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akinoameThe moment to fight
Now, admittedly, I should do like I did with the movie Riders and work from weakest character to strongest—and I will to some degree. But I want to put Kamen Rider Tiger here because of his association with the Alternatives. Satoru Tojo is Kagawa's prized pupil and seeks to live up to his ideal of a hero. And he is probably the most difficult character to talk about. He’s almost a sympathetic character. He wants to be a hero. It’s a noble wish, but…I think Harvey Dent says it best in The Dark Knight when he says, “You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become a villain.” Because that’s what happens quickly and brutally. Tojo doesn’t strike me as an inherently bad person. Rather, I think he’s extremely impressionable, and this was his downfall. He implies that he was always awkward and people were unkind to him. He gravitated toward Prof. Kagawa, who was the first one to see any value in him and truly showed him kindness. So he decided to model himself after Kagawa’s ideals. Kagawa had a belief in what a hero should be—and the more I bring this up, the more I think the guy might have been a literary professor before he memorized Kanzaki’s physics lesson from hell. Tojo internalized that belief and tried to emulate it without truly understanding what it meant. He couldn’t understand that a hero had to care about other people, even if it meant they had to sacrifice them—it was a contradiction within the belief. So he rationalized that as “If I do care about somebody, then I have to sacrifice them. That will make me a hero.” This arguably made him much more dangerous as an ally than an enemy, leading me to dub him “Team-Killing Fucktard.” And anyone who didn’t fit with his heroic ideal was to be eliminated—something that genuinely worried Kagawa, since he wanted to avoid sacrificing any more people than was absolutely necessary. Kagawa would only fight a Rider if they directly challenged him and would be a threat, such as Ren when he came to him with an ultimatum. Shinji wasn’t as proactive and would only fight in defense of himself or his friends—Tojo targeted him anyway, and Kagawa saved him from certain death. Ironically, at the moment of his death—shoving a father and son out of the way of an oncoming truck—Tojo can’t even recognize that what he’s done is heroic. The newspaper calls him a hero, and he dies wondering how he can become one.
All of Tojo’s personality brings me to a very uncomfortable conclusion: that he has a psychological or mental disorder. And his actor, Jun Takatsuki, really gives a muted performance that you expect from a character with a disorder. I purposely avoided mentioning it in the reviews themselves because it’s very uncomfortable, but I think I can say just what he was written with. I’m going to word this extremely carefully because one wrong move, and I’m going to get lynched: I think Tojo was written with the intent that he had Asperger’s Syndrome.
Now, this does not mean that I believe this is an accurate depiction of Asperger’s Syndrome by any means. What I mean by this is that Tojo seems to have what I call “Hollywood Asperger’s”: the typical symptoms—often exaggerated for effect and due to the writers’ lack of knowledge—that appear in characters on TV that are said by their writers to have Asperger’s Syndrome. Often, Hollywood Asperger’s is poorly researched and the symptoms seem to come directly from WebMD, Wikipedia, and the media stereotypes that they themselves feed into in a vicious cycle. For example: Temperance Brennan and Zack Addy in Bones (particularly painful examples) or possibly Gil Grissom in CSI. All three of these characters show some degree of a lack of empathy with other people and can’t seem to behave appropriately in certain social situations. They have their fixations, in their cases, about work (Brennan and Zack and their “hard science” route, Grissom and his obsession about the evidence over instinct. Also bugs). And honestly, Zack from Bones is probably Tojo’s best American equivalent: like Zack, Tojo practically worships his mentor and follows their word to the letter, even going beyond it to where it practically becomes a religion, and oversteps his boundaries in following this ideology to the point that he’s not only hurting people he’s never met but he’s also hurting his mentor and friends—and I think I just explained season three finale of Bones to myself.
It’s extremely uncomfortable, and every time Tojo is on-screen, I cringe. There is something so obviously “wrong” about him, and I really think Kobayashi and Inoue were going for Asperger’s without fully understanding the condition. If it’s any consolation, Kobayashi handles post-traumatic stress disorder a lot more sensitively in the later OOO, something I try my hardest not to go into a massive essay about.
Despite my feelings on Tojo, I have to say I kind of like the design of Tiger. In silver-and-blue, he does a pretty good white tiger motif (better than some Rangers, I have to admit), and I like the use of the axe as his Visor. It’s something that I wouldn’t have expected. And as a nice twist on the grill motif, the lenses on his mask are set up like stripes on a tiger. His fighting style relies on raw power, with a strong Monster, Destwilder—when your name is made up of “destroy” and “wild,” then you’re somebody I don’t want to mess with. His Weapon Card is Strike Vent, which provides him with the Dest Claw gauntlets—Wolverine weapons that we’d later see with certain forms of Kamen Rider OOO and with Fourze’s Claw Switch. His Attack Card is Freeze Vent, which can freeze any Monster—and presumably, Rider—in place for a short period of time. His Final Vent is called Crystal Break, where Destwilder drags the victim up to Tiger to get impaled on his claws. It’s highly effective when used all the way through, but with enough distance away from Tiger, the victim has ample time to get free.
Now it’s time to talk about that guy who was only in two episodes, Masashi Sudo, Kamen Rider Scissors, played by Takeshi Kimura. Also, I apologize if I slip up and accidentally refer to him as “Masaki Suda” (the actor who plays Philip in Kamen Rider W). Unfortunately, both come from the same franchise and have very similar names, so I have to try extra hard not to refer to Philip by mistake. If I do make this mistake, reward yourself with a drink or something.
There is almost nothing to talk about with this character. He’s only in episodes 5 and 6, and he’s got shit in terms of development. When he first appears, he’s set up to just be the guest star detective—possibly a shout-out to Kaoru Ichijou of Kuuga. When Reiko is attacked inside Kaga’s antique shop, he’s the detective in charge of the investigation. But eventually it’s learned that he was the attacker all along, that he was a corrupt cop who did some shady dealings with Kaga, but when the shop owner wanted more money, Sudo killed him and sealed his body within a wall of the shop. Which makes me wonder why nobody smelled the decomp, but whatever. I watched too much CSI. As a Rider, instead of actually fighting, Sudo just fed people to his monster, Volcancer, in order to become stronger.
Now, because the whole plot of these episodes is the mystery of Scissors’s identity, he gets even less screentime than that. We see more of his personality based around what he does in secret. When he sees Shinji’s business card and hears that he’s a Rider, he contacts him to get information on Ren and Yui, then lays traps for everybody. Rather than facing Ryuki or Knight in battle, he sets a deathtrap for Ryuki and tries to get Ren hit by a truck. When he learns that Yui is Kanzaki’s sister, he kidnaps her to try to get an edge in battle. Unfortunately, every single one of them got out of it—Shinji figured out about the death trap just in the nick of time, and Ren barely got hurt by the truck (still trying to figure that one out) and managed to rescue Yui. So even though he fights dirty, Sudo can’t win. He’s even more of a cartoon villain that way—his convoluted schemes just blow up in his face.
His suit seems pretty early into the design scheme, and the grill motif actually ends up looking more like the helmet design of the Hibiki Oni. His Visor is designed like a pair of shears or crab claws. Ironically, given how reluctant he is to actually confront a Rider, his deck consists of Weapon Cards only: Strike Vent (the Scissors Pincer, which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like, another claw), and Guard Vent, which forms a shield (Shell Defense). Before you start having traumatic flashbacks to the Cancer Zodiarts in Fourze, let me remind you that this guy only lasted two episodes. His shield didn’t do much to help him here. His Final Vent is a running gag within the Kamen Rider fandom. It only appeared once and was never completed—all we know is that Volcancer throws him in the air, and he spins, but Knight hit him with his own Final Vent before anything could happen. Since then, the Climax Heroes videogames have shown that that is the attack—he’s supposed to collide into his opponent while curled up into a ball. But his reputation never recovered, and as late as 2011, he was being made fun of by Eiji Hino and Ankh in the Let’s Go Kamen Riders net movies, where they wonder what his Final Vent is, only to be hit with it off-screen and remark on how amazing it was.
Mitsuru Sano, also known as Kamen Rider Imperer, lasts a bit longer than Sudo did, but in my opinion, he makes roughly about as much impact. He appears way too late in the game and even halfway through his debut episode, making it hard to get attached to him. His story is that he was born into privilege, but his father kicked him out, all in an attempt to get him to man up and learn responsibility. He struggled and scraped for a living, working part-time jobs and longing to be rich. He got his wish when his father died, leaving him with the company and the good life, and suddenly his wish was to keep it all.
What plagued Sano as a character was his initial selfishness. It’s understandable that he’s got bad luck and can’t hold down a job for long. But he’s not terribly endearing when he goes to every Rider he can find and tries to get them to hire his services. He comes off as amoral too, having zero problem with killing Yui as long as it pays the bills. His actor, Takashi Hyuga, keeps him generally very cheerful all the time, which really makes the distasteful actions worse. Then for some reason, he ended up taking in the completely broken Tojo, letting him stay in his apartment while he healed and slowly befriending him. This came back to bite him when Tojo decided that killing his new friend would make him one step closer to becoming a hero. His death is a tragic, given that he finally had what he wanted, but I can’t say I feel sad about it. Look at what he did with Yui. How am I supposed to feel bad for a guy who doesn’t think twice about killing an innocent woman?
