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akinoameThe movie opens up at a shopping mall, where a guy on a cell phone is attacked and strung up by an attacking Mirror Monster…while some girls watch on and totally fail to look terrified. More of the same kind of Monsters attack, drawing the attention of Shinji, who transforms into Kamen Rider Ryuki. As he and the other Riders fight, they’re joined by a new Rider, Kamen Rider Femme, who drops in from a skylight. She—and yes, she, as the first official female Kamen Rider—sees Ouja and rushes off to attack him while everybody else fights off the Monsters.
This opening has nothing to do with the rest of the movie. I’m assuming it’s only there because this is the Director’s Cut.
Following the title sequence, we cut to the real opening, where the lights are out at Atori Teahouse and Sanako is telling a ghost story. Yui’s scared, but Ren is busy being a dick and ruining the story with snarky commentary. Not that I’d know anything about snarky commentary in the middle of telling a story. Annoyed, Sanako falls on the old standby of “If you think you can do better, you give it a try!” But Shinji decides to instead. It’s almost too bad; I’m curious how Ren would have gotten himself out of that one. Anyway, Shinji tells a mysterious story from his childhood: how he met a strange girl at the park one day and promised to play with her again, but when rain kept him from visiting her again, she suddenly appeared in his room. They played together for a little bit, making teru teru bozu dolls, but when Shinji turned around, the girl was gone. However, proving once again that he’s a dick, Ren cuts in and asks Shinji if he dreamed the whole thing…which Shinji admits might have been the case. But before any more stories can be told, Shinji’s phone rings, and his editor-in-chief tells him to stop fooling around and get ready for a big story the next day. The group calls it a night, and Yui calls to Sanako, but she turns around and scares them all with a faceless mask. Yes, she even scares Ren. Sanako has every right to gloat. That’ll teach you to ruin people’s fun.
The next morning at ORE Journal, Shinji finds out exactly what that big story is: a marriage swindler has been conning women into engagements, then taking their money. His latest target is a rich young woman named Miho Kirishima. When Reiko shows Shinji the photo, it’s love at first sight, as Shinji and Editor-in-chief Okubo are clearly attracted to her and start getting into a macho protective thing. This manages to weird out even Shimada, which is like weirding out Gonzo of the Muppets. Shinji and Reiko go to meet Miho, who is in disbelief over the truth about her boyfriend, wanting to believe in him. Shinji falls for her fast and hard, swearing to protect her as she walks away. They manage to get Miho to agree to a stakeout at her parents’ home, where the swindler is supposed to meet and con the folks. He smiles at the family photo, giving a look around the house and noting just how big it is…which pisses off Shinji, who is listening in with Reiko via the wire Miho is wearing. The swindler pulls out an engagement ring, admitting it’s a bit overindulgent, but Miho’s worth it. Remembering Shinji and Reiko’s warning, Miho asks what he means, and sure enough, he starts talking about money and how he’s in a bit of a financial situation right now. At that point, Shinji’s had it, and he and Reiko burst through the door. Shinji holds up his business card, throwing aside his wallet, and declares that as a journalist for ORE, he’s busting the guy. Kinda works better if you’ve got a police badge. Shinji ushers Miho out of the way as Reiko confronts the swindler, but the parents come home and wonder what the hell is going on in their house. Reiko explains to them that their daughter was being conned, but the couple reveal that they have no daughter. In fact, the family photo of Miho now shows her giving them the red eye, which is a pretty awesome switch. Miho was a con the whole time, and now she’s got the swindler’s ring and Shinji’s wallet for good measure…which only has spare change, since he’s perpetually broke. Shinji chases Miho, who offers him the soda she bought with his money as he confronts her. Meanwhile, Goro is driving Kitaoka around, who is bored out of his mind until he sees Shinji and Miho arguing, and he recognizes her. Miho continues to taunt Shinji, even hairflipping, which he mocks back. It’s cute. But the swindler arrives and he wants his ring back, and Shinji shoves Miho forward to get herself out of this situation. Just then, Shinji and Miho hear the cry of the Mirror World, and a Shereghost type Monster nabs the swindler. Miho and Shinji run to the nearest window and Kitaoka steps out of the car, with Goro grinning as Kitaoka henshins into Zolda. To Shinji’s shock, Miho has a deck and becomes Kamen Rider Femme, and he reveals his identity by transforming into Ryuki. Ryuki and Femme arrive in the Mirror World, where a lost shoe is all that remains of the swindler, and the Monster is pretty much licking its fingers. An entire swarm of Shereghosts arrives, and Femme and Ryuki fight them off separately, with Zolda appearing as unexpected backup for Ryuki. But despite Ryuki’s and Femme’s Final Vents, the three Riders are soon overwhelmed.
Meanwhile, Yui, Sanako, and Ren are setting up at Atori when Sanako realizes it’s almost Yui’s twentieth birthday. Yui looks up at a mirror and sees a young girl there, which causes her to faint. Sanako and Ren fail to wake her up, and the girl in the mirror watches.
Shinji and Miho escape the Mirror World, and he confronts her about being a Rider, saying it’s too much for a woman. Yeah. Way to sound misogynistic there, hero. Can’t wait for Kamen Rider Kivala in a few years. Despite Shinji really sounding heroic there, Miho is determined to fight. Kitaoka then walks over to confront Miho, who is pissed to see him, and Shinji is distinctly uncomfortable before the others go their separate ways. Fortunately, their timing was perfect, as Sanako calls his cell phone to let him know what happened to Yui.
Yui is unconscious in bed, and the guys are hovering as Sanako gets to work nursing her, even though she used to be a midwife, not a nurse. Sanako then remembers that Yui fainted like this once before, soon after she’d been separated from Shiro. Ren then asks if she means Shiro Kanzaki.
…
I don’t know, you’re talking to Sanako Kanzaki about Yui Kanzaki, who was separated from her brother, Shiro. I’M PRETTY FUCKING SURE SHE MEANS SHIRO KANZAKI!
Not your brightest moment there, Ren. Anyway, Yui had been horribly depressed, but after she woke up, she returned to her usual cheerful self. At this point, Yui wakes up, and the guys really start hovering now, and she assures them she’s okay. She also tells her obasan not to make up stories, but Sanako insists it really happened. But this is only the beginning of something, as Shiro Kanzaki starts summoning the other Riders, starting with everybody’s favorite serial killer, Asakura, as he beats up random people in the street. Shinji and Ren discuss Yui’s past outside, and Shinji mentions that Yui must have been really lonely after her brother was taken away, but Ren tells him not to talk like he knows what it means to lose someone close. But before they can break into a full-out argument, Kanzaki appears.
In St. Old Abandoned Church, Kanzaki imposes a three day time limit, after which, their wishes can’t be granted. There are six Riders left: Ryuki, Knight, Zolda, Femme, Ouja, and a final one who will appear later. Note that this is not Odin, who was killed by Ren in episode 35. Unlike in the series, Kanzaki didn’t go for mass-produced Odins. Deciding that now’s as good a time as any to taunt the vicious sociopath, Miho picks a fight with Asakura, but Shinji tries to break it up and demands answers from Kanzaki. Naturally, Kanzaki refuses to explain himself and blames the whole war on the Riders, whose desires keep them fighting. Sure, blame the victims. But Kitaoka agrees, and Shinji challenges him and the others to stop fighting instead of start. However, neither Miho nor Ren is willing to drop out, and Kitaoka helpfully points out that once again, nobody’s listening to Shinji. Asakura decides to laugh like a creepy fuck and challenges Miho, and Kanzaki tosses them their decks. While Shinji tries to stop the impending Ouja vs. Femme fight, Ren and Kitaoka decide to develop some foe yay out of nowhere and settle things, catching their decks as Kanzaki throws them. Asakura punches Shinji out to keep him from interfering in the fight, and Ouja and Femme enter the Mirror World. Having failed to stop that fight, Shinji then sees Ren and Kitaoka about to do the same thing, and he fails there too. Maybe he should change his name from Kamen Rider Ryuki to Kamen Rider Babysitter. Finally fed up with this bullshit, he confronts Kanzaki, who is staring at Jesus on the crucifix in what I’m sure is in no way symbolic. Shinji grabs his deck and insists that no matter what Kanzaki says, he’s going to stop the fighting. Kanzaki totally ignores Shinji as he transforms, walks over to the pipe organ, and starts playing his image theme, which is the battle music for this fight. It’s every bit as awesome as it sounds. Ryuki tries to stop Femme from fighting Ouja, but Evildiver throws him over toward Knight vs. Zolda. Ryuki tries to stop Zolda from shooting the hell out of Knight, but both Ryuki and Knight wind up having to run from the attacks, with Knight telling Ryuki to stay out of his way. Finally, both battles come together, and as Ouja is prepared to finish off Femme, Zolda blasts him away before Final Venting everyone. Despite the overkill explosion, everyone survives. And Kanzaki disappears, having finished playing Phantom of the Opera for the day. Because why not? Shinji, Ren, and Miho make it back to the church, with Miho devastated that she can’t beat Asakura. When the guys ask why she’s got such a vendetta against a ruthless serial killer, she reveals that he killed her older sister. She also warns them against Kitaoka, who is recovering elsewhere with Asakura, who realizes just who Miho is. Kitaoka had represented Asakura in Miho’s sister’s murder case, and he now regrets that and wants to try to atone by trying to protect Miho, though he adamantly denies it. As Asakura miraculously leaves Kitaoka alone, Kitaoka breaks into an ominous coughing fit. Back at St. Old Abandoned Church, Miho suggests that she, Shinji, and Ren team up, but Ren refuses, citing it’s stupid to befriend other Riders when you know you’re going to wind up killing each other. Uh-huh. Sure, Ren. Shinji reminds him, though, that he was indecisive about killing earlier in the series, but Ren argues that he’s over it and that Shinji needs to drop the good guy act. Deciding that Ren is obviously a total dick who won’t help, Miho asks Shinji again, but he’s hesitant about believing her about anything and asks if her story is true. This pisses her the hell off, and he apologizes, insisting that he understands how she feels, but he hates the idea of taking revenge. He argues that her sister wouldn’t want that. So Miho feigns injury and punches Shinji in the stomach when he shows concern, proving to him both how easy he is to fool and how his compassion is a weakness. Can you feel the love tonight?
