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venus-says · 4 years

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Kamen Rider W Episodes 01-18

I like my detectives how I like my eggs, hard-boiled.

(GOSH THAT WAS AN HORRIBLE PUN, I'M SORRY)

If you saw my Kamen Rider Zero-One post you may recall that I've mentioned I had intentions of watching he older seasons of Kamen Rider, and well it happened faster than I thought and here we are.

When I decided to begin by W all I had in mind was that I wanted to start from the earliest era since in my mind this would be the closest o Zero-One's style thus it would be easier for me, in many places I saw they listing the Heisei era seasons divided into two parts so to my logic this would be the season to start.

What I didn't expect was... THAT I'D CHOOSE THE SEASON THAT WAS PRACTICALLY MADE FOR ME. As you can already guess, I LOVED WATCHING THIS. At first, it was confusing as hell, then when I see there's this cool looking dude parking his cool ass bike wearing a cool ass hat, and then when I know this guy is a detective obsessed with detective fiction AND I WAS SOLD! And the more I watch the more I fell in love with it.

But I'm getting ahead of myself, allow me to recollect and give a general overview.

This show has a very simple plot but they shine in this simplicity. Because there weren't any huge ambitions so far it made me feel very close to this world, yes they have monsters who use USB devices on their bodies and there's a dude with google on his brain, but when you put this fantastic element aside they did a good job on making me feel like that city and its people are real. What I really like about this whole thing is the structure of the show where all stories are two-parters, I think it's a good way to fill 49 episodes while keeping a good pace without having to pad things with filler to fulfill a quota. I may have watched 18 episodes but to me it felt like I just watched 9 episodes of a 45 minutes show on Netflix and if I didn't have to write this post I'd definitely had continued watching until a passed out because I didn't feel time passing. Another thing this show has going for is the music, from the opening to insert songs passing through BGM there are a lot of nice tunes and straight out bops in there, I really need to check their soundtrack sometime.

The characters have been very hit or miss to me so far. I really really like Shotaro, to me he's the perfect main character for shows like this because he has all elements we expect from a Red Ranger/Pink Cure but he's not only that, we see his passion but we also see his worries, more often than not he comes as the voice of reason of certain situations, and it's not a thing that happens only in certain episodes to try to pull an emotional moment or to be used as a comic relief, this is present, on a form or another, in all episodes and love it. Phillip in the other hand I have a really hard time with him, his quirk of being SO OBSESSED with things can be seen as cute in some moments but absolutely despiteful in others. Akiko is another part of the cast I dislike, I don't know if she was written to be utterly annoying, or if it's the performance of the actress that is way too much, but I couldn't sympathize with her in any moment.

This show also has great side characters, I don't remember their names but I think I love all of them! The cop duo is great, the informant is hilarious, I don't get Santa's existence on this but he's lots of fun, the ramen dude is kinda charismatic, and they have WTomo as recurring characters which I completely forgot was a thing! The villains are also quite interesting, I don't really like most of the designs of their Dopant forms (Taboo is the only one I like), but to me they have a very interesting dynamic and while their goal so far doesn't seem like anything spectacular, I really enjoy when the show takes its time to give us many looks in this family and gives us the opportunity to see their machinations in detail.

Thinking about the rider, W has a very simple design but it's not a detriment it works very well both aesthetically and as a gimmick, that I really like btw even though I get very uncomfortable when they use finishers where they get split in two. I like even more that Phillip and Shotaro don't need to be at the same place to be able to transform (you should take notes precure). They also have some really nice gadgets, I love the camera bat and the motorcycle for example, and this mix and match of forms gives some very creative combinations and attacks. I still think the belt is a bit too much, but it doesn't bother me like how the Zero-One's does.

This post is already pretty long but I'm talking about 18 episodes, I feel like I need to go through some stories in more detail.

I really like the second story (Episodes 3 and 4), and a huge part of that was how interesting the powers of the Dopant were. At first, I thought we had way too many scenes of Saeko and Kirihiko's wedding but after watching more episodes and seeing how this relationship developed(?) I think we needed to have that.

The story of the girl who lost her father (5 & 6) was a very good surprise to me, the show was very chill so far and then they drop this emotional bomb and OOF. It was amazing, the whole setting was quite interesting, the little girl was very strong and I really felt for her, I hated her mom at sometimes but in others I could understand her, and Shotaro's intern turmoil if he should tell the girl the truth or not was also incredible. I'm still puzzled about how Phillip knew about their special greeting though.