As for the suit? This is another one I think could have gone in the trash. The suede-and-sherpa look doesn’t fit with the design scheme of any Rider series at all, and I’m not sure what to think of the horns on his helmet. His fighting style is exclusively melee, except for the times he summons his Monsters—those gazelles I can never keep straight, but the Advent Card Archives list as Gigazelle while also including all the other fucking gazelles in the series. Sorry. Gazelle rant over. Anyway, Imperer’s attacks mostly rely on kicks, which makes it odd that his Weapon Card, Spin Vent, is a wrist-mounted fusion of two Spiral Sabers, appropriately called “Gazelle Stab.” That’s how I feel whenever I try to keep these Monsters straight. His Final Vent, Drive Divider, is a gazelle stampede followed by a knee strike to the head. I have the mental image of the stampede in The Lion King now, and I’ve got to tell you the knee strike is overkill. Given that the Contract card summons a stampede of gazelles anyway, this Final Vent feels particularly unimaginative.
Now we’re moving into characters with more impact on the plot, and we’ve got to start with Jun Shibaura (portrayed by Satoshi Ichijou), Kamen Rider Gai. Put simply, he is a little shit. He’s smug, he’s manipulative, and it’s great watching him get taken down. And yet, I’ve got to say I kind of like him for that. He kind of reminds me of the later Fourze character Kijima (the Cancer Zodiarts, whom I mentioned before), in that he’s just so overwhelmingly nasty that he becomes fun to watch. He doesn’t pretend to have any redeeming qualities about him, and it’s thoroughly enjoyable to watch his schemes blow up on him.
When we first meet Shibaura, he appears to be the lowest ranking member in Matrix, a gaming club at Meirin University. Shinji and Yui are investigating a story for ORE, where members of the club are engaging in a real-life battle game that closely resembles the Rider War. It turns out that Shibaura set the whole thing up himself, thinking of the Rider War as the ultimate game. I think why I like Shibaura as a character is that he’s the Digimon Kaiser of Digimon 02 done right. Part of what made the Kaiser so enjoyable at first was that he thought everything was a game and that he wasn’t really hurting anyone—but this later got re-explained as him being manipulated into evil, as per his origin story in a preceding videogame. Shibaura treats the Rider War as a game, yes. But he also understands that he is hurting real people and doesn’t give a shit. He wants his “game” to spill over into all of Japan, knowing that it’s addictive. At the same time, within the Rider War, he gets bored with how Shinji and Tezuka refuse to fight other Riders and how Ren is revealed to be unable to kill.
Shibaura plays a huge role in Ren’s first character crisis. We meet him shortly after we meet Tezuka, and Tezuka has a premonition that Shibaura will kill Ren in battle. Shibaura wounds Ren’s pride—something already aggravated by Tezuka’s actions—and provokes him into a fight. Ren turns out to be a much better fighter than Shibaura counted on and holds him at swordpoint, ready to make the final blow. But he can’t kill him, and Shibaura taunts him for it before kicking him out of the way, making an attack that definitely would have killed him had Shinji not intervened. When Ren is carried home by Tezuka and Shinji, Shibaura continues to taunt him on not having what it takes to be a real Rider. He continues picking on Ren later, kidnapping Yui and telling him that the only way he’ll reveal where she is is if Ren defeats him in battle. And he would have won if not for another of his schemes coming back to haunt him. When he learned that escaped convict Asakura became a Rider, he decided to inform him who else was a Rider, just to keep the “game” more interesting. Unfortunately for him, Asakura likes killing. And has no problem using Shibaura as a shield against Zolda’s Final Vent. And then finishing him off. It’s immensely satisfying to watch.
Gai’s Monster is Metalgelas, a rhinocerous-based Monster, and his suit does a damn good job incorporating that element into its design. It’s by far the “purest” use of the series’ design style, keeping everything relatively simple while showing him as a fairly well-armored guy. What’s interesting about him is that he’s actually not a very confrontational guy, similar to Sudo. He keeps talking about how he’ll kick everyone’s asses, but in battle, he really doesn’t have a whole lot to him, and he’s constantly making excuses and trying to talk his way out of a battle. Still, his deck is pretty formidable. Being a cheater, his deck includes two Attack Cards that are complete cheats: Confine Vent. This card nullifies the effects of any Advent Card scanned, and he’s got two of them. It can nullify summons or weapons/defense, which really sucks when the card system means you have only one shot. So if you try to use your shield and get hit by Confine Vent, you have no defense. It’s never seen whether or not it would work against a Final Vent, but its effects otherwise are brutal. His Weapon Card is Strike Vent, which summons the wrist-mounted Metal Horn, a weapon that looks like a rhino’s head. This weapon is used in the Final Vent, Heavy Pressure, where he’s propelled on Metalgelas’s shoulders and drives his weapon right into his opponent.
This next character has a surprisingly short time on-screen, but his presence has a major impact on the main characters. I’m talking about Miyuki Tezuka, a good friend of Shinji’s and Yui’s and a contested ally of Ren’s, Kamen Rider Raia. To be perfectly honest, I don’t quite know how to feel about this character, and hopefully, you’ll see as I explain him.
Tezuka was never meant to be Raia; much like Shinji, he only took up the deck after the original chosen Rider didn’t work out. In his case, the original Raia (or equivalent thereof) was meant to be Yuichi Saito, his best friend. Yuichi was a talented young pianist who, by an unfortunate twist of fate, ended up in the middle of one of Asakura’s fights one winter’s night. He wasn’t targeted or anything; he just got caught up in a fight in progress that spilled out of control, and he took a bad injury to his wrist, apparently severing a nerve. Because of the injury, Yuichi lost his ability to play the piano—his fingers no longer worked the way they used to. It was because of this that Kanzaki approached him with what we would come to know as the Raia deck, offering him the chance to regain his ability to play piano if he fought in the Rider War. While it was a tempting offer, Yuichi had to decline, unable to accept the idea of fighting and killing other people. Because Yuichi refused to play his game, Kanzaki punished him by sending his intended Contract Monster, Guldthunder, to kill him. Though he was unable to change his friend’s fate, Tezuka took up Yuichi’s deck and formed a contract with the monster Evildiver, and fought to try to change the other Riders’ fate.
And fate is a sticking point with this character. Tezuka is a fortuneteller with an uncannily accurate ability to predict people’s futures, and he insists that his predictions are always right. This really bugs me, to be perfectly honest. For the most part, Ryuki is pretty well grounded in science—albeit made-up science—and it doesn’t take a turn into the quasi-magical until the end we learn about Yui. And even then, it feels like it has a scientific explanation, or at least scientific as the show establishes science. If we establish a scale of magic to science, with Harry Potter on one end and a chemistry textbook on the other, then Ryuki is closer toward the textbook than to the boy wizard. Tezuka, on the other hand, edges more toward Hogwarts. I understand that it’s an important thing for his character, in order to tie in fate and, of course, to deal with his death. But it still feels out of place. Yet that’s not the biggest part that leaves me confused about him.
Tezuka first appears to Ren, semi-trolling him in an attempt to change his fate. And I kind of like that. Up until that point, Ren was very closed off, and any hints about himself were revealed to Shinji and Yui by accident, such as Shinji getting into a fight with him and accidentally breaking his necklace and finding the ring. Tezuka was the first one to be proactive with trying to get Ren to open up; Yui had always tried to respect Ren’s privacy and Shinji was very easily frustrated by Ren’s attitude and gave up a lot easier. I previously described Tezuka’s attempts to see Ren’s soul as taking a jackhammer to the walls Ren’s built around himself. And I stand by this metaphor; Tezuka does a little bit at a time, but in constant succession, and it’s aggressive enough to make Ren’s armor crumble. He ends up revealing more and more about himself when he doesn’t want to, suddenly exposed and afraid.
Now here’s where Tezuka leaves me feeling off. Everything I just described is more of what Shinji should be doing. And in fact, it’s what Shinji will do later on in the season, particularly after Tezuka’s death. Tezuka makes the cracks, and Shinji’s the one who helps Ren pry them open. Tezuka’s entire role in the series is to drive Shinji’s characterization. Now, I’m sure you’re wondering why I just said that after spending so much time describing how he affects Ren. Well, this is actually a big part of how he influences Shinji, not Ren. What Shinji does from then on is all the result of Tezuka’s work. Tezuka’s wish to change the Riders’ fates guided Shinji to actually try to stop the fighting by changing the Riders themselves. In short, Tezuka never really felt like a character of himself; rather, he was a vehicle for Shinji’s characterization. Or, if you’re a Decade fan, Raia has no story. He’s just meant to be an inspiration. This is why he had to die; inspirational characters cannot be allowed to live. Something has to continue to drive the main characters to continue on. It’s like a mentor—once his role is fulfilled, the only way he can continue to teach the main character is by dying and allowing them to continue on alone. In the special, Tezuka’s given a little more character. Rather than being a fortuneteller tied down by fate, he was Ren’s friend who was trying to stand by him and only began to realize that Ren was wrong. And the difference also shows with the acting. Hassei Takano was pretty low-key as Tezuka in the series, but he did considerably better in the special for the short time Tezuka was alive—though I’ll admit that part of it may simply be that he’d already played the role before that point and understood him better.
Tezuka did have promise, at least. Had Ren been the only main Rider, I think Tezuka would have made an excellent secondary Rider to him. We’re used to seeing the lighter primary Rider having a darker secondary (for example, W and Accel or Fourze and Meteor), but here was a chance to turn the formula on its head. Tezuka proved that he was good at breaking down Ren’s defenses and made him reveal more about himself, things that Ren himself didn’t know. But with Shinji around, he felt superfluous. Shinji ended up doing a better job at all of this simply because Ren respected him more—for one thing, Shinji at least could respect Ren’s privacy better. The best comparison I can think of for Shinji and Tezuka’s interaction as a primary and secondary Rider is to Eiji Hino and Akira Date in OOO, who both got along fine and were mostly on the same page in terms of personality—neither was a foil to the other. But even then, both Eiji and Date had partners who provided the necessary foil to their personalities: Ankh for Eiji and Goto for Date.