Sometime later, Shinji is working his shift at Atori and worrying about Yui, who’s spacing out after her fainting spell, but she insists she’s okay. Miho calls, much to Shinji’s shock, and she talks like she loves him, inviting him to a local Thai restaurant. Suspicious that she’s trying to trick another guy, Shinji refuses to fall for it. ‘Cause like The Who, he won’t get fooled again. Naturally, he finds himself riding over to the restaurant anyway. Turns out Miho’s run into a guy she’d conned once, and the poor, brokenhearted sucker hasn’t caught on and is still pursuing her. The only way Miho can get him to give up is to pretend to have a boyfriend, and Shinji is the easiest person to use for that. Despite himself, Shinji agrees, and their act manages to convince the other guy, especially when the spicy food turns out to be way too much for Shinji, and Miho has to wipe up the water he’s dripping all over himself. Because only lovers could lose as pathetic and flaily as that. Once they’ve learned the other guy paid their bill and wishes them happiness, the kind of awkward not-couple is ready to depart, but Miho invites Shinji to hang out. He insists that he’s busy and rides off…only to turn back around and go with her to an amusement park. After Miho tortures Shinji on thrill rides, they take a break for some ice cream, and Miho realizes just how adorably pathetic he is when she has to tie his shoe because he can’t seem to keep them tied properly. She then snuggles with him and admits that it’s hard being a Rider, drawing his sympathy…until he realizes that she’s trying to steal his deck. They argue, and Miho admits that she needs to fight as dirty as possible to win, before visiting her sister at a cryogenics lab and vowing to revive her.
A rainstorm develops, and at Atori, Yui and Sanako are making teru teru bozu when Shinji arrives, soaked and complaining about his terrible day. Yui goes to get him a towel, but as she retrieves it, a mirror breaks, bringing back memories of the girl in the mirror and herself as a child—both of them identical. Yui bursts running out of Atori, reaching a temple yard, where now Shinji and Ren are watching her dig, worried as they try to shield her from the rain. Yui digs up a box containing shards of a broken mirror and drawings of monsters. The Contract Monsters, to be exact, including Dragreder and Darkwing, which shocks their Riders. Yui explains that she always drew monsters as a child, sitting in front of the mirror, imagining they’d protect her. Yes, this little girl had a messed up life; the movie is actually kinder to her than the series. The one time she went outside, she befriended a local boy and promised to play with him again, but the next day it was raining, and he couldn’t come. Crying over the broken promise, Yui sat in front of the mirror until her reflection beckoned her to the Mirror World, where they played until Yui used up all of her time. Unable to return to the real world without risk of dying, Yui began crying again, and Mirror Yui offered her a deal: in exchange for borrowing Mirror Yui’s life force to live in the real world, Yui was to give her the drawings she’d made. All of the Monsters that Shinji and Ren and all the other Riders have faced and contracted with were created by Yui when she was a child. Yui then sees her younger self in the mirror again and drops it, just as Monsters attack a nearby mall, and Shinji and Ren run off. The battle from the opening ensues, only now it makes sense. Meanwhile, Yui remembers that she too has a time limit: her borrowed life will only last as long as she’s legally a child. On her twentieth birthday, which is only a few days away, she will die.
The Riders are being overwhelmed by Shereghosts and Raydragoons, but Femme and Ouja decide to settle the score anyway. Zolda once again intervenes and tries to help Femme, but she beats him up, injuring him badly. Femme manages to outwit Asakura, but he takes out her Guard Vent with his primary Contract Monster, Venosnaker. Meanwhile, in a poorly lit corridor, a sinister black Ryuki stalks through. Ouja gains the upper hand, but “Ryuki” arrives just in time with his Monster, a black version of Dragreder creatively named Dragblacker. The dark Ryuki answers to Shinji’s name when Femme calls it out, and he easily defeats Ouja and destroys his merged Monsters, Genocider, reducing Ouja to the pathetically easy to defeat Blank Form. Femme destroys Ouja’s deck, avenging her sister, but Asakura is guano loco enough not to go down with out a fight, so he tries to strangle her. Fortunately for Femme, he disintegrates, managing to look really creepy and demonic in the process. Meanwhile, Zolda staggers back and collapses through a mirror. The next shot is of a depressed Goro, implying that Kitaoka died, but it turns out that Kitaoka is alive, but really beat up. He tells Goro that he’ll keep fighting, but after remembering the thorough beating he just got trying to help Femme, he changes his mind. He doesn’t have much time left before his illness kills him, so instead of fighting, he decides to enjoy the rest of his life. He has a coughing fit that worries Goro, but he insists he’s fine, hiding the blood he just coughed up and calling up Reiko for a date. Reiko dismisses him, but after hearing him admit that he’s kept track of her rejections and this is the forty-second time he’s asked her out, she finally relents, possibly out of pity. She agrees to meet him for dinner—if she feels like it. Because she’s Reiko and therefore awesome. Kitaoka is actually worried for a moment that she’ll turn him down again, but Goro insists that he’s sure she’ll be there. It’s a really nice moment for the three of them. Hiding the blood again, Kitaoka sends Goro to pick up flowers, but ultimately, he decides to go along, pointedly leaving his deck—and the Rider War—behind as they debate just what color roses to get for Reiko.
At Atori, Reiko is touching up her makeup, to Okubo’s teasing while Shinji doodles and stresses over the revelation that Yui is the creator of the Mirror Monsters. Miho then calls him again to ask him out to dinner, and apparently slighted by Reiko’s and Shinji’s ships sailing, Shimada swaps her glasses for contacts, to Okubo’s shock. Yes, weird background events like this happen all the time at ORE Journal. It’s fun. Shinji meets Miho at a mall restaurant, where Miho is treating him to okonomiyaki as thanks for saving her…though Shinji has no clue what she’s talking about. The whole scene is cute, even though Shinji accidentally insults Miho by bringing up the fact that she cons men for a living, but she promises not to do it anymore, and he apologizes for irritating her. They end up arguing over Shinji possibly getting seaweed flakes stuck in his teeth, and they wind up spilling the flakes all over the customers next to them, flailing and stammering apologies as they try to fix it and just embarrass the hell out of themselves and the other customers. After dinner, Shinji washes up in the bathroom, optimistic that he’s gotten through to Miho, who isn’t too bad now that he’s gotten to know her a bit, and convinced he can stop the fighting. But Okubo calls, and as Shinji turns away to answer the phone, he fails to notice his reflection emerge from the mirror. Mirror Shinji joins Miho, who mistakes him for the real Shinji as they walk off to continue their date, while the real Shinji exits moments later, wondering where Miho went. At the same time this is going on, Yui is crying, fearful that she’s going to die soon, but her brother appears in the window, promising to grant her a new life, which makes her even more fearful now. Back at the date, Miho and Mirror Shinji are on the roof, with Miho walking along the masonry, enjoying the view. Mirror Shinji tries to snare her ankle to make her trip, but she turns around suddenly and calls him out on acting strange all night. When he rushes toward her, she jumps to safety, realizing he’s not Shinji. He tries to strangle her, but because he’s been in the real world too long, he’s disintegrating, much like a human who’s been in the Mirror World too long. He leaves Miho and goes to a nearby mirror, returning to the Mirror World. Miho transforms and follows, with a confused Shinji arriving and going after her, wondering just what the hell is going on. Meanwhile, Ren is out on his motorcycle when a Raydragoon emerges and attacks an innocent bystander, so he goes over to fight.
Femme is confronted by Mirror Shinji, who manages to henshin without a mirror, as he’s a creation of the Mirror World. While the dark Ryuki viciously fights Femme, Knight battles the Raydragoon in the air and witnesses the fight. In the darkness, he mistakes Femme’s opponent for Ryuki, but he can’t do anything because the Raydragoon has molted into the more powerful Hydragoon, forcing him to put all of his attention on his own fight. The dark Ryuki beats the utter shit out of Femme, fighting as dirty as possible. He’s about to finish her off when the real Ryuki arrives to save her. Ryuki stares in shock at his evil twin, but the dark Ryuki walks away, and Ryuki has to worry about the injured Femme. Shinji manages to bring Miho back to the real world while Ren finishes his battle, and Shinji’s terrified when she doesn’t wake up. With her hand shaking, Miho manages to flick his forehead before opening her eyes, joking that she fooled him again. They banter once again, but Miho holds onto him, spotting the seaweed flakes in his teeth and wiping them away before kneeling down to tie his shoe again. They walk back home, and Miho stops in the middle of the sidewalk, having trouble breathing. Hiding her injuries, she insists that Shinji can drop her off here, but he’s willing to take her the whole way home. She hurries him along, desperate not to let him see her die. Shinji asks if she’ll quit the Rider War, and she promises to think about it, waiting until Shinji’s gone to collapse into the nearby bushes. Struggling to breathe, Miho looks at the stars and apologizes to her sister and asks Shinji to at least keep his shoes tied. When the sun rises later, nobody on the sidewalk seems to notice the dead woman lying in the bushes, her Advent Card deck abandoned.
Shinji makes it back to Atori in the early morning, where Ren is waiting for him. Ren calls him out on deceiving everyone with his good-boy act and trying to make them lower their guards. But now, Ren feels that he can fight Shinji without reservations. Yui breaks up the impending fight, as she usually does, talking with them at the park. She reveals her fear that her brother has lied to Ren about granting a new life for him to give his fiancée if he wins the war. She reveals that her borrowed life will run out soon and the life that Kanzaki promised will probably go to her instead. But with both Shinji and Ren still standing and another Rider still out there, Shinji realizes that at this rate, Yui will die. Ren, however, promises to keep on fighting regardless, telling Yui that even if it’s only a 1% chance that Kanzaki is telling the truth, he has to believe in his promise. When he returns to Atori, Shinji agonizes over the truth, spotting the teru teru bozu that Yui had just made the day before. He realizes in horror that both his story from his childhood and Yui’s match up and that Yui was the little girl he’d met back then. Because he failed to keep his promise to her, Yui entered the Mirror World and had to receive a limited life and Kanzaki had to set up the Rider War. Everything that’s happened, everything they’ve all been through, it’s all his fault. He drops to his knees in horror as his reflection emerges from the window, pointing out that yes, this is all Shinji’s fault. Across town, at Seimeiin University, Yui enters Room 401, the lab where Kanzaki held his experiment that nearly killed Ren’s fiancée and kicked off the Rider War. She lights candles on a birthday cake and calls out for her brother, asking him not to leave her alone. He finally emerges, speaking gently to her as he promises to give her a new life as a birthday present. Neither seem to notice the sound of a heavy drop of liquid hitting the floor. Back at Atori, Mirror Shinji introduces himself as Shinji’s other self, similar to the two Yuis. Shinji backs away in terror as Mirror Shinji asks him to accept him and join with him to form the strongest Kamen Rider. He promises Shinji that they’ll be able to save Yui, which makes him falter and finally agree. At this point, Ren arrives to see the two Shinjis, one placing his hand through the other. Now, quick question. If you were in Ren’s position, what would you do? Would you a) stand at the door like a complete idiot watching and not doing a thing to help, or b) you’re a Kamen Rider, do something, damnit! Guess which one Ren picks. As Shinji gasps and tries to thrash around in pain, Mirror Shinji steps into him, absorbing him as he introduces himself to Ren as a Rider from the Mirror World, Ryuga. With the process complete, Ryuga can now exist in both worlds, no longer an illusion in the mirror, as he puts it. He henshins and fights Ren right outside Atori.
