[GoldenXtreme]

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Originally Posted by DreadBringer

While you have one season of him that is your least favorite of all, dunno if people's hate for him is too strong or irrational and bordering on irrational to not even think that the premier would be good? Also, the credit may go to Kazuya Kamihoriuchi as the main director.

I guess if anything I was worried I would be so burned out on Takahashi after all this time that I wouldn't be able to enjoy even the premier. That and the fact the prerelease character descriptions did not interest me. I even liked Geats pretty well early on, so I guess I should have expected the bare minimum of decent start to the show. As you said, perhaps it was the director who made it work by playing up the secret agent style just right!

[Sh Ranger]

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Originally Posted by Fish Sandwich

I kind of took the non-lethal bullets as a sort of play on how cleanly the violence in the stereotypical glamorous spy movie can be? Like, Baku dreams of being a cool secret agent, and all the cool tropes that come with that, but he absolutely does not dream about watching dudes bleed out from gory wounds or anything gruesome like that.

Obviously on an outside level, it's that way because this is a show for children, but I thought it made logical sense on a character level too, which is nice.

Good point.

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Originally Posted by Frontier

I think it's also worth noting that pretty much every Takahashi show has had the Secondary as the co-protagonist early on and how often they tend to dominate or take over focus on the plot. Like I remember people talking about Fuwa feeling like the real main character during certain points of Zero-One and how Keiwa initially seemed like the main POV or relatable protagonist compared to Ace in Geats.

That doesn't seem to be the case here.

Regrettably, I once also claimed Isamu was more of a protagonist than Aruto, which I've since realized is the kind of poor phrasing that leads to such misunderstandings like confusing the first arc perspective characters of Kabuto and Geats for the actual titular protagonists, who simply needed time for the viewers to warm up to them. Takahashi certainly has a habit to focus on other characters though. Even in EX-Aid where it's the Primary Rider, it's M who shines, not Emu.

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Originally Posted by velencourte

I think it's interesting that Baku's belt sits on his chest -- maybe now it serves as a defibrillator/pacemaker of sorts?

Now the Visions lyrics, "Give me the shock to the heart!", makes a lot of sense.

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Originally Posted by DreadBringer

By looks, even Ikki seem to be the cool type in Revice previews.

Cool Ikki does show up sometimes with his deductions in Episode 6 and The Mystery, but yeah, the previews made me expect more. There's also Evil Ikki from the OP, who has as much relevance as the cat from Gavv and the horse from Gaim.

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Originally Posted by DreadBringer

Heisei protagonists that are as relatable as this?

Kenzaki, Shounen, Shoutarou and Shinnosuke, I guess? They seem to have similar struggles with their goals in life, that most people can probably relate to.

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Originally Posted by DreadBringer

Often the cool and aura farming characters in media (not talking about toku, but talking about other media like anime or such) are those that are portrayed as the ones that would have no qualms to sacrifice some to accomplish missions or pull off intelligent gambits (seems to be partly the reason they're praised for being pragmatic, professional, and not sentimental/soft), but this seems to be important to be taken into account where high level of skill should be utilized for control and accuracy as well, as additional power/capability, to live up to one's moral compass more in minimizing killing (like how if you're super powerful, they can minimize force against like, armed human opponents to not kill them because you're not in danger).

Exactly. For an agent, having a license to kill doesn't mean the same as having carte blanche to kill, like how a driving license doesn't mean you can drive like crazy. Not even just for moral reasons. An agent who leaves a trail of corpses everywhere they go would be sloppy, compromizing their cover and betraying the integrity and trust of their organization.

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Originally Posted by DreadBringer

Though not in your case, Ex-Aid is considered high quality all the way around, at worst it'd be occassionally seeing Masamune (main antagonist at that time) as not living up to Kuroto (who almost no one can, I'd think he's the most successful and favorite character in all the KR franchise).

I'd still think that even for those fans who don't acknowledge the severe flaws of EX-Aid, they'd at least think the first half was higher quality, due to being the peak of their favorite God's arc.

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Originally Posted by DreadBringer

Otherwise yeah, my point about explaining something like Zitt's case in Zeztz rumor thread was that the belief that the writer does everything, and every single little grievance or merit the show has is either the merit or the fault of the main writer, is common but not completely right. Zeztz has Kazuya Kamihoriuchi as the main director who is consistent in his work's quality, for the credit in this episode.