Raia might be the first pink Rider, and I can’t say I have too much to complain about in terms of the suit. As his Monster is a ray, there’s an undeniable ray motif to his suit: the grill on his helmet is designed to resemble a ray’s gill slits, and there’s actually a braid running down his head that looks like a ray’s tail—an element I like, since it makes the suit more distinctive. In terms of fighting, however, Raia is technically a pacifist. He’ll fight Monsters, but fighting other Riders is absolutely out, and the one time he went into battle against Knight, he purposely avoided lethal attacks. As such, his deck is relatively nonlethal. His Weapon Card is Swing Vent, which summons a whip patterned off Evildiver’s tail. Like Verde, he has the Weapon/State Card Copy Vent, but he uses it exclusively as a Weapon Card. He frequently uses it with his allies, so that he can team up with Ryuki with a double Strike Vent, for instance. His Final Vent, Hide Venom, is the only really lethal card in his deck, and even then, we only ever see it destroy Monsters, not Riders (as mentioned before, he holds back in his fights with other Riders; Knight took the attack once and noticed that Raia was holding back, since he was still alive). He rides on Evildiver’s back to charge into an enemy.
Now, yes, Tezuka was the original owner of the Survive Shippu card, which he gave to Ren because he was afraid of the temptation to use the power, even against Asakura, who had destroyed his friend’s life. Since then, we’ve gotten concept art of Raia Survive (along with Yuichi Saito as a Rider contracted to Guldthunder—the name isn’t easy to read, with what only shows as a B and either an L or an I, and it could be anything from “Blue” to “BLT”) and a limited release of a toy for him (the only one I’ve seen is sold out on Plamoya). Given that he never appeared in canon, I’m not going to bother analyzing him.
I’m sure there were quite a few people waiting for this one: everybody’s favorite sociopath, Takeshi Asakura/Kamen Rider Ouja. Most of the characters of Ryuki are not evil or unforgivable. There are two exceptions to this. The first is Sudo, who was crooked from the start. The second is this guy, who is just plain bad. I can easily diagnose him with antisocial personality disorder (from the DSM-IV, but the World Health Organization’s dissocial personality disorder in the ICD-10 also matches to a T), for which I have the notes leftover from my Abnormal Psychology course in college. There is a pervasive disregard and violation of the rights of others (check) and it has occurred since age fifteen (he was about thirteen when he set his house on fire and killed everybody, so check), and they can’t learn from their mistakes or deal with boredom (Asakura pretty much is a one-trick pony a lot of the time, and no way in hell do you want him “vexed”). Three out of seven additional criteria must be met:
I have never seen any character so completely meet almost all of the criteria in this way. This is a guy who was purposely designed to be a sociopath, and Takashi Hagino plays him wonderfully. He turns on the crazy so well that it’s a shock when you see him in behind-the-scenes stuff, getting along with the other actors (apparently, he was sort of a “big brother” on set). Despite this, Asakura’s not “insane.” Around the time he first appeared, I made the distinction. Just because somebody has a mental or psychological disturbance listed in the DSM or ICD, it doesn’t make them “insane.” “Sanity” is a legal term, used to determine if someone can be held responsible for their actions. Asakura may be impulsive, but he’s repeatedly been shown to avoid fighting with others long enough to accomplish specific goals, whether it’s to trick Reiko into bringing him a victim, standing guard over a little girl to use her as Monster bait, or to hear out Kanzaki on important stuff like “You guys have to kill each other within the next three days.” So there’s some level of control—he’s not running around indiscriminately killing everyone he meets. And he clearly understands that what he’s doing is illegal, otherwise he wouldn’t bother to hide or lie. He just doesn’t give a shit. Because he first appeared in 2002, we didn’t have the perfect comparison that we do now: the Joker as portrayed by Heath Ledger in the 2008 movie The Dark Knight, who had been compared to a figure from Alfred’s past as such: “Some men aren’t looking for anything logical, like money. They can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.”
And burn the world Asakura did, from a young age. Nothing indicates that his family life was anything but normal. He had a younger brother, Akira, who loved and bugged the utter hell out of him. So one day, Asakura set the house on fire in an attempt to kill Akira. However, it backfired horribly; his parents were killed instead of Akira, and Asakura got a horrible burn on his shoulder that led Reiko to believe that he had tried to save his brother from the fire. Akira was adopted, his family name changed to Mihara, and Asakura assumed that he’d killed him. When Reiko told him otherwise, he tricked her into bringing Akira to him, where he had Venosnaker finish him off.
This alone is a good example of how utterly bugfuck crazy this guy is. He is motiveless malignity, violence incarnate. If he’s not inflicting harm on others, he’s inflicting it on himself to relieve boredom, which is mostly something he only did in prison. When we first meet him, he’s serving ten years for an unknown crime (probably murder or assault). This is the best sentence his lawyer, Kitaoka, could get for him, and he’s not happy that the previously unbeatable lawyer couldn’t get him off. This sets up a great story between the two Riders, who are equals in the eyes of the story: Asakura’s story requires Kitaoka, and over time, Kitaoka’s requires Asakura.
Asakura was brought into the Rider War because he would do exactly what Kanzaki wanted and thin out the ranks. He kills both Gai and Raia and steals their Mirror Monsters for himself. He’s also responsible for the deaths of Imperer and the second Zolda. If you include the special and movie, he also kills Scissors and the crime he was convicted of was the murder of Femme’s sister. So he’s got quite a kill count. And probably for the same reasons as Heath Ledger’s Joker (excellent performance, dangerous and unhinged character), he’s incredibly beloved—to the point that he was actually slated to die in Knight Survive’s first appearance, only to be spared because he was bringing in the viewers. He even got his own image song, “Spinnin’ Around”, only unlike the other image songs, there’s not a lot I can analyze. It just emphasizes how bugfuck nuts he is. Though I will admit the line about “drumbeats” worries me, given that I have watched Doctor Who and know what it means when someone constantly hears the sound of drums. It’s really hard to find anything redeemable in him, and that’s the whole point. This is what makes his appearance as an apparent decent guy in the epilogue so weird, but it was about giving everyone a happy ending anyway. His was just the weird one.
Ouja is the first purple Rider I can think of, and he establishes a trend within Kobayashi’s Rider series that purple Riders are the most dangerous: Den-O Gun Form was the playful but uncontrollable Ryutaros, and OOO PuToTyra was an absolute berserker whom Eiji had a hard time keeping under control because of the extremely dangerous purple Core Medals. And maybe it’s because I love the Disney movie Aladdin and its villain, Jafar, but I really like Ouja’s design. The cobra theme looks perfect—so perfect, in fact, that early art leaks for the movie form of Kamen Rider OOO, BraKaWani, showed him with an Ouja-style helmet. And the Visor being styled as a staff with a cobra head just screams Jafar to me. I won’t bother analyzing Blank Form from the movie because there’s no point in analyzing it—it was mostly just a bone thrown to fans, and Ryuki Blank Form is the only one so useless it’s funny—and like with Raia, I won’t analyze the S.I.C.-only Survive form, released as a toy and featured in the sidestory The World of If. While it looks cool, it never appeared in canon.
While Asakura is a berserker and fights as such as Ouja, his deck reveals a dangerously cunning mind—something we see when he steals other Contract Monsters. His primary Weapon Card is Sword Vent, which is patterned off a cobra fang cross-bred with a Spiral Saber. He also has the Attack Card Steal Vent, only otherwise owned by noted cheating bastard, Odin, which allows you to steal the weapon of a particular Rider. His primary Monster, Venosnaker, is a huge snake that I’m sure Samuel L. Jackson wouldn’t want to see on a plane anytime soon, and its signature attack is to spew acidic venom, something that can dissolve anything and almost blinded Ouja in an accidental attack. Venosnaker’s Final Vent is Veno Crash, where it spits more venom at a target while launching Ouja at them, where he makes a devastating scissor kick. But there’s also two more cards in his deck, and it’s where he particularly becomes a threat: additional contract cards, which he used on the masterless Metalgelas and Evildiver, binding them to him. This presumably gave him all of Gai’s and Raia’s cards, but we only see him use the contracts, Final Vents, and the Strike and Swing Vents. What they’re really there for is the final card, Unite Vent, which merges all three Monsters together to create the chimeric Genocider. Genocider’s Final Vent, Doomsday, is on the level of a Survive Final Vent, with 8000 Attack Points. Genocider opens up a cavity in its chest, sucking in the victim close to them while Ouja corkscrew-kicks them in. He’s a powerful Rider that perfectly complements the wonderfully deranged character, easily making him beloved enough to reappear as a summon and even as a last-resort almost-ally in Kamen Rider Decade.
Kamen Rider Zolda is a character bound in the lives of two men: Syuichi Kitaoka and Goro Yura, played by Ryohei (surname: Odai) and Tomohisa Yuge, respectively. Technically, Goro is support staff and I should include him there, but Kitaoka’s development winds up depending on him more and more, and Goro even becomes Zolda in the final episode, so I’m putting him here instead.
The two of them are probably the best example of character development through the course of the series. When we first meet Kitaoka, he’s on the run from agents from a corrupt company he’d defended, who learned that he was embezzling money from them. Which is never referred to again, and let’s just chalk it up to Toshiki Inoue not knowing how to write this character. He’s cocky, arrogant, and obsessed with his image. The man is a peacock. He enjoys the finer things in life and only looks out for number one. As a Rider, he’d prefer to let the others kill themselves off first before he comes in. As for Goro, our first impression of him is as Kitaoka’s dedicated and dangerous bodyguard, always with a threatening air about him.