As more liquid drops ominously to the floor, Yui asks Kanzaki if he remembers their childhood and how he used to protect her from bullies. The music playing, naturally, is Climax 10, easily the most depressing piece of background music ever created for Kamen Rider. I may have only seen three series, but I’m pretty sure this is the case. Calling her brother an idiot for still trying to protect her, she smiles through held-back tears and says she loves him before blowing out her candles and laying her head down on the table. Realizing that something is horribly wrong, Kanzaki gets up and tears the coverings from the windows, revealing that Yui slit her wrist, choosing suicide over the Rider War. Unable to accept it, Kanzaki completely loses his shit, to use the technical term. His agonized shouts create a backlash of Mirror World energy, shattering glass throughout the city and catching Knight’s attention. Knowing something is wrong, Ren leaves the battle and flies toward the source of the explosion. Kanzaki disintegrates into darkness as Ren races to Room 401, arriving to find Yui dead. When he sees her bloodied wrist, he breaks down into tears, asking why she did this. Ryuga arrives, but Ren refuses to leave Yui’s side, even as Ryuga holds his sword against him. Ryuga then sees Yui and freezes before staggering backwards as Shinji fights back, breaking the merge. Shinji stands and looks at Yui, saying that he understands. Ryuga insists that they need to merge again and save Yui, but Shinji argues that Yui didn’t want to live by someone else dying. Ryuga decides essentially, fuck that shit, and tries to strangle Shinji—what is it with this movie and strangling people?—but Shinji uses the broken mirrors to henshin. Ren gets up in a daze and walks toward an empty chair, where his fiancée had sat when she was attacked and put in a coma, once again powerless to do anything to help the people he cares about. Ryuga and Ryuki battle throughout the parking garage, even involving Dragreder and Dragblacker. They manage to make it to the roof of the garage, and Ryuga punches Ryuki back into Room 401 with Ren and Yui. Both Riders scan their Final Vent cards, and with a last look at Yui, Ryuki charges to meet Ryuga’s Final Vent. The two attacks explode violently, forcing Ren away from the window as only one Shinji survives, pulling himself to his feet. Ren asks which one he is, but he soon recognizes the sorrow on his face as only being Shinji. Unfortunately, with Kanzaki in no state to control the Mirror Monsters, a massive swarm of Hydragoons emerge into the real world, attacking the city. Realizing it’s the end of the world, Ren confesses that until now, he never had, nor wanted, a friend. But despite everything, Shinji’s become his first and only friend.
…I know, I know. Save the analysis for the actual analysis section, not the recap. But I really have to say this here. First off, I love this speech. It says so much about Ren’s character—how much he’s changed that he considers Shinji his friend and how much he’s changed that he can actually say this to Shinji’s face. How he clearly knows he and Shinji are going to die right there, so he’s not going to leave things unsaid, not now. So I really hate that I have to call bullshit on it. It’s a gorgeous speech, yes. But Shinji is not Ren’s “only friend.” There’s another friend, and her dead body is no less than five feet away from him as he says this.
Throughout the series, Ren has always been there for Yui. They have a very interesting relationship in that it would be so easy to ship them, but I feel like it would be inappropriate. They seem to use one another as surrogates: Ren unconsciously sees Yui as a surrogate for Eri, so he does the same things he did with his fiancée: try to cover up the fact that he’s been fighting, always be there for her when she needs him, and assure her that everything he’s going through isn’t her fault. Meanwhile, I think Yui sees Ren as a surrogate for her brother: Kanzaki hasn’t been there for her since childhood, but Ren is right now. When she’s scared, Ren seeks her out and helps her through it. When she needs to be rescued, he and Shinji are right there to save her. Sure, Ren’s cold and aloof, but so is Kanzaki. The lines blur between them, which is one reason why I think Kanzaki seemed to have a more personal vendetta against Ren than against Shinji, whose very existence fucked up all his plans.
Even outside the context of the series and within the movie itself, Ren and Yui clearly have a relationship well beyond Ren’s claim early on that he only associated himself with her to give himself an advantage in battle. Again, he’s pretty much constantly there for her. He never leaves her side when she collapses, he joins Shinji in the pouring rain when he finds out she dashed out of Atori to dig up a makeshift grave, and no less than five minutes ago, he was sobbing at her side when he saw she’d killed herself. If the only knowledge of Ren Akiyama you have is from reading my review so far? Even then you get the sense that he doesn’t cry for just anyone. Hell, as I’ve pointed out elsewhere, his reaction to her death is the exact same reaction he had when Shinji died in the series: crying, calling them an idiot, then shutting down completely—refusing to leave their side and completely losing the will to fight. This is a man who can’t even afford to do this for his own fiancée, but he did it for Yui. And in the series, he did it for Shinji. And his speech implies he doesn’t see Yui on as equal footing as Shinji?
Now, I know. I’m watching a fansub. There are liberties taken with the translation, for whatever reason—be they personal preference or just difference in connotation between cultures. But still, the general gist is the same. And when he’s saying this right in front of the body of the girl who’s been at his side from almost the start of his battle, it kind of comes off as a slap in the face. It’s a very strange divide between the actor’s emotion and the writer’s script that creates a huge conflict of intent that I can’t seem to make out, and that bothers me about this.
Anyway, Shinji affirms that he and Ren are friends, but Ren insists that he has to win, and he asks Shinji to fight with him. Shinji agrees, so long as Ren hears out his wish: “Don’t die.” His voice raw, Ren wishes him the same. Then without mirrors, belts, or even their Survive cards, the two henshin directly into Survive form, which is just too damn cool to complain about. They look at each other once before charging into certain death on Dragranzer and Darkraider, fighting impossible odds and just trying to survive and not break their promise to one another.
The credits roll, and we see that Kanzaki has reset time once again. A young Yui is alone in the park when she turns to see Shiro behind her. He calls out her name, and she cheerfully cries out, “Oniichan!” before running over to play with him, neither having to worry about broken promises.
Most of this movie is canon up until about the point where Tojo, Kamen Rider Tiger, dies. But it does have one big divergence point early: Yui’s death. Kanzaki has reset the Rider War over and over again, trying to get things to go his way, so it’s easy to ask why he didn’t just Time Vent Yui’s death out of existence? This answers the question of why, continuing the sense the series had that you can’t defy fate; you just have to take it into your own hands.
In Episode Final, Yui and Shinji met when they were children and became friends, playing at the park and promising to play there again the next day. However, thanks to a rainstorm, Shinji wasn’t able to keep his promise. Yui went to the park to see he wasn’t there, then returned home and began crying in front of the mirror until she went to the Mirror World. She still ends up receiving the life of her Mirror World counterpart, but the circumstances are different. You see from the start that Yui is special somehow, so she was able to survive in the Mirror World without immediately disintegrating, which is what happens when a normal human goes in otherwise; the Kamen Riders and Alternatives are able to extend the amount of time they can stay there thanks to their armor. Instead of disintegrating, however, Yui’s time limit meant she would die if she returned to the real world, and this is why she needed that life force.
The keywords for Kamen Rider Ryuki are “Those who don’t fight won’t survive,” and survival is a huge theme. Everyone is trying to ensure something continues on, whether it’s trying to save themselves like Kitaoka, saving someone else like Ren and Kanzaki are doing, trying to save the Riders like Shinji and Tezuka, or trying to save the fight like Asakura. And this movie manages to tie the theme together with the Mirror Monsters. Why do the Monsters attack humans? Yui theorizes that it’s to consume their life force. Monsters fight one another to gain energy and become stronger, which feeds them—much like the wild Digimon in Digimon Tamers. But because they were created by Yui, the Monsters have no life force of their own. It’s implied that they’re an extension of her imagination, much like the Imagin of the later series Kamen Rider Den-O, also headed up by Yasuko Kobayashi, the main writer for Ryuki. Oddly enough, given that Let’s Go Kamen Riders reveals that the Den-O and OOO world is actually Kamen Rider World Prime, this makes perfect sense, and the Mirror Monsters could be early ancestors of the Imagin, denied form thanks to Yui and Shiro no longer creating them in the reset timeline. And if devouring the energy of other Monsters can make the Monsters stronger, devouring the life force of humans might give them life force of their own, rather than being maintained by the Kanzaki siblings.
But life force is a tricky thing, and there’s a sense of Equivalent Exchange like Fullmetal Alchemist at play: to obtain, something of equal value must be lost. The Mirror Monsters consume humans whole and fail to gain enough life force to live. And when it comes to the great power of the Rider War, that power has to come from somewhere, especially if it’s life. Yui received life from someone exactly identical to her, and it wasn’t strong enough to keep her going past childhood. And if obtaining the power is the end result of the Rider War, why did Kanzaki pick thirteen Riders? Why not just stop at two? Give Ren the Knight deck, send him against Odin immediately, and claim the prize immediately? Yui theorizes that it’s a matter of the quality of the power. The power comes from the lives of the Kamen Riders, and as they fight, they become stronger. When they fight one another, the strongest ones survive, and it’s the strongest life that Kanzaki is going to transfer to Yui. Which gives Ren’s death at the end of the Rider War in episode 50 a whole new meaning, if he’d been forced to pay into the power with his own life to revive Eri; it would explain why she didn’t wake up until he was dead. Yes, this series is significantly more depressing and horrifying in retrospect.
I’ll get more in-depth about Ryuki’s relationship with fate when I batch review the series, but in short, I feel like it’s more a matter of taking fate into your own hands rather than fighting it or accepting it. You can change the way things happen, even if you can’t change the end result. And you can use that to better the fates of others. And that is exactly what Yui does here, and it makes her role stronger than in the end of the series. Sure, in the series, she tried to kill herself to stop her brother from continuing the war, but she was prevented from doing so and died in a more passive way. She did talk her brother out of resetting time again, though, so more power to her.
It’s almost a shame that this wasn’t the true end, since Yui really comes off as a lot more proactive in trying to stop the war here. She tries to talk Kanzaki down, reminding him of their past and asking him to stay with her for her birthday. She points out that she’s not a little girl anymore and she doesn’t need him to protect her. She’s grown up, and she’s ready to act like an adult and walk on her own to face her problems—and that means not needing him to save her. Watching it, you forget that Kanzaki is the villain here and that he’s done all these horrible things and ruined so many lives and gotten so many people killed. He sees himself as a big brother doing what needs to be done to protect his little sister, just like he’s always protected his little sister. And Yui maturely tells him that she doesn’t need him to do that anymore, but she still loves him. And she chooses to kill herself in order to stop him because she loves him and she knows she has to do this because of that.