Episodes 7 and 8 were without a doubt my least favorites and the only episodes I straight out hated. To start the "victim" of the week was just the worst dude ever who in the moment their friend decided to go try something else he felt like if it was okay to put her name in to be killed. In whatever way you put it, this isn't cool. and to make things worst THIS SHOW REDEEMS THIS DUDE LIKE IF WHAT HE DID WASN'T EXTREMELY ABUSIVE AND ABSOLUTELY WRONG. Another thing this episode did was make me hate Phillip who was so fucking obsessed with this stupid dance move and showed completely disregard to not only his mission but also the girl in this episode to the point where THEY LOST FOUR MEMORY DRIVERS TO THE VILLAIN BECAUSE HE JUST COULDN'T LET GO OF THIS THING THAT I DON'T EVEN KNOW WHY HE WAS RESEARCHING IN THE FIRST PLACE. UGH I hate this story so much.

The story of Episodes 11 and 12 was pretty interesting as well, the way the Virus Dopant worked in here was very clever, and also the thing that started this whole mini-arc was a very interesting topic I wish they had dowelled more on traffic accidents and such instead of going "girl got me because she was being cheated" thing.

Wakana's arc from episodes 13 and 14 was amazing, probably my favorite episodes so far. I thought it was going to be something to comment on the obsessiveness of idol fans, and secretly I wish that was the case rather than a dumb rivalry between two women, but I can't deny that what we got was indeed pretty good. One thing I really enjoyed from this episode was seeing past "victims" return, it shows that this world is alive and that the past episodes weren't just isolated events. It was also very good to see the seed of Wakana's redemption being planted, and the revelation that Phillip is her brother came in a very good way too. Very well rounded episode.

Sadly this can't be said about the next two arcs, they had a major pacing problem for me. I think what both of these arcs needed was more of a connection between the two, especially for Kirihiko's defeat/redemption.

Episodes 15 and 16 are fine, it was the typical "villain takes on the hero's identity to crush their popularity" but that had elevated stakes, but I feel like Phillip and Fang needed to be worked more and maybe if they had left a few things out of both episodes they could've built more into this. And you can kinda say the same about 17 & 18, they tried to do so much in just these two episodes that the major event of one of the lieutenants being defeated felt very rushed. I think they could've left this plot of kids with Gaia Memories and a single Memory being used by multiple people be an arc solely for this problem so they could go really in dept with such an interesting conflict, and let this be a more proper send-off to one of the big bad guys.

Despite said problems, I still enjoyed the shit out of W and I'll definitely try to sneak in a couple of episodes more before going to bed today. This was my first time covering so many episodes at once and I hope it wasn't a dreadful experience to any of you who sit through almost 1700 words of me rambling trying to sound smart. XD You can expect my review of Zero-One's episode 10 either tomorrow or Tuesday and if nothing goes wrong I'll be back next Saturday with another 16 episodes of W to talk about. See ya folks~.

#Kamen Rider W #kamen rider

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venus-says · 4 years

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Kamen Rider Wizard Episodes 18-35

Conveniently, this was a hot mess just like a chimera.

(yeah I know I'm late, I'm on a busy week I'm trying to figure out my schedule LEAVE ME ALONE)

I mentioned this before and you all know the posts about the middle arc of the Kamen Rider seasons are always the hardest to write about, it's the second act so there's no much of a structure to follow, it's not like the first third where they'll introduce the world and the characters and we'll see the sprouts of everything starting to grow, and it's not like the final third where we already have well-established characters and plotlines and we see everything converging in the end.

The second third is always wild and I never know what to expect, but none of the second acts so far got me SO LOST like this one. And when you think about it, it shouldn't be like this since of all 9 episode arcs in this period NONE of them could be considered filler. All of the mini-arcs in this period had important things, the first one is introducing Beast and Land Dragon, the second introduces the Draco Timer, the third is Phoenix's defeat, the fourth one is to give Kousuke some dept and backstory, in the fifth one we get to know more about Medusa and the seed of a possible new Rider is planted, the sixth one gives Beast a power-up, the seventh one gives Wizard a new power-up, in the eight one we have Gremlin asserting his position as a new general, and the ninth one we dive into Gremlin's past and what I'm guessing is going to be the final quest of the season finally it's brought upon Haruto's eyes.

So, as y'all can see, it's a very eventful arc and this should be a good thing, you know? Like, they're not wasting time, this is on paper looks great!!! And yet, I didn't like it. To me, it was too much and it got rushed and confusing.