But the two share a secret that betrays who they really are underneath it all and paves the way for their development. Kitaoka is suffering from an unspecified disease (presumably cancer) that is no longer curable. He is dying, and the only thing that can save his life is the Rider War. So he wishes for eternal life. Goro is bound to him as a servant because Kitaoka spent crucial time defending him in a petty assault trial, missing a diagnosis that would have caught his illness in time to treat it. Guilt is what initially ties Goro to Kitaoka, but over time, he becomes a loyal and trusted friend.
To discuss them separately for a moment, I’ll start with Goro. Very quickly, we learn that he’s much gentler than he appears to be. When a little girl comes to ask Kitaoka to defend her father in court, Kitaoka is a dick and kicks her out. As an apology for his master’s behavior, Goro gives her candy. She later repays him with a gift of paper cranes, and he becomes her protector throughout the arc, providing her with a voice in front of Shinji’s friends and especially in front of Kitaoka, who can’t help but feel a little betrayed by his faithful servant siding with the little girl. He does pull one major asshole moment soon after that, when he agrees to work with Kitaoka in a plan to emotionally destroy Shinji by faking his own death, but he sees what a mistake he made when Shinji drops to his knees and holds his hands, sobbing that he’s grateful Goro is alive. Goro can hardly bear to leave the other man at that point and makes sure that he offers a bit of comfort before rejoining his Sensei.
But from there, Goro gains more of a voice in front of Kitaoka and he becomes more and more willing to argue with him. He’s still a bit submissive to him, but in the way that a trusted friend might be, rather than a servant. This especially picks up when Asakura appears, and Goro worries greatly over Kitaoka’s safety. He repeatedly tries to talk Kitaoka out of fighting him and even goes to the length of getting him out of the house for a whole day to keep Asakura from finding him. On a few occasions, he even tries to settle the matter of Asakura for himself, but it never works out, and Kitaoka finally has to tell him that it’s not his job to kill Asakura, knowing that his friend shouldn’t have to sacrifice his gentleness in order to protect him.
As for Kitaoka, his journey takes place through the background of the entire series. He begins very self-centered, only looking out for himself. He tries to keep Shinji in jail, knowing the consequences of violating a contract with a Monster, so he’ll have one less Rider to worry about. He mocks Ren for being friends with him and even for fighting for the sake of a lover, arguing that it should be all about him. I think somewhere in there, I accidentally described Kuzco from The Emperor’s New Groove, but there you go. And when Shinji expresses his relief that Goro is alive, Ren is quick to tell a disgusted Kitaoka that Shinji’s a better man than the both of them.
By the end, we learn just how much this line has influenced Kitaoka’s development, and looking back, it makes perfect sense. Kitaoka had a lot more firepower and was easily able to overwhelm Shinji and Ren early on, but then the two heroes got caught up in dealing with other Riders, so they didn’t clash for a while. But then Asakura joined the battle and kidnapped Goro. Ren realized what happened and tried to convince Kitaoka to let him help save him, but Kitaoka wasn’t willing to form even a short-lived alliance with the other Rider. They fought and ended the battle in a draw, with Kitaoka shocked at how much Ren had improved since their last battle. Ren argued that Kitaoka might have gotten weaker, and this became a driving factor in his development. Kitaoka knew that his body was failing him, and the symptoms of his illness began to interfere greatly with his life. Without short-lived alliances with Shinji and Ren, he couldn’t stand up to other Riders.
This frustrated him, with him unable to determine whether it was his physical state or his emotional state that was making him so weak. He could compensate for his body’s failings by relying on ranged attacks, but he couldn’t make up for emotional failings. The enmity between him and Shinji was disappearing; the other Rider might have annoyed the hell out of him, but he didn’t hate him the way he once did. And though he didn’t get along with Ren either, neither one of them particularly held a grudge against the other, and Ren even ended up becoming his unwilling secret-keeper when he saved Kitaoka from Tiger only to learn about his illness.
Kitaoka struggles to try to fight for himself, only to be forced into alliances with the others, particularly against Asakura, who is too dangerous for one Rider to face alone. This grudge match against Asakura is a major portion of his character development, to the point that it would be impossible for Kitaoka to develop the way he did without Asakura there. He wonders for a little while if he should try to behave like Asakura in order to get an edge in the Rider War, but he quickly decides against it, disgusted with Asakura’s methods and view of the world. Eventually, it becomes less that Kitaoka is fighting in order to gain eternal life and more that he’s fighting to stop Asakura and the other crazies who would harm other people. In short, Kitaoka becomes a more heroic character.
Kitaoka’s wish is eternal life. Goro’s wish is for Kitaoka to be happy. Eventually, Kitaoka begins to fulfill Goro’s wish. As his illness becomes more and more pronounced, his relationship with Goro changes. Goro is Kitaoka’s caretaker, yes, but he’s much more of an equal—to the point that when Goro risks his life to save Kitaoka from Asakura, Kitaoka can’t bear to leave him in danger and risks his own life to get Asakura off of him and try to escape. When Goro checks out of the hospital afterward, it’s Kitaoka who drives him home, in a reversal of their usual roles. Kitaoka begins to realize, thanks to Goro, that he doesn’t need eternal life and that he’s no longer willing to fight in the Rider War. He decides to quit, to Goro’s immense relief, but it soon occurs to him that if he’s dying, he’s leaving behind Asakura as his legacy. For the sake of balancing his ledger, he decides to fight Asakura for the last time, no matter how it pains Goro for him to do so, knowing he will die this time. However, his illness claims his life before he can fight, and Goro carries out his last wish and fights Asakura. Perhaps because of his kind heart, Goro is unable to fight the way a Rider should and dies against Asakura, his last words a confused and yet completely lucid promise to Kitaoka to cook him something good when he comes home.
Kitaoka came out of the series with two image songs. His first, “Kienai Niji” (“Unfading Rainbow”), expresses his search for eternal life and his struggle with loneliness. He accepts that the world is a harsh and lonely place, but he finds himself trying to achieve more. Is eternity what he really needs? Taking that into account, I think it helps explain his attraction to Reiko, which I purposely left out of his analysis. His attraction to her didn’t contribute as much as expected to his development, though over time, it became clear he genuinely respected her as a woman and as a journalist—perhaps even came to love her. And I think he pursued her for two reasons. First was the clear shock that she did turn him down—after all, he’s the man who has everything (or so it seems). Why would anyone find him lacking? This is the same struggle he has with Shinji before he ever learns that the younger man is a Rider. And second, I think he pursued her so much because she turned him down. Rejection was safe. It meant he didn’t have to worry about somebody caring for him. Throughout the series, Kitaoka is subtly pushing people away, particularly Goro. For the most part, he insists that he can’t have friends if he’s going to be a Rider, since he believes that friendship is a weakness. And to some degree, he’s got a point—Shinji and Ren are both plagued with the knowledge that one day they’ll have to fight, and every time they come to blows, they’re hurting themselves more than each other because each knows he’s fighting his best friend. But Kitaoka even pushes away Goro, repeatedly suggesting that Goro can find a job elsewhere, and I think this is more a matter of his fear of dying. He seems to expect Goro to leave. He can’t fathom the idea that someone will be around to love and mourn him when he dies. So his wish of eternal life makes sense on another level: being immortal while everyone around him is mortal is a terribly lonely thing. When he begins to realize that he’s got a good life and people around who love him, then he lets go of that lonely wish.
His second image song is a duet with Goro, ”Dear Friend”. Sadly, right now, I can’t find a streaming version of the song to listen to, so I can only work off of what I’m reading in the translation, which only gives half the story. This song seems to take place later in the series from “Kienai Niji,” with Kitaoka beginning to give up on his quest for eternity. He realizes he has everything he truly wants right here and now, with a friend he can’t bring himself to thank and could never thank enough. And at the same time, Goro realizes more and more of who he really is and can’t bring himself to ever say goodbye to his friend, only promising to see him again always.
Zolda is a bright green Rider supposedly based off a bull like his Contract Monster, Magnugiga, but he’s much more machine-like than that. Don’t worry; we’ll get another green-bull Rider down the line with Zeronos in Den-O. While Goro may be a good hand-to-hand fighter, Kitaoka’s illness means that he doesn’t have the stamina to engage in close-range combat for very long, and he sucks at it anyway. So Zolda is mostly a ranged fighter only. All of his cards are Weapon Cards. There is a single close-range Strike Vent, which summons Giga Horn (which I assume is a wrist-mounted weapon), but it never shows up in the series. Still, it’s included in the Advent Card Archives, so I’ll mention it. His Guard Vent, Giga Armor, is a pretty effective shield. Apparently, a second, unseen Guard Vent was included in a previous card release, but it’s not in the Archives, so I won’t count it toward canon cards. But he’s a gun guy, as seen with his Visor being a gun. He’s got two Shoot Vents. The first, with 2000 Attack Points, is Giga Launcher, a giant of a bazooka. That he loves to hold just below the belt. As you can see, I’m extremely mature. And missing the image I was originally going to link to. His second Shoot Vent, Giga Cannon, is a pair of cannons on his shoulders that blast off lasers for 3000 AP. His Final Vent is End of the World, where he sticks his Visor up Magnugiga’s butt (or in his back—the angle is hard to tell) and launches everything. Unsurprisingly, with 7000 AP, this is just between Ryuki’s Final Vent and Knight Survive’s. Too bad that it so rarely works.
Finally, we come to probably the weakest character in the series but a very memorable one all the same. Kamen Rider Odin.