Yui shares the strong character focus with Shinji, who really goes through hell here. In a lot of ways, this movie feels like two merged into one. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t, but the more lighthearted Femme half of the movie progresses into the very suddenly dark and depressing Ryuga half, and Shinji’s character development is tied to both of the new characters.
When Shinji first meets Miho, he makes a complete derp of himself. She’s pretty and elegant, and he wants to protect her at all costs. And then he finds out that she’s a con artist, swindling men out of their money. He got tricked just as much as the others. Still, he finds himself equally attracted to and annoyed by her, unable to figure out Miho’s personas. It’s cute to watch because you know he really would like to get to know her better, but she’s constantly lying to him and he doesn’t know whether or not to trust her, even when she’s telling the truth. She bugs him, but at the same time, he likes her.
During this half of the movie, Shinji keeps up his role trying to be the hero of the series: trying to stop the Riders from fighting, struggling with understanding their motivation, but still maintaining that it’s wrong to play Kanzaki’s game and kill one another. He still tries to save them. And he really focuses a lot on Miho, since she just won’t leave him alone. You really see it toward the end of their date, both just before and after Ryuga cockblocks and attacks. Shinji is convinced that he’s getting through to Miho and that he can get her to stop fighting. And he goes to rescue her and is scared as hell when she doesn’t wake up after taking such a horrific beating. She lies and insists that she’s okay and teases him so he won’t worry, but he still tries to be a gentleman and walk her home and even asks to be sure that she’ll drop out of the battle before he leaves her. When he does leave, he’s smiling and giving a look down at the shoe she tied, believing he’s saved her. Which is probably another reason why she refused to let him see her die.
But the second half of the movie, beginning immediately after Miho’s death, is what destroys everything Shinji’s tried to do. He was a kid when he first met Yui, and it was completely out of his control that he couldn’t keep his promise to her—yes, kids, keep your promises even when acts of weather or God keep them well out of your control, or your friends are going to die and everything bad that happens after is all your fault. He blames himself for it, even when he had no say in the matter. As to how exactly Yui ended up in his room and playing with him, I’m going to assume that it was Mirror Yui, possibly just after she gave her life force over to Yui. Or it’s possible that Yui went through after receiving the life force, then had to return home through the Mirror World. They don’t explain it, but with Yui’s explicit repression of her childhood memories, it’s forgivable.
This revelation results in Shinji being very easy for Ryuga to manipulate, which is ironic given how Miho was manipulating him throughout the whole first half of the movie. Themes carry over, such as the manipulation and his insistence to Miho that killing someone else to save someone you love is wrong and that the people you’re trying to save don’t want that. He says this about Yui, and it actually seems to hit a chord with Ren, who gives him a look of shock—appropriately, given that he’s trying to save his fiancée, who nearly died in this very room more than a year ago. Shinji fights Ryuga with all he has to try to honor Yui’s memory, and then he and Ren decide to fight off the invasion of their world even though they know they can’t win and they’re going to die; even if it’s a 1% chance, they have to fight if they want anything to survive.
Of the two new characters for the movie, Miho Kirishima gets more screentime and development. As Kamen Rider Femme, she is contracted to the swan Monster Blancwing, giving her white knight-themed armor with a cape, all meant to be reminiscent of Knight. I kind of have a love-hate relationship with her design. For the most part it looks impressive and elegant, but some things bother me. Her Visor, for one—the foil that acts as a card reader—doesn’t appear to be particularly strong, and she uses it as her primary weapon, much as Knight uses his. Hers is very thin and doesn’t seem to have a lot of strength to it, making it look kind of silly when she’s trying to score deadly attacks against Zolda, Ouja, and Ryuga. Her cape is another issue. I don’t know if it’s made of cloth or plastic, and there are times when it really gets to be irritating. Sometimes it looks really nice, moving around her fairly dramatically. But other times, it appears to be very plastic in design, and it looks distracting. The biggest example I can think of is when it’s pretty much shredded in Ouja’s attack on her, and it ends up looking like she’s wearing a shower curtain. Which is sad, because I really do think it completes the ensemble. Her Sword Vent card gives her a double-bladed naginata, which is as far from a sword as you can get. Again, I’ve got kind of a love-hate relationship here; I think I like Miho more than I like Femme. Femme’s attacks never seem to look like they’ve got much force behind them, which is a bad thing when she’s supposed to be facing off against characters that we’ve watched become very strong. Her Final Vent looks kind of silly in the face of the other Final Vents, where Blancwing creates a gust of wind that blows the enemies toward Femme to destroy them with her not-a-Sword Vent. Guard Vent makes up for it, giving her a shield and pretty much Odin’s powers—a distracting shower of feathers and teleportation powers for quick attacks.
Miho is a con artist by trade, though we never find out if she’s doing it as part of her need to get an advantage to save her sister or if she did it beforehand. She appears to come from a fairly wealthy family if she managed to have her sister’s remains cryogenically frozen, though that might have wiped her out and made her need to con men for a living. Either way, this is her motivation. Without any reason other than “shits and giggles,” Asakura beat her sister to death with a broken bottle. Kitaoka represented him in court and managed to get him off or at least got a reduced sentence, since Asakura is a serial killer and we don’t know just which murder he’s in prison for during his first appearance in the series. Kitaoka regrets representing Asakura period, but he really regrets this particular case, and Miho holds it against him. So she considers them both her enemies and tries every dirty trick in the book—including picking Shinji’s pocket to get his deck—to try to win.
Things change when she meets Shinji, because everyone changes after meeting him. She tries to con him, but she finds herself falling for him, especially after she thinks he saved her. She turns out to be a teasing but nurturing person, tying his shoes for him and wiping the seaweed flakes from his teeth. Shinji’s clumsiness is charming to her. When he klutzes out at the restaurant and spills all of his okonomiyaki mix onto the grill, she lightly scolds him as she shapes it, then dumps all of hers out just the same way. The fact that she ends up treating him and cooking a meal for him shows how fond she is of him, and she is proud to tell him that she’s a good cook. She even manages to forgive him when he points out that it’s a good skill for her to have if she’s conning men. And even when she realizes that Ryuga was the one who saved her, she still has something for Shinji, trying to take care of little things like his teeth and his shoes and refusing to let him see her die, hoping with her last breath that he’ll be able to take care of himself.
As for the second character, Ryuga, he doesn’t get much development, but his backstory is tied much more deeply to the overall plot. As an exact copy of Shinji, he looks the same, but as if viewed in the mirror. His personality is entirely the opposite: manipulative and cruel, as opposed to Shinji’s open friendliness and naïveté. Referred to as both Mirror Shinji and Dark Side Shinji in supplemental information, he was created by Yui just the same as the Mirror Monsters—her desire for a playmate brought him into being, thanks to her Mirror World self. However, like the Mirror Monsters, he didn’t have an existence outside of Yui, which made him perfect for Kanzaki’s game. All it took was to tell him to take Shinji’s life force for his own to allow him to live and let him fight in order to save Yui. To be perfectly honest, I’m not sure how much is Ryuga being obsessed with Yui, how much is Kanzaki’s manipulation, and how much is Ryuga manipulating Shinji, but it works. He doesn’t need to be particularly complex. He only reveals himself toward the end, and all he really needs is to be threatening.
Ryuga is Ryuki’s evil twin, and appropriately, his powers reflect Shinji’s. His Contract Monster, Dragblacker, is a black dragon otherwise identical to Dragreder. All of his cards are the same as Shinji’s, and the only real difference comes the first time he uses his Final Vent. Shinji’s Final Vent always involves him leaping into the air, flipping around, and doing a kick while Dragreder blasts a fireball for him to fly through to increase the power of his Rider Kick. The first time Ryuga uses his, he’s hovering in the air, which makes it damn creepy and clear that he’s definitely not human. When Dragblacker blasts out a black and blue fireball, it first entraps the enemy in stone, preventing them from escaping before Ryuga kicks into them with the rest of the fire.
Ryuga’s greatest strength in terms of character is how he affects Shinji. Shinji is scared of him. He knows right away that this guy is a threat and that he wants to end his life. And Ryuga talks him into it. He plays on Shinji’s guilt and grief over soon losing his friend, and he makes him believe this is the only way to fix everything. He then proceeds to beat up Ren, who escapes before he can get killed. If not for Yui killing herself, they would have lost Shinji. Ryuga’s personality was just that powerful and Shinji had lost the will to fight and thus survive. It was only because the sight of Yui dead shocked the both of them so much that Shinji realized Yui wouldn’t want him to do this that he forced himself free of Ryuga. And it gave him the will to survive stronger than Ryuga’s, allowing him to win.
My final notes on this movie have to come down to the acting. Everyone in this cast is strong, and they really turned in a good performance. Takashi Hagino, who plays Asakura, was as creepy as ever and even managed to make his death scene scary. Props to him for giving children nightmares. Kenzaburo Kikuchi, Kanzaki, really nailed that last scene with Yui, dropping the vague threatening nature that he usually has and being a gentle and loving older brother…who proceeds to completely lose it when she dies. But I’ve really got to hand it to the leads. Satoshi Matsuda doesn’t get a chance to show a whole lot of emotion thanks to Ren’s stoic nature, but he does awesome with Ren’s breakdowns, and he really turned in a good performance here when Ren discovered Yui’s body.
The absolute best was our star, Shinji and Ryuga himself, Takamasa Suga. Shinji’s usually a ball of energy or struggling with indecision, but this really gave him a chance to run the gamut of emotions. It’s best shown when Shinji breaks down in Atori and Ryuga confronts him. He does an amazing job with Shinji’s grief and horror, and then he switches gears so well to Ryuga’s creepy, threatening nature. I wouldn’t be surprised if he took a bit of Hagino’s performance as Asakura into it, given there are definite similarities in the predatory look Ryuga gives Shinji. He absolutely nails the tenseness of that scene, with Shinji terrified and reluctant and Ryuga constantly pressing the issue until he agrees. It’s very easy to believe they’re two different people. Even as a Rider, Ryuga’s voice is so low and feral that he sounds different from Shinji, who is loud but very human. And when the climax is a guy fighting himself, you really have to do a good job conveying that, and he went above and beyond awesome on that one.
Episode Final was written by Toshiki Inoue and directed by Ryuta Tasaki. Takamasa Suga played Shinji and Ryuga, with Seiji Takaiwa as Ryuki’s suit actor and Jiro Okamoto as Ryuga’s suit actor, with Jun Watanabe as a sub. Satoshi Matsuda played Ren, with Makoto Ito as Knight’s suit actor. Yui was played by Ayano Sugiyama, Kanzaki by Kenzaburo Kikuchi, and Sanako by Kazue Tsunogae. Kitaoka was played by Ryohei, with Yoshifumi Oshikawa as Zolda’s suit actor. Goro was played by Tomohisa Yuge. Asakura was played by Takashi Hagino, with Jiro Okamoto as Ouja’s suit actor. Miho was played by Natsuki Kato, with Keiko Hashimoto as Femme’s suit actor. Kanji Tsuda played Okubo, Sayaka Kuon played Reiko, and Hitomi Kurihara played Shimada. The younger Shinji, Yui, and Shiro were uncredited.
