[Fish Sandwich]

Hey everyone, guess what time it is!



Yeah, no. Unfortunately, we're going to be waiting a while to actually see that shiny new Watch in action. Which is a shame when this episode is so awesome.

There's not much I can complain about here. Like, I was considering whining about Zeronos using Altair Form, but then I remembered we've established pretty thoroughly how f***ed up the timestream is by this point, so not only am I willing to consider this canon, I think Zi-O might've accidentally explained away Climax Deka while it's at it. Not bad, although I can't help but think if Shimoyama were writing this he would've had it be Zero Form.

He also probably wouldn't quite be insane enough to have Sougo's uncle fixing up the Den-Liner, though, so don't think I'm dissing Nobuhiro Mouri. At this point, he's pretty much the de facto co-head writer for this show, and he's continuing a long streak of extremely successful episodes with this one.

As a Den-O fan, it's got everything I could want. Seeing Yuuto in action was an absolute delight, especially since he's clearly winning against all of Zi-O's Riders at once, in his base form. That bit where jumps over Zi-O is especially awesome. But of course, what's Yuuto without Deneb, who is also here and being as great as ever. Plus all the Taros back at once, just in case the deal wasn't sweet enough already. I wanna say you can tell Kobayashi wasn't helping with the dialogue this time, but I have a strong bias when it comes to these things, so putting that aside, I'm pretty sure everyone was acting right. They also didn't miss both the opportunities for obvious jokes with Yuuto/Kiriya and Trinity/Climax, but what really impressed me was how naturally they found an excuse to get Momotaros as a part of Zi-O Trinity, which is actually quite clever and not something I expected. Combine all this with a boatload of background music straight out of 2007, and you've got yourself a heck of a tribute.

As a Zi-O fan, this is a very exciting setup, but as often happens with this show, it's hard to say much more than that without the resolution. Grand Zi-O is definitely cool, though. Maybe I'm late to the party with this observation because I haven't looked at catalogs or anything, but with the two extra belts on the side, it's neat that it's basically Zi-O III. I mean, I guess Trinity kinda did that, too, but those extra belts weren't Sougo's. Oh, and the summoning other Riders shtick was cool too, I guess. That's probably more important than how many belts he has.

Waiting an extra week for the conclusion here seems cruel, but thinking about it, I'd rather wait for this than like, if the Kiva two-parter got interrupted by golf. The more upset I am about waiting, the better the show is doing, right?