That cheating bastard.
To be fair, I probably should be discussing him alongside Kanzaki, but I want to try and discuss him separate from his master for a moment. Moreso than any of the other Riders here, Odin has no story. He is nobody. In fact, he’s three nobodies. Supplemental information reveals that the first Odin was a down-on-his luck homeless guy that Kanzaki approached with a deck, but to be honest? We don’t need to know. None of the other Odins have identities even revealed in supplemental info. It’s what makes him creepy. He could be anyone. And he is no one.
The Odins are voiced by Tsuyoshi Koyama, who provides the voice of the Visors in the series (except for the Alternatives’ Slash Visors, as said before), which adds to the creepy factor. He’s inhuman. And that’s the whole point.
Odin was created to win. He breaks all the rules of the Advent Card system—summoning weapons without scanning cards, being frickin’ overpowered even compared to the Survive forms, and being able to reverse time whenever the hell Kanzaki feels like it. The power is so much that it overwrites the user’s personality, programming them as Kanzaki’s puppet. So why didn’t Kanzaki use it himself and leave out that reprogramming bit? Well, you need a physical body in order to use the decks, and Kanzaki sacrificed his, so Odin acts as his proxy. If you’re a fan of OOO, he kind of feels like a prototype for the purple Core Medals; Odin wants nothing—he has no desire of his own. He only does what Kanzaki wants.
He is the thirteenth Rider, the one that the last surviving Rider must face at the end of the Rider War. But Odin would defeat that Rider in order to gain the new life for Yui. Things, of course, don’t go as planned thanks to Ren Akiyama, who defeats all but one of them. Ren demands to fight the first Odin way ahead of schedule, with both Odin and Kanzaki warning him he’s not ready, and despite getting his ass thoroughly kicked, Ren kills Odin in self-defense—only because Odin let his guard down. This is a running thing, apparently, because Ren is able to kill the second Odin when he lets his guard down too; Yui screams and catches Odin’s attention long enough for Ryuki to hold him down while Knight attacks. The third one, for the sake of the Odins’ dignity, is the only one Ren doesn’t personally kill. He dies because Kanzaki forfeits the Rider War, apparently psychically killing him. Ren wins anyway, even if by default. That’s kind of a crappy record against the guy.
Odin has a beautiful design, based off a golden phoenix. The grill motif is kept by having lenses on each of the feather-like designs on his helmet. His Visor is a staff topped with a phoenix with its wings folded. Hell, even his belt is gold, showing just how different and more powerful he is. This guy set the standard for phoenix-based and birdlike characters in the franchise. We expect them to have some kind of design motif similar to his. His body language was kept for the loopy swan Imagin Sieg in Den-O, and you can bet that when I see the Phoenix Phantom in Wizard, I’m judging him based on Odin.
Odin has a Survive card in canon—one never seen in the series, so it’s unknown if he’s in Survive mode or not. S.I.C. did release their interpretation of Odin Survive, and quite honestly, it looks like what would happen if Sephiroth became a Kamen Rider. But his trump card is Time Vent—which I guess I’d classify as an Attack Card. This turns back time, apparently to any time he cares to, but we see the series restart from episode one. Note that Kanzaki apparently has the ability to do this without the Time Vent card, given the finale and the movie, but I guess the card is to be used in case Kanzaki isn’t in the right mind to do it himself. Or the power relies on Kanzaki. I don’t know. Wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey.
In addition to Time Vent, he has the Weapon Card Sword Vent, which summons either one or two swords, the Gold Sabers, with an Attack Point count of 4000—putting him on par with the best sword-user in the series, Knight Survive. Guard Vent conjures the Gold Shield, with 4000 Attack Points. It’s clear that he was created to fight Survives. Only Shinji and Ren were worthy to battle him, but throughout the story, it seems more and more evident that it was Ren’s destiny to fight him. His Attack Card is Steal Vent, which allows him to take the weapon of any Rider he’s fighting. This is, of course, trouble if you’re a melee fighter like Knight, who depends on his sword. It also knocks out defense really damn well. His Final Vent, Eternal Chaos, has an overwhelming Attack Point count of 10,000. As a reference, Ryuki Survive’s Final Vent is only 9000. Insert Dragonball Z meme here. We never see it all the way through, since the only time it’s used, we cut to Knight Survive charging into it and then to Kanzaki’s emotional crisis. What we do know is that his Contract Monster, Goldphoenix, comes behind him as he levitates, and presumably Goldphoenix attaches to him as wings like Darkwing does to Knight. I don’t know if Dragon Knight expanded on this attack, but Climax Heroes shows that he just proceeds to fly into his victim headfirst with gold flames around him. Given that it’s Odin, we know that it’s devastating, and Knight is barely left standing out of sheer willpower alone.
But while each character has their own story, the story of Ryuki itself is revealed by an unlikely group. Next time, we explore the plot and the support staff of the main characters.
Now, admittedly, I should do like I did with the movie Riders and work from weakest character to strongest—and I will to some degree. But I want to put Kamen Rider Tiger here because of his association with the Alternatives. Satoru Tojo is Kagawa's prized pupil and seeks to live up to his ideal of a hero. And he is probably the most difficult character to talk about. He’s almost a sympathetic character. He wants to be a hero. It’s a noble wish, but…I think Harvey Dent says it best in The Dark Knight when he says, “You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become a villain.” Because that’s what happens quickly and brutally. Tojo doesn’t strike me as an inherently bad person. Rather, I think he’s extremely impressionable, and this was his downfall. He implies that he was always awkward and people were unkind to him. He gravitated toward Prof. Kagawa, who was the first one to see any value in him and truly showed him kindness. So he decided to model himself after Kagawa’s ideals. Kagawa had a belief in what a hero should be—and the more I bring this up, the more I think the guy might have been a literary professor before he memorized Kanzaki’s physics lesson from hell. Tojo internalized that belief and tried to emulate it without truly understanding what it meant. He couldn’t understand that a hero had to care about other people, even if it meant they had to sacrifice them—it was a contradiction within the belief. So he rationalized that as “If I do care about somebody, then I have to sacrifice them. That will make me a hero.” This arguably made him much more dangerous as an ally than an enemy, leading me to dub him “Team-Killing Fucktard.” And anyone who didn’t fit with his heroic ideal was to be eliminated—something that genuinely worried Kagawa, since he wanted to avoid sacrificing any more people than was absolutely necessary. Kagawa would only fight a Rider if they directly challenged him and would be a threat, such as Ren when he came to him with an ultimatum. Shinji wasn’t as proactive and would only fight in defense of himself or his friends—Tojo targeted him anyway, and Kagawa saved him from certain death. Ironically, at the moment of his death—shoving a father and son out of the way of an oncoming truck—Tojo can’t even recognize that what he’s done is heroic. The newspaper calls him a hero, and he dies wondering how he can become one.
All of Tojo’s personality brings me to a very uncomfortable conclusion: that he has a psychological or mental disorder. And his actor, Jun Takatsuki, really gives a muted performance that you expect from a character with a disorder. I purposely avoided mentioning it in the reviews themselves because it’s very uncomfortable, but I think I can say just what he was written with. I’m going to word this extremely carefully because one wrong move, and I’m going to get lynched: I think Tojo was written with the intent that he had Asperger’s Syndrome.
Now, this does not mean that I believe this is an accurate depiction of Asperger’s Syndrome by any means. What I mean by this is that Tojo seems to have what I call “Hollywood Asperger’s”: the typical symptoms—often exaggerated for effect and due to the writers’ lack of knowledge—that appear in characters on TV that are said by their writers to have Asperger’s Syndrome. Often, Hollywood Asperger’s is poorly researched and the symptoms seem to come directly from WebMD, Wikipedia, and the media stereotypes that they themselves feed into in a vicious cycle. For example: Temperance Brennan and Zack Addy in Bones (particularly painful examples) or possibly Gil Grissom in CSI. All three of these characters show some degree of a lack of empathy with other people and can’t seem to behave appropriately in certain social situations. They have their fixations, in their cases, about work (Brennan and Zack and their “hard science” route, Grissom and his obsession about the evidence over instinct. Also bugs). And honestly, Zack from Bones is probably Tojo’s best American equivalent: like Zack, Tojo practically worships his mentor and follows their word to the letter, even going beyond it to where it practically becomes a religion, and oversteps his boundaries in following this ideology to the point that he’s not only hurting people he’s never met but he’s also hurting his mentor and friends—and I think I just explained season three finale of Bones to myself.
It’s extremely uncomfortable, and every time Tojo is on-screen, I cringe. There is something so obviously “wrong” about him, and I really think Kobayashi and Inoue were going for Asperger’s without fully understanding the condition. If it’s any consolation, Kobayashi handles post-traumatic stress disorder a lot more sensitively in the later OOO, something I try my hardest not to go into a massive essay about.
Despite my feelings on Tojo, I have to say I kind of like the design of Tiger. In silver-and-blue, he does a pretty good white tiger motif (better than some Rangers, I have to admit), and I like the use of the axe as his Visor. It’s something that I wouldn’t have expected. And as a nice twist on the grill motif, the lenses on his mask are set up like stripes on a tiger. His fighting style relies on raw power, with a strong Monster, Destwilder—when your name is made up of “destroy” and “wild,” then you’re somebody I don’t want to mess with. His Weapon Card is Strike Vent, which provides him with the Dest Claw gauntlets—Wolverine weapons that we’d later see with certain forms of Kamen Rider OOO and with Fourze’s Claw Switch. His Attack Card is Freeze Vent, which can freeze any Monster—and presumably, Rider—in place for a short period of time. His Final Vent is called Crystal Break, where Destwilder drags the victim up to Tiger to get impaled on his claws. It’s highly effective when used all the way through, but with enough distance away from Tiger, the victim has ample time to get free.