This opening has nothing to do with the rest of the movie. I’m assuming it’s only there because this is the Director’s Cut.
Following the title sequence, we cut to the real opening, where the lights are out at Atori Teahouse and Sanako is telling a ghost story. Yui’s scared, but Ren is busy being a dick and ruining the story with snarky commentary. Not that I’d know anything about snarky commentary in the middle of telling a story. Annoyed, Sanako falls on the old standby of “If you think you can do better, you give it a try!” But Shinji decides to instead. It’s almost too bad; I’m curious how Ren would have gotten himself out of that one. Anyway, Shinji tells a mysterious story from his childhood: how he met a strange girl at the park one day and promised to play with her again, but when rain kept him from visiting her again, she suddenly appeared in his room. They played together for a little bit, making teru teru bozu dolls, but when Shinji turned around, the girl was gone. However, proving once again that he’s a dick, Ren cuts in and asks Shinji if he dreamed the whole thing…which Shinji admits might have been the case. But before any more stories can be told, Shinji’s phone rings, and his editor-in-chief tells him to stop fooling around and get ready for a big story the next day. The group calls it a night, and Yui calls to Sanako, but she turns around and scares them all with a faceless mask. Yes, she even scares Ren. Sanako has every right to gloat. That’ll teach you to ruin people’s fun.
The next morning at ORE Journal, Shinji finds out exactly what that big story is: a marriage swindler has been conning women into engagements, then taking their money. His latest target is a rich young woman named Miho Kirishima. When Reiko shows Shinji the photo, it’s love at first sight, as Shinji and Editor-in-chief Okubo are clearly attracted to her and start getting into a macho protective thing. This manages to weird out even Shimada, which is like weirding out Gonzo of the Muppets. Shinji and Reiko go to meet Miho, who is in disbelief over the truth about her boyfriend, wanting to believe in him. Shinji falls for her fast and hard, swearing to protect her as she walks away. They manage to get Miho to agree to a stakeout at her parents’ home, where the swindler is supposed to meet and con the folks. He smiles at the family photo, giving a look around the house and noting just how big it is…which pisses off Shinji, who is listening in with Reiko via the wire Miho is wearing. The swindler pulls out an engagement ring, admitting it’s a bit overindulgent, but Miho’s worth it. Remembering Shinji and Reiko’s warning, Miho asks what he means, and sure enough, he starts talking about money and how he’s in a bit of a financial situation right now. At that point, Shinji’s had it, and he and Reiko burst through the door. Shinji holds up his business card, throwing aside his wallet, and declares that as a journalist for ORE, he’s busting the guy. Kinda works better if you’ve got a police badge. Shinji ushers Miho out of the way as Reiko confronts the swindler, but the parents come home and wonder what the hell is going on in their house. Reiko explains to them that their daughter was being conned, but the couple reveal that they have no daughter. In fact, the family photo of Miho now shows her giving them the red eye, which is a pretty awesome switch. Miho was a con the whole time, and now she’s got the swindler’s ring and Shinji’s wallet for good measure…which only has spare change, since he’s perpetually broke. Shinji chases Miho, who offers him the soda she bought with his money as he confronts her. Meanwhile, Goro is driving Kitaoka around, who is bored out of his mind until he sees Shinji and Miho arguing, and he recognizes her. Miho continues to taunt Shinji, even hairflipping, which he mocks back. It’s cute. But the swindler arrives and he wants his ring back, and Shinji shoves Miho forward to get herself out of this situation. Just then, Shinji and Miho hear the cry of the Mirror World, and a Shereghost type Monster nabs the swindler. Miho and Shinji run to the nearest window and Kitaoka steps out of the car, with Goro grinning as Kitaoka henshins into Zolda. To Shinji’s shock, Miho has a deck and becomes Kamen Rider Femme, and he reveals his identity by transforming into Ryuki. Ryuki and Femme arrive in the Mirror World, where a lost shoe is all that remains of the swindler, and the Monster is pretty much licking its fingers. An entire swarm of Shereghosts arrives, and Femme and Ryuki fight them off separately, with Zolda appearing as unexpected backup for Ryuki. But despite Ryuki’s and Femme’s Final Vents, the three Riders are soon overwhelmed.
Meanwhile, Yui, Sanako, and Ren are setting up at Atori when Sanako realizes it’s almost Yui’s twentieth birthday. Yui looks up at a mirror and sees a young girl there, which causes her to faint. Sanako and Ren fail to wake her up, and the girl in the mirror watches.
Shinji and Miho escape the Mirror World, and he confronts her about being a Rider, saying it’s too much for a woman. Yeah. Way to sound misogynistic there, hero. Can’t wait for Kamen Rider Kivala in a few years. Despite Shinji really sounding heroic there, Miho is determined to fight. Kitaoka then walks over to confront Miho, who is pissed to see him, and Shinji is distinctly uncomfortable before the others go their separate ways. Fortunately, their timing was perfect, as Sanako calls his cell phone to let him know what happened to Yui.
Yui is unconscious in bed, and the guys are hovering as Sanako gets to work nursing her, even though she used to be a midwife, not a nurse. Sanako then remembers that Yui fainted like this once before, soon after she’d been separated from Shiro. Ren then asks if she means Shiro Kanzaki.
…
I don’t know, you’re talking to Sanako Kanzaki about Yui Kanzaki, who was separated from her brother, Shiro. I’M PRETTY FUCKING SURE SHE MEANS SHIRO KANZAKI!
Not your brightest moment there, Ren. Anyway, Yui had been horribly depressed, but after she woke up, she returned to her usual cheerful self. At this point, Yui wakes up, and the guys really start hovering now, and she assures them she’s okay. She also tells her obasan not to make up stories, but Sanako insists it really happened. But this is only the beginning of something, as Shiro Kanzaki starts summoning the other Riders, starting with everybody’s favorite serial killer, Asakura, as he beats up random people in the street. Shinji and Ren discuss Yui’s past outside, and Shinji mentions that Yui must have been really lonely after her brother was taken away, but Ren tells him not to talk like he knows what it means to lose someone close. But before they can break into a full-out argument, Kanzaki appears.
In St. Old Abandoned Church, Kanzaki imposes a three day time limit, after which, their wishes can’t be granted. There are six Riders left: Ryuki, Knight, Zolda, Femme, Ouja, and a final one who will appear later. Note that this is not Odin, who was killed by Ren in episode 35. Unlike in the series, Kanzaki didn’t go for mass-produced Odins. Deciding that now’s as good a time as any to taunt the vicious sociopath, Miho picks a fight with Asakura, but Shinji tries to break it up and demands answers from Kanzaki. Naturally, Kanzaki refuses to explain himself and blames the whole war on the Riders, whose desires keep them fighting. Sure, blame the victims. But Kitaoka agrees, and Shinji challenges him and the others to stop fighting instead of start. However, neither Miho nor Ren is willing to drop out, and Kitaoka helpfully points out that once again, nobody’s listening to Shinji. Asakura decides to laugh like a creepy fuck and challenges Miho, and Kanzaki tosses them their decks. While Shinji tries to stop the impending Ouja vs. Femme fight, Ren and Kitaoka decide to develop some foe yay out of nowhere and settle things, catching their decks as Kanzaki throws them. Asakura punches Shinji out to keep him from interfering in the fight, and Ouja and Femme enter the Mirror World. Having failed to stop that fight, Shinji then sees Ren and Kitaoka about to do the same thing, and he fails there too. Maybe he should change his name from Kamen Rider Ryuki to Kamen Rider Babysitter. Finally fed up with this bullshit, he confronts Kanzaki, who is staring at Jesus on the crucifix in what I’m sure is in no way symbolic. Shinji grabs his deck and insists that no matter what Kanzaki says, he’s going to stop the fighting. Kanzaki totally ignores Shinji as he transforms, walks over to the pipe organ, and starts playing his image theme, which is the battle music for this fight. It’s every bit as awesome as it sounds. Ryuki tries to stop Femme from fighting Ouja, but Evildiver throws him over toward Knight vs. Zolda. Ryuki tries to stop Zolda from shooting the hell out of Knight, but both Ryuki and Knight wind up having to run from the attacks, with Knight telling Ryuki to stay out of his way. Finally, both battles come together, and as Ouja is prepared to finish off Femme, Zolda blasts him away before Final Venting everyone. Despite the overkill explosion, everyone survives. And Kanzaki disappears, having finished playing Phantom of the Opera for the day. Because why not? Shinji, Ren, and Miho make it back to the church, with Miho devastated that she can’t beat Asakura. When the guys ask why she’s got such a vendetta against a ruthless serial killer, she reveals that he killed her older sister. She also warns them against Kitaoka, who is recovering elsewhere with Asakura, who realizes just who Miho is. Kitaoka had represented Asakura in Miho’s sister’s murder case, and he now regrets that and wants to try to atone by trying to protect Miho, though he adamantly denies it. As Asakura miraculously leaves Kitaoka alone, Kitaoka breaks into an ominous coughing fit. Back at St. Old Abandoned Church, Miho suggests that she, Shinji, and Ren team up, but Ren refuses, citing it’s stupid to befriend other Riders when you know you’re going to wind up killing each other. Uh-huh. Sure, Ren. Shinji reminds him, though, that he was indecisive about killing earlier in the series, but Ren argues that he’s over it and that Shinji needs to drop the good guy act. Deciding that Ren is obviously a total dick who won’t help, Miho asks Shinji again, but he’s hesitant about believing her about anything and asks if her story is true. This pisses her the hell off, and he apologizes, insisting that he understands how she feels, but he hates the idea of taking revenge. He argues that her sister wouldn’t want that. So Miho feigns injury and punches Shinji in the stomach when he shows concern, proving to him both how easy he is to fool and how his compassion is a weakness. Can you feel the love tonight?
Sometime later, Shinji is working his shift at Atori and worrying about Yui, who’s spacing out after her fainting spell, but she insists she’s okay. Miho calls, much to Shinji’s shock, and she talks like she loves him, inviting him to a local Thai restaurant. Suspicious that she’s trying to trick another guy, Shinji refuses to fall for it. ‘Cause like The Who, he won’t get fooled again. Naturally, he finds himself riding over to the restaurant anyway. Turns out Miho’s run into a guy she’d conned once, and the poor, brokenhearted sucker hasn’t caught on and is still pursuing her. The only way Miho can get him to give up is to pretend to have a boyfriend, and Shinji is the easiest person to use for that. Despite himself, Shinji agrees, and their act manages to convince the other guy, especially when the spicy food turns out to be way too much for Shinji, and Miho has to wipe up the water he’s dripping all over himself. Because only lovers could lose as pathetic and flaily as that. Once they’ve learned the other guy paid their bill and wishes them happiness, the kind of awkward not-couple is ready to depart, but Miho invites Shinji to hang out. He insists that he’s busy and rides off…only to turn back around and go with her to an amusement park. After Miho tortures Shinji on thrill rides, they take a break for some ice cream, and Miho realizes just how adorably pathetic he is when she has to tie his shoe because he can’t seem to keep them tied properly. She then snuggles with him and admits that it’s hard being a Rider, drawing his sympathy…until he realizes that she’s trying to steal his deck. They argue, and Miho admits that she needs to fight as dirty as possible to win, before visiting her sister at a cryogenics lab and vowing to revive her.