Like how the infamous Job Competition arc was Ohmori's fault, but I guess some people forget that since they're too focused on hating on Takahashi. In that case, maybe I should rescind my complaint about Jit towards Takahashi, since it's possible that he honestly may have had no idea what to do with a sudden new character in the final arc, but had to make it work somehow.

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Originally Posted by DreadBringer

This happens too for like Den-O (who has another bad luck MC), thinking that Yuuto is more actual MC, or that Ryuki previously have Ren being the one seen as real MC due to not being sold with Shinji.

Yuto as protagonist sounds incredulous, since he doesn't even appear until Episode 19. Shinji and Ren seem like equal protagonists in the story though, at least for the time when the Heisei format was being developed. They both have henshin poses similar to the OG Double Riders and matching Final Forms, suggesting Knight is more like a Primary Rider than his immediate and only predecessor G3.

[StardustWhip]

- I really enjoyed this episode! I don't think it gripped me in quite the same way that Geats or Zero-One did (to compare it to past Takahashi-written series), but it's still really exciting, both on a simple "new Rider season" level, and because the episode itself was just really well written.

- I like Baku as a protagonist. The early trailers had me thinking at first he'd be a suave cool guy hero like Ace or Tendou, and that would've been interesting enough, but I really like this approach where he's just a generally nice and rather dorky guy that really just wants to help people, and becomes a suave secret agent in his dreams. It goes well with the dreams motif of this season, I think, and I'm interested in seeing where he goes from here.

- On the negative side, I'll echo the complaints that the nighttime fight wasn't very exciting, in terms of first-episode Rider fights. Not bad, but it was hard to tell what was happening at times, and the fight choreography wasn't as dynamic as it could be/often is; presumably to keep it from being too hard for the suit actors to tell what's going on. Holding out hope that future fight scenes will be better though; we've already seen a few daytime/indoors fights in the trailers, and I'm hoping that the fight choreography will be better when those come around.

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Originally Posted by GoldenXtreme

Minor quibble to start with: I kind of assumed that TokuSHOUTsu would have like some kind of "episode starting in X minutes" countdown after the prior episode ended, that way each episode airing would start at every half hour on the dot. But they literally run back to back nonstop, so for someone trying to catch the new episode after the initial airing it's pretty much impossible to get on the stream at the right moment. I'll probably just try to jump on the premier next time, even if it is a little late for me.

- Yeah... I remember waiting 'til 11:00 PM to put on the stream since I wasn't there in time for the premiere, and ended up jumping in when Baku was in the hospital. Luckily I wised up pretty quickly and just waited fourteen more minutes, but it'd be nice if the episodes were aired at 30-minute intervals, rather than back to back to back like they did for premiere.

[Fish Sandwich]

So, another thought occurred to me today regarding how this show's premise is the gift that keeps on giving -- Baku's secret agent dreams are probably full of English because he watches lots of foreign spy movies with subtitles.

It's clearly shown from the merch in his bedroom that Seven and Zero are specific characters he's fond of, so on top of that, it's even pretty likely "I'm on it" is a catchphrase he's quoting the same way, for example, an English-speaking Rider fan might say henshin in Japanese when playing with a Driver toy, or on whatever other such occasion.

Again, the English is obviously there on the meta level because it creates a certain atmosphere for the series, but the whole symbiosis of What The Show Needs and What The Protagonist Wants this year is so effortless, it's insane.

[Frontier]

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Originally Posted by Sh Ranger

Like how the infamous Job Competition arc was Ohmori's fault, but I guess some people forget that since they're too focused on hating on Takahashi. In that case, maybe I should rescind my complaint about Jit towards Takahashi, since it's possible that he honestly may have had no idea what to do with a sudden new character in the final arc, but had to make it work somehow.

I always thought of that as like Sento's dad in Build where they were kind of running out of story to tell but still needed to delay the story until they got to the final episode.

[skyh0und0028]

I think you're onto something there

Quote:

Originally Posted by Fish Sandwich

So, another thought occurred to me today regarding how this show's premise is the gift that keeps on giving -- Baku's secret agent dreams are probably full of English because he watches lots of foreign spy movies with subtitles.

It's clearly shown from the merch in his bedroom that Seven and Zero are specific characters he's fond of, so on top of that, it's even pretty likely "I'm on it" is a catchphrase he's quoting the same way, for example, an English-speaking Rider fan might say henshin in Japanese when playing with a Driver toy, or on whatever other such occasion.

Again, the English is obviously there on the meta level because it creates a certain atmosphere for the series, but the whole symbiosis of What The Show Needs and What The Protagonist Wants this year is so effortless, it's insane.