Now it’s time to talk about that guy who was only in two episodes, Masashi Sudo, Kamen Rider Scissors, played by Takeshi Kimura. Also, I apologize if I slip up and accidentally refer to him as “Masaki Suda” (the actor who plays Philip in Kamen Rider W). Unfortunately, both come from the same franchise and have very similar names, so I have to try extra hard not to refer to Philip by mistake. If I do make this mistake, reward yourself with a drink or something.
There is almost nothing to talk about with this character. He’s only in episodes 5 and 6, and he’s got shit in terms of development. When he first appears, he’s set up to just be the guest star detective—possibly a shout-out to Kaoru Ichijou of Kuuga. When Reiko is attacked inside Kaga’s antique shop, he’s the detective in charge of the investigation. But eventually it’s learned that he was the attacker all along, that he was a corrupt cop who did some shady dealings with Kaga, but when the shop owner wanted more money, Sudo killed him and sealed his body within a wall of the shop. Which makes me wonder why nobody smelled the decomp, but whatever. I watched too much CSI. As a Rider, instead of actually fighting, Sudo just fed people to his monster, Volcancer, in order to become stronger.
Now, because the whole plot of these episodes is the mystery of Scissors’s identity, he gets even less screentime than that. We see more of his personality based around what he does in secret. When he sees Shinji’s business card and hears that he’s a Rider, he contacts him to get information on Ren and Yui, then lays traps for everybody. Rather than facing Ryuki or Knight in battle, he sets a deathtrap for Ryuki and tries to get Ren hit by a truck. When he learns that Yui is Kanzaki’s sister, he kidnaps her to try to get an edge in battle. Unfortunately, every single one of them got out of it—Shinji figured out about the death trap just in the nick of time, and Ren barely got hurt by the truck (still trying to figure that one out) and managed to rescue Yui. So even though he fights dirty, Sudo can’t win. He’s even more of a cartoon villain that way—his convoluted schemes just blow up in his face.
His suit seems pretty early into the design scheme, and the grill motif actually ends up looking more like the helmet design of the Hibiki Oni. His Visor is designed like a pair of shears or crab claws. Ironically, given how reluctant he is to actually confront a Rider, his deck consists of Weapon Cards only: Strike Vent (the Scissors Pincer, which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like, another claw), and Guard Vent, which forms a shield (Shell Defense). Before you start having traumatic flashbacks to the Cancer Zodiarts in Fourze, let me remind you that this guy only lasted two episodes. His shield didn’t do much to help him here. His Final Vent is a running gag within the Kamen Rider fandom. It only appeared once and was never completed—all we know is that Volcancer throws him in the air, and he spins, but Knight hit him with his own Final Vent before anything could happen. Since then, the Climax Heroes videogames have shown that that is the attack—he’s supposed to collide into his opponent while curled up into a ball. But his reputation never recovered, and as late as 2011, he was being made fun of by Eiji Hino and Ankh in the Let’s Go Kamen Riders net movies, where they wonder what his Final Vent is, only to be hit with it off-screen and remark on how amazing it was.
Mitsuru Sano, also known as Kamen Rider Imperer, lasts a bit longer than Sudo did, but in my opinion, he makes roughly about as much impact. He appears way too late in the game and even halfway through his debut episode, making it hard to get attached to him. His story is that he was born into privilege, but his father kicked him out, all in an attempt to get him to man up and learn responsibility. He struggled and scraped for a living, working part-time jobs and longing to be rich. He got his wish when his father died, leaving him with the company and the good life, and suddenly his wish was to keep it all.
What plagued Sano as a character was his initial selfishness. It’s understandable that he’s got bad luck and can’t hold down a job for long. But he’s not terribly endearing when he goes to every Rider he can find and tries to get them to hire his services. He comes off as amoral too, having zero problem with killing Yui as long as it pays the bills. His actor, Takashi Hyuga, keeps him generally very cheerful all the time, which really makes the distasteful actions worse. Then for some reason, he ended up taking in the completely broken Tojo, letting him stay in his apartment while he healed and slowly befriending him. This came back to bite him when Tojo decided that killing his new friend would make him one step closer to becoming a hero. His death is a tragic, given that he finally had what he wanted, but I can’t say I feel sad about it. Look at what he did with Yui. How am I supposed to feel bad for a guy who doesn’t think twice about killing an innocent woman?
As for the suit? This is another one I think could have gone in the trash. The suede-and-sherpa look doesn’t fit with the design scheme of any Rider series at all, and I’m not sure what to think of the horns on his helmet. His fighting style is exclusively melee, except for the times he summons his Monsters—those gazelles I can never keep straight, but the Advent Card Archives list as Gigazelle while also including all the other fucking gazelles in the series. Sorry. Gazelle rant over. Anyway, Imperer’s attacks mostly rely on kicks, which makes it odd that his Weapon Card, Spin Vent, is a wrist-mounted fusion of two Spiral Sabers, appropriately called “Gazelle Stab.” That’s how I feel whenever I try to keep these Monsters straight. His Final Vent, Drive Divider, is a gazelle stampede followed by a knee strike to the head. I have the mental image of the stampede in The Lion King now, and I’ve got to tell you the knee strike is overkill. Given that the Contract card summons a stampede of gazelles anyway, this Final Vent feels particularly unimaginative.
Now we’re moving into characters with more impact on the plot, and we’ve got to start with Jun Shibaura (portrayed by Satoshi Ichijou), Kamen Rider Gai. Put simply, he is a little shit. He’s smug, he’s manipulative, and it’s great watching him get taken down. And yet, I’ve got to say I kind of like him for that. He kind of reminds me of the later Fourze character Kijima (the Cancer Zodiarts, whom I mentioned before), in that he’s just so overwhelmingly nasty that he becomes fun to watch. He doesn’t pretend to have any redeeming qualities about him, and it’s thoroughly enjoyable to watch his schemes blow up on him.
When we first meet Shibaura, he appears to be the lowest ranking member in Matrix, a gaming club at Meirin University. Shinji and Yui are investigating a story for ORE, where members of the club are engaging in a real-life battle game that closely resembles the Rider War. It turns out that Shibaura set the whole thing up himself, thinking of the Rider War as the ultimate game. I think why I like Shibaura as a character is that he’s the Digimon Kaiser of Digimon 02 done right. Part of what made the Kaiser so enjoyable at first was that he thought everything was a game and that he wasn’t really hurting anyone—but this later got re-explained as him being manipulated into evil, as per his origin story in a preceding videogame. Shibaura treats the Rider War as a game, yes. But he also understands that he is hurting real people and doesn’t give a shit. He wants his “game” to spill over into all of Japan, knowing that it’s addictive. At the same time, within the Rider War, he gets bored with how Shinji and Tezuka refuse to fight other Riders and how Ren is revealed to be unable to kill.
Shibaura plays a huge role in Ren’s first character crisis. We meet him shortly after we meet Tezuka, and Tezuka has a premonition that Shibaura will kill Ren in battle. Shibaura wounds Ren’s pride—something already aggravated by Tezuka’s actions—and provokes him into a fight. Ren turns out to be a much better fighter than Shibaura counted on and holds him at swordpoint, ready to make the final blow. But he can’t kill him, and Shibaura taunts him for it before kicking him out of the way, making an attack that definitely would have killed him had Shinji not intervened. When Ren is carried home by Tezuka and Shinji, Shibaura continues to taunt him on not having what it takes to be a real Rider. He continues picking on Ren later, kidnapping Yui and telling him that the only way he’ll reveal where she is is if Ren defeats him in battle. And he would have won if not for another of his schemes coming back to haunt him. When he learned that escaped convict Asakura became a Rider, he decided to inform him who else was a Rider, just to keep the “game” more interesting. Unfortunately for him, Asakura likes killing. And has no problem using Shibaura as a shield against Zolda’s Final Vent. And then finishing him off. It’s immensely satisfying to watch.
Gai’s Monster is Metalgelas, a rhinocerous-based Monster, and his suit does a damn good job incorporating that element into its design. It’s by far the “purest” use of the series’ design style, keeping everything relatively simple while showing him as a fairly well-armored guy. What’s interesting about him is that he’s actually not a very confrontational guy, similar to Sudo. He keeps talking about how he’ll kick everyone’s asses, but in battle, he really doesn’t have a whole lot to him, and he’s constantly making excuses and trying to talk his way out of a battle. Still, his deck is pretty formidable. Being a cheater, his deck includes two Attack Cards that are complete cheats: Confine Vent. This card nullifies the effects of any Advent Card scanned, and he’s got two of them. It can nullify summons or weapons/defense, which really sucks when the card system means you have only one shot. So if you try to use your shield and get hit by Confine Vent, you have no defense. It’s never seen whether or not it would work against a Final Vent, but its effects otherwise are brutal. His Weapon Card is Strike Vent, which summons the wrist-mounted Metal Horn, a weapon that looks like a rhino’s head. This weapon is used in the Final Vent, Heavy Pressure, where he’s propelled on Metalgelas’s shoulders and drives his weapon right into his opponent.
This next character has a surprisingly short time on-screen, but his presence has a major impact on the main characters. I’m talking about Miyuki Tezuka, a good friend of Shinji’s and Yui’s and a contested ally of Ren’s, Kamen Rider Raia. To be perfectly honest, I don’t quite know how to feel about this character, and hopefully, you’ll see as I explain him.