A rainstorm develops, and at Atori, Yui and Sanako are making teru teru bozu when Shinji arrives, soaked and complaining about his terrible day. Yui goes to get him a towel, but as she retrieves it, a mirror breaks, bringing back memories of the girl in the mirror and herself as a child—both of them identical. Yui bursts running out of Atori, reaching a temple yard, where now Shinji and Ren are watching her dig, worried as they try to shield her from the rain. Yui digs up a box containing shards of a broken mirror and drawings of monsters. The Contract Monsters, to be exact, including Dragreder and Darkwing, which shocks their Riders. Yui explains that she always drew monsters as a child, sitting in front of the mirror, imagining they’d protect her. Yes, this little girl had a messed up life; the movie is actually kinder to her than the series. The one time she went outside, she befriended a local boy and promised to play with him again, but the next day it was raining, and he couldn’t come. Crying over the broken promise, Yui sat in front of the mirror until her reflection beckoned her to the Mirror World, where they played until Yui used up all of her time. Unable to return to the real world without risk of dying, Yui began crying again, and Mirror Yui offered her a deal: in exchange for borrowing Mirror Yui’s life force to live in the real world, Yui was to give her the drawings she’d made. All of the Monsters that Shinji and Ren and all the other Riders have faced and contracted with were created by Yui when she was a child. Yui then sees her younger self in the mirror again and drops it, just as Monsters attack a nearby mall, and Shinji and Ren run off. The battle from the opening ensues, only now it makes sense. Meanwhile, Yui remembers that she too has a time limit: her borrowed life will only last as long as she’s legally a child. On her twentieth birthday, which is only a few days away, she will die.
The Riders are being overwhelmed by Shereghosts and Raydragoons, but Femme and Ouja decide to settle the score anyway. Zolda once again intervenes and tries to help Femme, but she beats him up, injuring him badly. Femme manages to outwit Asakura, but he takes out her Guard Vent with his primary Contract Monster, Venosnaker. Meanwhile, in a poorly lit corridor, a sinister black Ryuki stalks through. Ouja gains the upper hand, but “Ryuki” arrives just in time with his Monster, a black version of Dragreder creatively named Dragblacker. The dark Ryuki answers to Shinji’s name when Femme calls it out, and he easily defeats Ouja and destroys his merged Monsters, Genocider, reducing Ouja to the pathetically easy to defeat Blank Form. Femme destroys Ouja’s deck, avenging her sister, but Asakura is guano loco enough not to go down with out a fight, so he tries to strangle her. Fortunately for Femme, he disintegrates, managing to look really creepy and demonic in the process. Meanwhile, Zolda staggers back and collapses through a mirror. The next shot is of a depressed Goro, implying that Kitaoka died, but it turns out that Kitaoka is alive, but really beat up. He tells Goro that he’ll keep fighting, but after remembering the thorough beating he just got trying to help Femme, he changes his mind. He doesn’t have much time left before his illness kills him, so instead of fighting, he decides to enjoy the rest of his life. He has a coughing fit that worries Goro, but he insists he’s fine, hiding the blood he just coughed up and calling up Reiko for a date. Reiko dismisses him, but after hearing him admit that he’s kept track of her rejections and this is the forty-second time he’s asked her out, she finally relents, possibly out of pity. She agrees to meet him for dinner—if she feels like it. Because she’s Reiko and therefore awesome. Kitaoka is actually worried for a moment that she’ll turn him down again, but Goro insists that he’s sure she’ll be there. It’s a really nice moment for the three of them. Hiding the blood again, Kitaoka sends Goro to pick up flowers, but ultimately, he decides to go along, pointedly leaving his deck—and the Rider War—behind as they debate just what color roses to get for Reiko.
At Atori, Reiko is touching up her makeup, to Okubo’s teasing while Shinji doodles and stresses over the revelation that Yui is the creator of the Mirror Monsters. Miho then calls him again to ask him out to dinner, and apparently slighted by Reiko’s and Shinji’s ships sailing, Shimada swaps her glasses for contacts, to Okubo’s shock. Yes, weird background events like this happen all the time at ORE Journal. It’s fun. Shinji meets Miho at a mall restaurant, where Miho is treating him to okonomiyaki as thanks for saving her…though Shinji has no clue what she’s talking about. The whole scene is cute, even though Shinji accidentally insults Miho by bringing up the fact that she cons men for a living, but she promises not to do it anymore, and he apologizes for irritating her. They end up arguing over Shinji possibly getting seaweed flakes stuck in his teeth, and they wind up spilling the flakes all over the customers next to them, flailing and stammering apologies as they try to fix it and just embarrass the hell out of themselves and the other customers. After dinner, Shinji washes up in the bathroom, optimistic that he’s gotten through to Miho, who isn’t too bad now that he’s gotten to know her a bit, and convinced he can stop the fighting. But Okubo calls, and as Shinji turns away to answer the phone, he fails to notice his reflection emerge from the mirror. Mirror Shinji joins Miho, who mistakes him for the real Shinji as they walk off to continue their date, while the real Shinji exits moments later, wondering where Miho went. At the same time this is going on, Yui is crying, fearful that she’s going to die soon, but her brother appears in the window, promising to grant her a new life, which makes her even more fearful now. Back at the date, Miho and Mirror Shinji are on the roof, with Miho walking along the masonry, enjoying the view. Mirror Shinji tries to snare her ankle to make her trip, but she turns around suddenly and calls him out on acting strange all night. When he rushes toward her, she jumps to safety, realizing he’s not Shinji. He tries to strangle her, but because he’s been in the real world too long, he’s disintegrating, much like a human who’s been in the Mirror World too long. He leaves Miho and goes to a nearby mirror, returning to the Mirror World. Miho transforms and follows, with a confused Shinji arriving and going after her, wondering just what the hell is going on. Meanwhile, Ren is out on his motorcycle when a Raydragoon emerges and attacks an innocent bystander, so he goes over to fight.
Femme is confronted by Mirror Shinji, who manages to henshin without a mirror, as he’s a creation of the Mirror World. While the dark Ryuki viciously fights Femme, Knight battles the Raydragoon in the air and witnesses the fight. In the darkness, he mistakes Femme’s opponent for Ryuki, but he can’t do anything because the Raydragoon has molted into the more powerful Hydragoon, forcing him to put all of his attention on his own fight. The dark Ryuki beats the utter shit out of Femme, fighting as dirty as possible. He’s about to finish her off when the real Ryuki arrives to save her. Ryuki stares in shock at his evil twin, but the dark Ryuki walks away, and Ryuki has to worry about the injured Femme. Shinji manages to bring Miho back to the real world while Ren finishes his battle, and Shinji’s terrified when she doesn’t wake up. With her hand shaking, Miho manages to flick his forehead before opening her eyes, joking that she fooled him again. They banter once again, but Miho holds onto him, spotting the seaweed flakes in his teeth and wiping them away before kneeling down to tie his shoe again. They walk back home, and Miho stops in the middle of the sidewalk, having trouble breathing. Hiding her injuries, she insists that Shinji can drop her off here, but he’s willing to take her the whole way home. She hurries him along, desperate not to let him see her die. Shinji asks if she’ll quit the Rider War, and she promises to think about it, waiting until Shinji’s gone to collapse into the nearby bushes. Struggling to breathe, Miho looks at the stars and apologizes to her sister and asks Shinji to at least keep his shoes tied. When the sun rises later, nobody on the sidewalk seems to notice the dead woman lying in the bushes, her Advent Card deck abandoned.
Shinji makes it back to Atori in the early morning, where Ren is waiting for him. Ren calls him out on deceiving everyone with his good-boy act and trying to make them lower their guards. But now, Ren feels that he can fight Shinji without reservations. Yui breaks up the impending fight, as she usually does, talking with them at the park. She reveals her fear that her brother has lied to Ren about granting a new life for him to give his fiancée if he wins the war. She reveals that her borrowed life will run out soon and the life that Kanzaki promised will probably go to her instead. But with both Shinji and Ren still standing and another Rider still out there, Shinji realizes that at this rate, Yui will die. Ren, however, promises to keep on fighting regardless, telling Yui that even if it’s only a 1% chance that Kanzaki is telling the truth, he has to believe in his promise. When he returns to Atori, Shinji agonizes over the truth, spotting the teru teru bozu that Yui had just made the day before. He realizes in horror that both his story from his childhood and Yui’s match up and that Yui was the little girl he’d met back then. Because he failed to keep his promise to her, Yui entered the Mirror World and had to receive a limited life and Kanzaki had to set up the Rider War. Everything that’s happened, everything they’ve all been through, it’s all his fault. He drops to his knees in horror as his reflection emerges from the window, pointing out that yes, this is all Shinji’s fault. Across town, at Seimeiin University, Yui enters Room 401, the lab where Kanzaki held his experiment that nearly killed Ren’s fiancée and kicked off the Rider War. She lights candles on a birthday cake and calls out for her brother, asking him not to leave her alone. He finally emerges, speaking gently to her as he promises to give her a new life as a birthday present. Neither seem to notice the sound of a heavy drop of liquid hitting the floor. Back at Atori, Mirror Shinji introduces himself as Shinji’s other self, similar to the two Yuis. Shinji backs away in terror as Mirror Shinji asks him to accept him and join with him to form the strongest Kamen Rider. He promises Shinji that they’ll be able to save Yui, which makes him falter and finally agree. At this point, Ren arrives to see the two Shinjis, one placing his hand through the other. Now, quick question. If you were in Ren’s position, what would you do? Would you a) stand at the door like a complete idiot watching and not doing a thing to help, or b) you’re a Kamen Rider, do something, damnit! Guess which one Ren picks. As Shinji gasps and tries to thrash around in pain, Mirror Shinji steps into him, absorbing him as he introduces himself to Ren as a Rider from the Mirror World, Ryuga. With the process complete, Ryuga can now exist in both worlds, no longer an illusion in the mirror, as he puts it. He henshins and fights Ren right outside Atori.