I know it's a staple and they had toys to sell, but I believe this show would beneficiate of having only one Rider. And I'm not saying this just because I hate Kousuke, I do think that they wanted to do so much with Haruto and they had SO MANY power-ups for Wizard planned that when they had to share that time with Beast it felt like most of the things were getting rushed and these power-ups didn't feel special because they happened so often and it felt like they've been just tossed around in the story.

Had Beast not been around we would have time for things to stick more with us and we would have more opportunities for the cast we already had to tighten up their bonds, which was something that lacked a lot to me in this part, and considering the major power-up Wizard got in episode 31 was highly dependant on his relationship with Koyomi I think it was crucial for us to see more of them.

And so that I can get over it already and not mention Kousuke anymore until the end of this post, I'm gonna beat on him a little more here. He's SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO ANNOYING, I can't think of any other characters in this franchise that annoy me as much, I had my problems with Phillip, I had my problems with Ankh, I had my problems with the entire Fourze cast, and I'm having problems with Aruto, none of them come close to my despise for Kousuke. He's flat, you know he's hyper and all, but everything to him ends up coming to his need to consume both food and mana, even the very interesting conflict with his grandma at some point got intertwined to that, and to me, that's just stupid. Yeah, the guy has to defeat phantoms to not die, fine, that's cool, but when you reduce his character to only that it doesn't make for an interesting character, or at least not one that I can care for. Also, his Rider form looks stupid, there was so much they could do with a Rider based on a chimera that has a lion as a basic motif, and they went with the plainest design they could go, like do they really call that helmet a mane? Did they think just making a shoulder piece was enough? And that hyper mode? Jesus that looks awful. if they were going for lion they completely missed the mark but if they were going for something Egyptian, maybe then they hit the nail in the coffin.

But that's enough of that, while I didn't looove most of the things in this part, aside from Kousuke and the too much going on, this arc had interesting things going on and these were the things that kept me going.

I think the most interesting thing of them all were the villains. Phoenix had a somewhat decent arc going around his defeat, it was interesting seeing him connect with Rinko even if at the end of the day he was just doing it to lure Wizard, again the thing of needing more time comes to play here because I would love if this had lasted a bit longer, I think it would beneficiate Rinko's character quite a lot having more time for this dynamic to happen and seeing this going at the same time as we see more of how her relationship with Haruto is.

Medusa had one of my favorite episodes that were the ones where we get to know more about who Medusa's gate was. Kousuke being gross and being attracted to high schoolers aside, I liked everything in those two episodes. I would've loved to see they "losing" and a gate becoming a phantom on screen but what we got there was quite interesting as well, and as much as I don't think they have more room for a new Rider to come and join the party but I would absolutely love to see her sister, I think Mayu is her name, come in as a wizard and SHE being the one to defeat medusa. Don't think it'll happen, but it sure would be awesome.

The highlight of all the villains is definitely Gremlin, or Sora how he likes to be called. I was very intrigued when he first appeared and I wasn't sure if I'd like him, but the dude created havoc and it was amazing. Just the fact that he was a serial killer before becoming a phantom is awesome enough, I was really shocked when that was revealed and that really made him rise in my conception. They set him up as a good parallel to Aruto since he's half-human half-phantom and I really hope they work with that for the final part.

The remaining cast stayed more or less the same, Rinko got her time to shine at the beginning of this arc in Phoenix's defeat, and Koyomi was there for Aruto's groundbreaking moment, and that was pretty much it for the gang.

Aruto kinda followed this too, but after losing his magic he had an awesome moment where he started thinking he was useless and he was helped by those two siblings and that was very strong and sweet and even though that was only two episodes I think it was a decent amount of time for making him stand out in the crowd. I do think this thing of the dragon reiving inside him wasn't a good decision, I think it would've been better and more meaningful if his magic had come back alone and from his own will/heart but oh well, that's okay.

I think this pretty much sums up everything I had to say, I usually try to highlight individual episodes but I don't think there had any other episode that stood out to me that I haven't mentioned already so I can skip this part, and I don't have any other remarks about the new forms look so... after this average second act I don't know what to expect from the final act, and the show also didn't help me in this matter since the only hook episode 35 left was Haruto finally knowing the Philosopher's stone exists so let's see what they gonna do with that. I'll see you the next time, hopefully on the scheduled day. Bye-bye~

#Kamen Rider Wizard #kamen rider

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