Tezuka was never meant to be Raia; much like Shinji, he only took up the deck after the original chosen Rider didn’t work out. In his case, the original Raia (or equivalent thereof) was meant to be Yuichi Saito, his best friend. Yuichi was a talented young pianist who, by an unfortunate twist of fate, ended up in the middle of one of Asakura’s fights one winter’s night. He wasn’t targeted or anything; he just got caught up in a fight in progress that spilled out of control, and he took a bad injury to his wrist, apparently severing a nerve. Because of the injury, Yuichi lost his ability to play the piano—his fingers no longer worked the way they used to. It was because of this that Kanzaki approached him with what we would come to know as the Raia deck, offering him the chance to regain his ability to play piano if he fought in the Rider War. While it was a tempting offer, Yuichi had to decline, unable to accept the idea of fighting and killing other people. Because Yuichi refused to play his game, Kanzaki punished him by sending his intended Contract Monster, Guldthunder, to kill him. Though he was unable to change his friend’s fate, Tezuka took up Yuichi’s deck and formed a contract with the monster Evildiver, and fought to try to change the other Riders’ fate.
And fate is a sticking point with this character. Tezuka is a fortuneteller with an uncannily accurate ability to predict people’s futures, and he insists that his predictions are always right. This really bugs me, to be perfectly honest. For the most part, Ryuki is pretty well grounded in science—albeit made-up science—and it doesn’t take a turn into the quasi-magical until the end we learn about Yui. And even then, it feels like it has a scientific explanation, or at least scientific as the show establishes science. If we establish a scale of magic to science, with Harry Potter on one end and a chemistry textbook on the other, then Ryuki is closer toward the textbook than to the boy wizard. Tezuka, on the other hand, edges more toward Hogwarts. I understand that it’s an important thing for his character, in order to tie in fate and, of course, to deal with his death. But it still feels out of place. Yet that’s not the biggest part that leaves me confused about him.
Tezuka first appears to Ren, semi-trolling him in an attempt to change his fate. And I kind of like that. Up until that point, Ren was very closed off, and any hints about himself were revealed to Shinji and Yui by accident, such as Shinji getting into a fight with him and accidentally breaking his necklace and finding the ring. Tezuka was the first one to be proactive with trying to get Ren to open up; Yui had always tried to respect Ren’s privacy and Shinji was very easily frustrated by Ren’s attitude and gave up a lot easier. I previously described Tezuka’s attempts to see Ren’s soul as taking a jackhammer to the walls Ren’s built around himself. And I stand by this metaphor; Tezuka does a little bit at a time, but in constant succession, and it’s aggressive enough to make Ren’s armor crumble. He ends up revealing more and more about himself when he doesn’t want to, suddenly exposed and afraid.
Now here’s where Tezuka leaves me feeling off. Everything I just described is more of what Shinji should be doing. And in fact, it’s what Shinji will do later on in the season, particularly after Tezuka’s death. Tezuka makes the cracks, and Shinji’s the one who helps Ren pry them open. Tezuka’s entire role in the series is to drive Shinji’s characterization. Now, I’m sure you’re wondering why I just said that after spending so much time describing how he affects Ren. Well, this is actually a big part of how he influences Shinji, not Ren. What Shinji does from then on is all the result of Tezuka’s work. Tezuka’s wish to change the Riders’ fates guided Shinji to actually try to stop the fighting by changing the Riders themselves. In short, Tezuka never really felt like a character of himself; rather, he was a vehicle for Shinji’s characterization. Or, if you’re a Decade fan, Raia has no story. He’s just meant to be an inspiration. This is why he had to die; inspirational characters cannot be allowed to live. Something has to continue to drive the main characters to continue on. It’s like a mentor—once his role is fulfilled, the only way he can continue to teach the main character is by dying and allowing them to continue on alone. In the special, Tezuka’s given a little more character. Rather than being a fortuneteller tied down by fate, he was Ren’s friend who was trying to stand by him and only began to realize that Ren was wrong. And the difference also shows with the acting. Hassei Takano was pretty low-key as Tezuka in the series, but he did considerably better in the special for the short time Tezuka was alive—though I’ll admit that part of it may simply be that he’d already played the role before that point and understood him better.
Tezuka did have promise, at least. Had Ren been the only main Rider, I think Tezuka would have made an excellent secondary Rider to him. We’re used to seeing the lighter primary Rider having a darker secondary (for example, W and Accel or Fourze and Meteor), but here was a chance to turn the formula on its head. Tezuka proved that he was good at breaking down Ren’s defenses and made him reveal more about himself, things that Ren himself didn’t know. But with Shinji around, he felt superfluous. Shinji ended up doing a better job at all of this simply because Ren respected him more—for one thing, Shinji at least could respect Ren’s privacy better. The best comparison I can think of for Shinji and Tezuka’s interaction as a primary and secondary Rider is to Eiji Hino and Akira Date in OOO, who both got along fine and were mostly on the same page in terms of personality—neither was a foil to the other. But even then, both Eiji and Date had partners who provided the necessary foil to their personalities: Ankh for Eiji and Goto for Date.
Raia might be the first pink Rider, and I can’t say I have too much to complain about in terms of the suit. As his Monster is a ray, there’s an undeniable ray motif to his suit: the grill on his helmet is designed to resemble a ray’s gill slits, and there’s actually a braid running down his head that looks like a ray’s tail—an element I like, since it makes the suit more distinctive. In terms of fighting, however, Raia is technically a pacifist. He’ll fight Monsters, but fighting other Riders is absolutely out, and the one time he went into battle against Knight, he purposely avoided lethal attacks. As such, his deck is relatively nonlethal. His Weapon Card is Swing Vent, which summons a whip patterned off Evildiver’s tail. Like Verde, he has the Weapon/State Card Copy Vent, but he uses it exclusively as a Weapon Card. He frequently uses it with his allies, so that he can team up with Ryuki with a double Strike Vent, for instance. His Final Vent, Hide Venom, is the only really lethal card in his deck, and even then, we only ever see it destroy Monsters, not Riders (as mentioned before, he holds back in his fights with other Riders; Knight took the attack once and noticed that Raia was holding back, since he was still alive). He rides on Evildiver’s back to charge into an enemy.
Now, yes, Tezuka was the original owner of the Survive Shippu card, which he gave to Ren because he was afraid of the temptation to use the power, even against Asakura, who had destroyed his friend’s life. Since then, we’ve gotten concept art of Raia Survive (along with Yuichi Saito as a Rider contracted to Guldthunder—the name isn’t easy to read, with what only shows as a B and either an L or an I, and it could be anything from “Blue” to “BLT”) and a limited release of a toy for him (the only one I’ve seen is sold out on Plamoya). Given that he never appeared in canon, I’m not going to bother analyzing him.
I’m sure there were quite a few people waiting for this one: everybody’s favorite sociopath, Takeshi Asakura/Kamen Rider Ouja. Most of the characters of Ryuki are not evil or unforgivable. There are two exceptions to this. The first is Sudo, who was crooked from the start. The second is this guy, who is just plain bad. I can easily diagnose him with antisocial personality disorder (from the DSM-IV, but the World Health Organization’s dissocial personality disorder in the ICD-10 also matches to a T), for which I have the notes leftover from my Abnormal Psychology course in college. There is a pervasive disregard and violation of the rights of others (check) and it has occurred since age fifteen (he was about thirteen when he set his house on fire and killed everybody, so check), and they can’t learn from their mistakes or deal with boredom (Asakura pretty much is a one-trick pony a lot of the time, and no way in hell do you want him “vexed”). Three out of seven additional criteria must be met:
- A failure to conform to social norms regarding lawful behavior: repeated behaviors that would be grounds for an arrest. This is an obvious yes.
- Deceitfulness with repeated lying and use of aliases, and conning others for profit or pleasure. This is debatable, but he did con Reiko into bringing his brother to him.
- Impulsivity and failure to plan ahead. This guy is impulsive as hell, which leads to…
- Irritability and aggressiveness with repeated assaults or fights. If you don’t think this qualifies, you were not watching the same character.
- Reckless disregard for the safety of themselves or others. Remember that time he kept attacking Ryuki and Knight even though they were all way past the time limit and risked dying? Or damn near any other time he just goes and tries to beat shit up and doesn’t care if he gets hurt in the process?
- Consistent irresponsibility with repeated failure to meet the demands of work behavior or financial responsibility. This is the first one where I can honestly say it doesn’t apply.
- Lack of remorse where they’ll rationalize away their responsibility or just not care. Emphasis necessary.
I have never seen any character so completely meet almost all of the criteria in this way. This is a guy who was purposely designed to be a sociopath, and Takashi Hagino plays him wonderfully. He turns on the crazy so well that it’s a shock when you see him in behind-the-scenes stuff, getting along with the other actors (apparently, he was sort of a “big brother” on set). Despite this, Asakura’s not “insane.” Around the time he first appeared, I made the distinction. Just because somebody has a mental or psychological disturbance listed in the DSM or ICD, it doesn’t make them “insane.” “Sanity” is a legal term, used to determine if someone can be held responsible for their actions. Asakura may be impulsive, but he’s repeatedly been shown to avoid fighting with others long enough to accomplish specific goals, whether it’s to trick Reiko into bringing him a victim, standing guard over a little girl to use her as Monster bait, or to hear out Kanzaki on important stuff like “You guys have to kill each other within the next three days.” So there’s some level of control—he’s not running around indiscriminately killing everyone he meets. And he clearly understands that what he’s doing is illegal, otherwise he wouldn’t bother to hide or lie. He just doesn’t give a shit. Because he first appeared in 2002, we didn’t have the perfect comparison that we do now: the Joker as portrayed by Heath Ledger in the 2008 movie The Dark Knight, who had been compared to a figure from Alfred’s past as such: “Some men aren’t looking for anything logical, like money. They can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.”