As more liquid drops ominously to the floor, Yui asks Kanzaki if he remembers their childhood and how he used to protect her from bullies. The music playing, naturally, is Climax 10, easily the most depressing piece of background music ever created for Kamen Rider. I may have only seen three series, but I’m pretty sure this is the case. Calling her brother an idiot for still trying to protect her, she smiles through held-back tears and says she loves him before blowing out her candles and laying her head down on the table. Realizing that something is horribly wrong, Kanzaki gets up and tears the coverings from the windows, revealing that Yui slit her wrist, choosing suicide over the Rider War. Unable to accept it, Kanzaki completely loses his shit, to use the technical term. His agonized shouts create a backlash of Mirror World energy, shattering glass throughout the city and catching Knight’s attention. Knowing something is wrong, Ren leaves the battle and flies toward the source of the explosion. Kanzaki disintegrates into darkness as Ren races to Room 401, arriving to find Yui dead. When he sees her bloodied wrist, he breaks down into tears, asking why she did this. Ryuga arrives, but Ren refuses to leave Yui’s side, even as Ryuga holds his sword against him. Ryuga then sees Yui and freezes before staggering backwards as Shinji fights back, breaking the merge. Shinji stands and looks at Yui, saying that he understands. Ryuga insists that they need to merge again and save Yui, but Shinji argues that Yui didn’t want to live by someone else dying. Ryuga decides essentially, fuck that shit, and tries to strangle Shinji—what is it with this movie and strangling people?—but Shinji uses the broken mirrors to henshin. Ren gets up in a daze and walks toward an empty chair, where his fiancée had sat when she was attacked and put in a coma, once again powerless to do anything to help the people he cares about. Ryuga and Ryuki battle throughout the parking garage, even involving Dragreder and Dragblacker. They manage to make it to the roof of the garage, and Ryuga punches Ryuki back into Room 401 with Ren and Yui. Both Riders scan their Final Vent cards, and with a last look at Yui, Ryuki charges to meet Ryuga’s Final Vent. The two attacks explode violently, forcing Ren away from the window as only one Shinji survives, pulling himself to his feet. Ren asks which one he is, but he soon recognizes the sorrow on his face as only being Shinji. Unfortunately, with Kanzaki in no state to control the Mirror Monsters, a massive swarm of Hydragoons emerge into the real world, attacking the city. Realizing it’s the end of the world, Ren confesses that until now, he never had, nor wanted, a friend. But despite everything, Shinji’s become his first and only friend.
…I know, I know. Save the analysis for the actual analysis section, not the recap. But I really have to say this here. First off, I love this speech. It says so much about Ren’s character—how much he’s changed that he considers Shinji his friend and how much he’s changed that he can actually say this to Shinji’s face. How he clearly knows he and Shinji are going to die right there, so he’s not going to leave things unsaid, not now. So I really hate that I have to call bullshit on it. It’s a gorgeous speech, yes. But Shinji is not Ren’s “only friend.” There’s another friend, and her dead body is no less than five feet away from him as he says this.
Throughout the series, Ren has always been there for Yui. They have a very interesting relationship in that it would be so easy to ship them, but I feel like it would be inappropriate. They seem to use one another as surrogates: Ren unconsciously sees Yui as a surrogate for Eri, so he does the same things he did with his fiancée: try to cover up the fact that he’s been fighting, always be there for her when she needs him, and assure her that everything he’s going through isn’t her fault. Meanwhile, I think Yui sees Ren as a surrogate for her brother: Kanzaki hasn’t been there for her since childhood, but Ren is right now. When she’s scared, Ren seeks her out and helps her through it. When she needs to be rescued, he and Shinji are right there to save her. Sure, Ren’s cold and aloof, but so is Kanzaki. The lines blur between them, which is one reason why I think Kanzaki seemed to have a more personal vendetta against Ren than against Shinji, whose very existence fucked up all his plans.
Even outside the context of the series and within the movie itself, Ren and Yui clearly have a relationship well beyond Ren’s claim early on that he only associated himself with her to give himself an advantage in battle. Again, he’s pretty much constantly there for her. He never leaves her side when she collapses, he joins Shinji in the pouring rain when he finds out she dashed out of Atori to dig up a makeshift grave, and no less than five minutes ago, he was sobbing at her side when he saw she’d killed herself. If the only knowledge of Ren Akiyama you have is from reading my review so far? Even then you get the sense that he doesn’t cry for just anyone. Hell, as I’ve pointed out elsewhere, his reaction to her death is the exact same reaction he had when Shinji died in the series: crying, calling them an idiot, then shutting down completely—refusing to leave their side and completely losing the will to fight. This is a man who can’t even afford to do this for his own fiancée, but he did it for Yui. And in the series, he did it for Shinji. And his speech implies he doesn’t see Yui on as equal footing as Shinji?
Now, I know. I’m watching a fansub. There are liberties taken with the translation, for whatever reason—be they personal preference or just difference in connotation between cultures. But still, the general gist is the same. And when he’s saying this right in front of the body of the girl who’s been at his side from almost the start of his battle, it kind of comes off as a slap in the face. It’s a very strange divide between the actor’s emotion and the writer’s script that creates a huge conflict of intent that I can’t seem to make out, and that bothers me about this.
Anyway, Shinji affirms that he and Ren are friends, but Ren insists that he has to win, and he asks Shinji to fight with him. Shinji agrees, so long as Ren hears out his wish: “Don’t die.” His voice raw, Ren wishes him the same. Then without mirrors, belts, or even their Survive cards, the two henshin directly into Survive form, which is just too damn cool to complain about. They look at each other once before charging into certain death on Dragranzer and Darkraider, fighting impossible odds and just trying to survive and not break their promise to one another.
The credits roll, and we see that Kanzaki has reset time once again. A young Yui is alone in the park when she turns to see Shiro behind her. He calls out her name, and she cheerfully cries out, “Oniichan!” before running over to play with him, neither having to worry about broken promises.
Most of this movie is canon up until about the point where Tojo, Kamen Rider Tiger, dies. But it does have one big divergence point early: Yui’s death. Kanzaki has reset the Rider War over and over again, trying to get things to go his way, so it’s easy to ask why he didn’t just Time Vent Yui’s death out of existence? This answers the question of why, continuing the sense the series had that you can’t defy fate; you just have to take it into your own hands.
In Episode Final, Yui and Shinji met when they were children and became friends, playing at the park and promising to play there again the next day. However, thanks to a rainstorm, Shinji wasn’t able to keep his promise. Yui went to the park to see he wasn’t there, then returned home and began crying in front of the mirror until she went to the Mirror World. She still ends up receiving the life of her Mirror World counterpart, but the circumstances are different. You see from the start that Yui is special somehow, so she was able to survive in the Mirror World without immediately disintegrating, which is what happens when a normal human goes in otherwise; the Kamen Riders and Alternatives are able to extend the amount of time they can stay there thanks to their armor. Instead of disintegrating, however, Yui’s time limit meant she would die if she returned to the real world, and this is why she needed that life force.
The keywords for Kamen Rider Ryuki are “Those who don’t fight won’t survive,” and survival is a huge theme. Everyone is trying to ensure something continues on, whether it’s trying to save themselves like Kitaoka, saving someone else like Ren and Kanzaki are doing, trying to save the Riders like Shinji and Tezuka, or trying to save the fight like Asakura. And this movie manages to tie the theme together with the Mirror Monsters. Why do the Monsters attack humans? Yui theorizes that it’s to consume their life force. Monsters fight one another to gain energy and become stronger, which feeds them—much like the wild Digimon in Digimon Tamers. But because they were created by Yui, the Monsters have no life force of their own. It’s implied that they’re an extension of her imagination, much like the Imagin of the later series Kamen Rider Den-O, also headed up by Yasuko Kobayashi, the main writer for Ryuki. Oddly enough, given that Let’s Go Kamen Riders reveals that the Den-O and OOO world is actually Kamen Rider World Prime, this makes perfect sense, and the Mirror Monsters could be early ancestors of the Imagin, denied form thanks to Yui and Shiro no longer creating them in the reset timeline. And if devouring the energy of other Monsters can make the Monsters stronger, devouring the life force of humans might give them life force of their own, rather than being maintained by the Kanzaki siblings.
But life force is a tricky thing, and there’s a sense of Equivalent Exchange like Fullmetal Alchemist at play: to obtain, something of equal value must be lost. The Mirror Monsters consume humans whole and fail to gain enough life force to live. And when it comes to the great power of the Rider War, that power has to come from somewhere, especially if it’s life. Yui received life from someone exactly identical to her, and it wasn’t strong enough to keep her going past childhood. And if obtaining the power is the end result of the Rider War, why did Kanzaki pick thirteen Riders? Why not just stop at two? Give Ren the Knight deck, send him against Odin immediately, and claim the prize immediately? Yui theorizes that it’s a matter of the quality of the power. The power comes from the lives of the Kamen Riders, and as they fight, they become stronger. When they fight one another, the strongest ones survive, and it’s the strongest life that Kanzaki is going to transfer to Yui. Which gives Ren’s death at the end of the Rider War in episode 50 a whole new meaning, if he’d been forced to pay into the power with his own life to revive Eri; it would explain why she didn’t wake up until he was dead. Yes, this series is significantly more depressing and horrifying in retrospect.
I’ll get more in-depth about Ryuki’s relationship with fate when I batch review the series, but in short, I feel like it’s more a matter of taking fate into your own hands rather than fighting it or accepting it. You can change the way things happen, even if you can’t change the end result. And you can use that to better the fates of others. And that is exactly what Yui does here, and it makes her role stronger than in the end of the series. Sure, in the series, she tried to kill herself to stop her brother from continuing the war, but she was prevented from doing so and died in a more passive way. She did talk her brother out of resetting time again, though, so more power to her.
It’s almost a shame that this wasn’t the true end, since Yui really comes off as a lot more proactive in trying to stop the war here. She tries to talk Kanzaki down, reminding him of their past and asking him to stay with her for her birthday. She points out that she’s not a little girl anymore and she doesn’t need him to protect her. She’s grown up, and she’s ready to act like an adult and walk on her own to face her problems—and that means not needing him to save her. Watching it, you forget that Kanzaki is the villain here and that he’s done all these horrible things and ruined so many lives and gotten so many people killed. He sees himself as a big brother doing what needs to be done to protect his little sister, just like he’s always protected his little sister. And Yui maturely tells him that she doesn’t need him to do that anymore, but she still loves him. And she chooses to kill herself in order to stop him because she loves him and she knows she has to do this because of that.
Yui shares the strong character focus with Shinji, who really goes through hell here. In a lot of ways, this movie feels like two merged into one. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t, but the more lighthearted Femme half of the movie progresses into the very suddenly dark and depressing Ryuga half, and Shinji’s character development is tied to both of the new characters.
