid scheme for Enter to pursue. Having a multi-part problem that requires subduing J, dodging Enter’s attacks, and then defeating J’s virus in his mindscape… that’s more than I’d normally expect for a 7-minute narrative, which is a pleasant surprise.

I don’t know how much more I can really say about a 13-minute magazine pack-in DVD that spends a third of its time telling you what the switches inside the Buster Machines do. There ain’t a lot of new content here, but I really enjoyed what was here. It was cute!



IT’S TIME FOR Space Sheriff Gavan!

Ha ha, but I did not enjoy this part! I’m glad the file I watched included a commercial at the end for a different pack-in DVD that’s all about the then-upcoming Gavan film, because I could not FOR THE LIFE OF ME figure out why a silent Gavan swooped in to save Jin and then left without a word. Completely inexplicable when viewed from 2024, and I thought I was watching the wrong video for a second. God bless Toei’s obligatory guest appearances of the early 2010s!