[Kamen Rider Die]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Fish Sandwich

I wonder if people who have been around longer than me could better get this across, but it's also sort of important to note that Sakamoto was actually only just starting to become synonymous with Rider at the time, since he got involved with the franchise during Double a few years before this. Nowadays, it's like he just shows up to direct episodes and movies and web spinoffs of every toku franchise ever without anyone even needing to ask, so it's easy to take for granted in retrospect, but at the time, it was pretty exciting to see this guy leave Power Rangers and suddenly be making all these projects in Japan that had *this* level of kinetic excitement to nearly every shot. There really wasn't anybody else on these shows doing anything quite like it back then, and maybe there still isn't? This specific period for him, especially, I've always felt was just crazy heightened in a way I feel like he's sort of reined in a bit since. I don't particularly miss his obsession with legs being on such prominent display so constantly, but I definitely still yearn every now and then for how wild stuff like the camera setups could get.

The Zodiart fight in this episode reminded me a ton of the first episode for Gavv, which has maybe my favorite opening fight in Reiwa. In both, there's a sense of the show using its pre-show planning to have the first suit fight of the series incorporate a level of action and stunt work that -- if not to the level of a movie -- was far more than you were likely to get on a weekly basis, while still feeling like it was in the range of what this team was proving they could deliver. The crew here makes the action scale reasonably, keeps the stakes appropriate, and tells you what you need to know about how the heroes are going to attack problems going forward. It's memorably excellent!