When Shinji first meets Miho, he makes a complete derp of himself. She’s pretty and elegant, and he wants to protect her at all costs. And then he finds out that she’s a con artist, swindling men out of their money. He got tricked just as much as the others. Still, he finds himself equally attracted to and annoyed by her, unable to figure out Miho’s personas. It’s cute to watch because you know he really would like to get to know her better, but she’s constantly lying to him and he doesn’t know whether or not to trust her, even when she’s telling the truth. She bugs him, but at the same time, he likes her.
During this half of the movie, Shinji keeps up his role trying to be the hero of the series: trying to stop the Riders from fighting, struggling with understanding their motivation, but still maintaining that it’s wrong to play Kanzaki’s game and kill one another. He still tries to save them. And he really focuses a lot on Miho, since she just won’t leave him alone. You really see it toward the end of their date, both just before and after Ryuga cockblocks and attacks. Shinji is convinced that he’s getting through to Miho and that he can get her to stop fighting. And he goes to rescue her and is scared as hell when she doesn’t wake up after taking such a horrific beating. She lies and insists that she’s okay and teases him so he won’t worry, but he still tries to be a gentleman and walk her home and even asks to be sure that she’ll drop out of the battle before he leaves her. When he does leave, he’s smiling and giving a look down at the shoe she tied, believing he’s saved her. Which is probably another reason why she refused to let him see her die.
But the second half of the movie, beginning immediately after Miho’s death, is what destroys everything Shinji’s tried to do. He was a kid when he first met Yui, and it was completely out of his control that he couldn’t keep his promise to her—yes, kids, keep your promises even when acts of weather or God keep them well out of your control, or your friends are going to die and everything bad that happens after is all your fault. He blames himself for it, even when he had no say in the matter. As to how exactly Yui ended up in his room and playing with him, I’m going to assume that it was Mirror Yui, possibly just after she gave her life force over to Yui. Or it’s possible that Yui went through after receiving the life force, then had to return home through the Mirror World. They don’t explain it, but with Yui’s explicit repression of her childhood memories, it’s forgivable.
This revelation results in Shinji being very easy for Ryuga to manipulate, which is ironic given how Miho was manipulating him throughout the whole first half of the movie. Themes carry over, such as the manipulation and his insistence to Miho that killing someone else to save someone you love is wrong and that the people you’re trying to save don’t want that. He says this about Yui, and it actually seems to hit a chord with Ren, who gives him a look of shock—appropriately, given that he’s trying to save his fiancée, who nearly died in this very room more than a year ago. Shinji fights Ryuga with all he has to try to honor Yui’s memory, and then he and Ren decide to fight off the invasion of their world even though they know they can’t win and they’re going to die; even if it’s a 1% chance, they have to fight if they want anything to survive.
Of the two new characters for the movie, Miho Kirishima gets more screentime and development. As Kamen Rider Femme, she is contracted to the swan Monster Blancwing, giving her white knight-themed armor with a cape, all meant to be reminiscent of Knight. I kind of have a love-hate relationship with her design. For the most part it looks impressive and elegant, but some things bother me. Her Visor, for one—the foil that acts as a card reader—doesn’t appear to be particularly strong, and she uses it as her primary weapon, much as Knight uses his. Hers is very thin and doesn’t seem to have a lot of strength to it, making it look kind of silly when she’s trying to score deadly attacks against Zolda, Ouja, and Ryuga. Her cape is another issue. I don’t know if it’s made of cloth or plastic, and there are times when it really gets to be irritating. Sometimes it looks really nice, moving around her fairly dramatically. But other times, it appears to be very plastic in design, and it looks distracting. The biggest example I can think of is when it’s pretty much shredded in Ouja’s attack on her, and it ends up looking like she’s wearing a shower curtain. Which is sad, because I really do think it completes the ensemble. Her Sword Vent card gives her a double-bladed naginata, which is as far from a sword as you can get. Again, I’ve got kind of a love-hate relationship here; I think I like Miho more than I like Femme. Femme’s attacks never seem to look like they’ve got much force behind them, which is a bad thing when she’s supposed to be facing off against characters that we’ve watched become very strong. Her Final Vent looks kind of silly in the face of the other Final Vents, where Blancwing creates a gust of wind that blows the enemies toward Femme to destroy them with her not-a-Sword Vent. Guard Vent makes up for it, giving her a shield and pretty much Odin’s powers—a distracting shower of feathers and teleportation powers for quick attacks.
Miho is a con artist by trade, though we never find out if she’s doing it as part of her need to get an advantage to save her sister or if she did it beforehand. She appears to come from a fairly wealthy family if she managed to have her sister’s remains cryogenically frozen, though that might have wiped her out and made her need to con men for a living. Either way, this is her motivation. Without any reason other than “shits and giggles,” Asakura beat her sister to death with a broken bottle. Kitaoka represented him in court and managed to get him off or at least got a reduced sentence, since Asakura is a serial killer and we don’t know just which murder he’s in prison for during his first appearance in the series. Kitaoka regrets representing Asakura period, but he really regrets this particular case, and Miho holds it against him. So she considers them both her enemies and tries every dirty trick in the book—including picking Shinji’s pocket to get his deck—to try to win.
Things change when she meets Shinji, because everyone changes after meeting him. She tries to con him, but she finds herself falling for him, especially after she thinks he saved her. She turns out to be a teasing but nurturing person, tying his shoes for him and wiping the seaweed flakes from his teeth. Shinji’s clumsiness is charming to her. When he klutzes out at the restaurant and spills all of his okonomiyaki mix onto the grill, she lightly scolds him as she shapes it, then dumps all of hers out just the same way. The fact that she ends up treating him and cooking a meal for him shows how fond she is of him, and she is proud to tell him that she’s a good cook. She even manages to forgive him when he points out that it’s a good skill for her to have if she’s conning men. And even when she realizes that Ryuga was the one who saved her, she still has something for Shinji, trying to take care of little things like his teeth and his shoes and refusing to let him see her die, hoping with her last breath that he’ll be able to take care of himself.
As for the second character, Ryuga, he doesn’t get much development, but his backstory is tied much more deeply to the overall plot. As an exact copy of Shinji, he looks the same, but as if viewed in the mirror. His personality is entirely the opposite: manipulative and cruel, as opposed to Shinji’s open friendliness and naïveté. Referred to as both Mirror Shinji and Dark Side Shinji in supplemental information, he was created by Yui just the same as the Mirror Monsters—her desire for a playmate brought him into being, thanks to her Mirror World self. However, like the Mirror Monsters, he didn’t have an existence outside of Yui, which made him perfect for Kanzaki’s game. All it took was to tell him to take Shinji’s life force for his own to allow him to live and let him fight in order to save Yui. To be perfectly honest, I’m not sure how much is Ryuga being obsessed with Yui, how much is Kanzaki’s manipulation, and how much is Ryuga manipulating Shinji, but it works. He doesn’t need to be particularly complex. He only reveals himself toward the end, and all he really needs is to be threatening.
Ryuga is Ryuki’s evil twin, and appropriately, his powers reflect Shinji’s. His Contract Monster, Dragblacker, is a black dragon otherwise identical to Dragreder. All of his cards are the same as Shinji’s, and the only real difference comes the first time he uses his Final Vent. Shinji’s Final Vent always involves him leaping into the air, flipping around, and doing a kick while Dragreder blasts a fireball for him to fly through to increase the power of his Rider Kick. The first time Ryuga uses his, he’s hovering in the air, which makes it damn creepy and clear that he’s definitely not human. When Dragblacker blasts out a black and blue fireball, it first entraps the enemy in stone, preventing them from escaping before Ryuga kicks into them with the rest of the fire.
Ryuga’s greatest strength in terms of character is how he affects Shinji. Shinji is scared of him. He knows right away that this guy is a threat and that he wants to end his life. And Ryuga talks him into it. He plays on Shinji’s guilt and grief over soon losing his friend, and he makes him believe this is the only way to fix everything. He then proceeds to beat up Ren, who escapes before he can get killed. If not for Yui killing herself, they would have lost Shinji. Ryuga’s personality was just that powerful and Shinji had lost the will to fight and thus survive. It was only because the sight of Yui dead shocked the both of them so much that Shinji realized Yui wouldn’t want him to do this that he forced himself free of Ryuga. And it gave him the will to survive stronger than Ryuga’s, allowing him to win.
My final notes on this movie have to come down to the acting. Everyone in this cast is strong, and they really turned in a good performance. Takashi Hagino, who plays Asakura, was as creepy as ever and even managed to make his death scene scary. Props to him for giving children nightmares. Kenzaburo Kikuchi, Kanzaki, really nailed that last scene with Yui, dropping the vague threatening nature that he usually has and being a gentle and loving older brother…who proceeds to completely lose it when she dies. But I’ve really got to hand it to the leads. Satoshi Matsuda doesn’t get a chance to show a whole lot of emotion thanks to Ren’s stoic nature, but he does awesome with Ren’s breakdowns, and he really turned in a good performance here when Ren discovered Yui’s body.
The absolute best was our star, Shinji and Ryuga himself, Takamasa Suga. Shinji’s usually a ball of energy or struggling with indecision, but this really gave him a chance to run the gamut of emotions. It’s best shown when Shinji breaks down in Atori and Ryuga confronts him. He does an amazing job with Shinji’s grief and horror, and then he switches gears so well to Ryuga’s creepy, threatening nature. I wouldn’t be surprised if he took a bit of Hagino’s performance as Asakura into it, given there are definite similarities in the predatory look Ryuga gives Shinji. He absolutely nails the tenseness of that scene, with Shinji terrified and reluctant and Ryuga constantly pressing the issue until he agrees. It’s very easy to believe they’re two different people. Even as a Rider, Ryuga’s voice is so low and feral that he sounds different from Shinji, who is loud but very human. And when the climax is a guy fighting himself, you really have to do a good job conveying that, and he went above and beyond awesome on that one.
Episode Final was written by Toshiki Inoue and directed by Ryuta Tasaki. Takamasa Suga played Shinji and Ryuga, with Seiji Takaiwa as Ryuki’s suit actor and Jiro Okamoto as Ryuga’s suit actor, with Jun Watanabe as a sub. Satoshi Matsuda played Ren, with Makoto Ito as Knight’s suit actor. Yui was played by Ayano Sugiyama, Kanzaki by Kenzaburo Kikuchi, and Sanako by Kazue Tsunogae. Kitaoka was played by Ryohei, with Yoshifumi Oshikawa as Zolda’s suit actor. Goro was played by Tomohisa Yuge. Asakura was played by Takashi Hagino, with Jiro Okamoto as Ouja’s suit actor. Miho was played by Natsuki Kato, with Keiko Hashimoto as Femme’s suit actor. Kanji Tsuda played Okubo, Sayaka Kuon played Reiko, and Hitomi Kurihara played Shimada. The younger Shinji, Yui, and Shiro were uncredited.