And burn the world Asakura did, from a young age. Nothing indicates that his family life was anything but normal. He had a younger brother, Akira, who loved and bugged the utter hell out of him. So one day, Asakura set the house on fire in an attempt to kill Akira. However, it backfired horribly; his parents were killed instead of Akira, and Asakura got a horrible burn on his shoulder that led Reiko to believe that he had tried to save his brother from the fire. Akira was adopted, his family name changed to Mihara, and Asakura assumed that he’d killed him. When Reiko told him otherwise, he tricked her into bringing Akira to him, where he had Venosnaker finish him off.
This alone is a good example of how utterly bugfuck crazy this guy is. He is motiveless malignity, violence incarnate. If he’s not inflicting harm on others, he’s inflicting it on himself to relieve boredom, which is mostly something he only did in prison. When we first meet him, he’s serving ten years for an unknown crime (probably murder or assault). This is the best sentence his lawyer, Kitaoka, could get for him, and he’s not happy that the previously unbeatable lawyer couldn’t get him off. This sets up a great story between the two Riders, who are equals in the eyes of the story: Asakura’s story requires Kitaoka, and over time, Kitaoka’s requires Asakura.
Asakura was brought into the Rider War because he would do exactly what Kanzaki wanted and thin out the ranks. He kills both Gai and Raia and steals their Mirror Monsters for himself. He’s also responsible for the deaths of Imperer and the second Zolda. If you include the special and movie, he also kills Scissors and the crime he was convicted of was the murder of Femme’s sister. So he’s got quite a kill count. And probably for the same reasons as Heath Ledger’s Joker (excellent performance, dangerous and unhinged character), he’s incredibly beloved—to the point that he was actually slated to die in Knight Survive’s first appearance, only to be spared because he was bringing in the viewers. He even got his own image song, “Spinnin’ Around”, only unlike the other image songs, there’s not a lot I can analyze. It just emphasizes how bugfuck nuts he is. Though I will admit the line about “drumbeats” worries me, given that I have watched Doctor Who and know what it means when someone constantly hears the sound of drums. It’s really hard to find anything redeemable in him, and that’s the whole point. This is what makes his appearance as an apparent decent guy in the epilogue so weird, but it was about giving everyone a happy ending anyway. His was just the weird one.
Ouja is the first purple Rider I can think of, and he establishes a trend within Kobayashi’s Rider series that purple Riders are the most dangerous: Den-O Gun Form was the playful but uncontrollable Ryutaros, and OOO PuToTyra was an absolute berserker whom Eiji had a hard time keeping under control because of the extremely dangerous purple Core Medals. And maybe it’s because I love the Disney movie Aladdin and its villain, Jafar, but I really like Ouja’s design. The cobra theme looks perfect—so perfect, in fact, that early art leaks for the movie form of Kamen Rider OOO, BraKaWani, showed him with an Ouja-style helmet. And the Visor being styled as a staff with a cobra head just screams Jafar to me. I won’t bother analyzing Blank Form from the movie because there’s no point in analyzing it—it was mostly just a bone thrown to fans, and Ryuki Blank Form is the only one so useless it’s funny—and like with Raia, I won’t analyze the S.I.C.-only Survive form, released as a toy and featured in the sidestory The World of If. While it looks cool, it never appeared in canon.
While Asakura is a berserker and fights as such as Ouja, his deck reveals a dangerously cunning mind—something we see when he steals other Contract Monsters. His primary Weapon Card is Sword Vent, which is patterned off a cobra fang cross-bred with a Spiral Saber. He also has the Attack Card Steal Vent, only otherwise owned by noted cheating bastard, Odin, which allows you to steal the weapon of a particular Rider. His primary Monster, Venosnaker, is a huge snake that I’m sure Samuel L. Jackson wouldn’t want to see on a plane anytime soon, and its signature attack is to spew acidic venom, something that can dissolve anything and almost blinded Ouja in an accidental attack. Venosnaker’s Final Vent is Veno Crash, where it spits more venom at a target while launching Ouja at them, where he makes a devastating scissor kick. But there’s also two more cards in his deck, and it’s where he particularly becomes a threat: additional contract cards, which he used on the masterless Metalgelas and Evildiver, binding them to him. This presumably gave him all of Gai’s and Raia’s cards, but we only see him use the contracts, Final Vents, and the Strike and Swing Vents. What they’re really there for is the final card, Unite Vent, which merges all three Monsters together to create the chimeric Genocider. Genocider’s Final Vent, Doomsday, is on the level of a Survive Final Vent, with 8000 Attack Points. Genocider opens up a cavity in its chest, sucking in the victim close to them while Ouja corkscrew-kicks them in. He’s a powerful Rider that perfectly complements the wonderfully deranged character, easily making him beloved enough to reappear as a summon and even as a last-resort almost-ally in Kamen Rider Decade.
Kamen Rider Zolda is a character bound in the lives of two men: Syuichi Kitaoka and Goro Yura, played by Ryohei (surname: Odai) and Tomohisa Yuge, respectively. Technically, Goro is support staff and I should include him there, but Kitaoka’s development winds up depending on him more and more, and Goro even becomes Zolda in the final episode, so I’m putting him here instead.
The two of them are probably the best example of character development through the course of the series. When we first meet Kitaoka, he’s on the run from agents from a corrupt company he’d defended, who learned that he was embezzling money from them. Which is never referred to again, and let’s just chalk it up to Toshiki Inoue not knowing how to write this character. He’s cocky, arrogant, and obsessed with his image. The man is a peacock. He enjoys the finer things in life and only looks out for number one. As a Rider, he’d prefer to let the others kill themselves off first before he comes in. As for Goro, our first impression of him is as Kitaoka’s dedicated and dangerous bodyguard, always with a threatening air about him.
But the two share a secret that betrays who they really are underneath it all and paves the way for their development. Kitaoka is suffering from an unspecified disease (presumably cancer) that is no longer curable. He is dying, and the only thing that can save his life is the Rider War. So he wishes for eternal life. Goro is bound to him as a servant because Kitaoka spent crucial time defending him in a petty assault trial, missing a diagnosis that would have caught his illness in time to treat it. Guilt is what initially ties Goro to Kitaoka, but over time, he becomes a loyal and trusted friend.
To discuss them separately for a moment, I’ll start with Goro. Very quickly, we learn that he’s much gentler than he appears to be. When a little girl comes to ask Kitaoka to defend her father in court, Kitaoka is a dick and kicks her out. As an apology for his master’s behavior, Goro gives her candy. She later repays him with a gift of paper cranes, and he becomes her protector throughout the arc, providing her with a voice in front of Shinji’s friends and especially in front of Kitaoka, who can’t help but feel a little betrayed by his faithful servant siding with the little girl. He does pull one major asshole moment soon after that, when he agrees to work with Kitaoka in a plan to emotionally destroy Shinji by faking his own death, but he sees what a mistake he made when Shinji drops to his knees and holds his hands, sobbing that he’s grateful Goro is alive. Goro can hardly bear to leave the other man at that point and makes sure that he offers a bit of comfort before rejoining his Sensei.
But from there, Goro gains more of a voice in front of Kitaoka and he becomes more and more willing to argue with him. He’s still a bit submissive to him, but in the way that a trusted friend might be, rather than a servant. This especially picks up when Asakura appears, and Goro worries greatly over Kitaoka’s safety. He repeatedly tries to talk Kitaoka out of fighting him and even goes to the length of getting him out of the house for a whole day to keep Asakura from finding him. On a few occasions, he even tries to settle the matter of Asakura for himself, but it never works out, and Kitaoka finally has to tell him that it’s not his job to kill Asakura, knowing that his friend shouldn’t have to sacrifice his gentleness in order to protect him.
As for Kitaoka, his journey takes place through the background of the entire series. He begins very self-centered, only looking out for himself. He tries to keep Shinji in jail, knowing the consequences of violating a contract with a Monster, so he’ll have one less Rider to worry about. He mocks Ren for being friends with him and even for fighting for the sake of a lover, arguing that it should be all about him. I think somewhere in there, I accidentally described Kuzco from The Emperor’s New Groove, but there you go. And when Shinji expresses his relief that Goro is alive, Ren is quick to tell a disgusted Kitaoka that Shinji’s a better man than the both of them.
By the end, we learn just how much this line has influenced Kitaoka’s development, and looking back, it makes perfect sense. Kitaoka had a lot more firepower and was easily able to overwhelm Shinji and Ren early on, but then the two heroes got caught up in dealing with other Riders, so they didn’t clash for a while. But then Asakura joined the battle and kidnapped Goro. Ren realized what happened and tried to convince Kitaoka to let him help save him, but Kitaoka wasn’t willing to form even a short-lived alliance with the other Rider. They fought and ended the battle in a draw, with Kitaoka shocked at how much Ren had improved since their last battle. Ren argued that Kitaoka might have gotten weaker, and this became a driving factor in his development. Kitaoka knew that his body was failing him, and the symptoms of his illness began to interfere greatly with his life. Without short-lived alliances with Shinji and Ren, he couldn’t stand up to other Riders.
This frustrated him, with him unable to determine whether it was his physical state or his emotional state that was making him so weak. He could compensate for his body’s failings by relying on ranged attacks, but he couldn’t make up for emotional failings. The enmity between him and Shinji was disappearing; the other Rider might have annoyed the hell out of him, but he didn’t hate him the way he once did. And though he didn’t get along with Ren either, neither one of them particularly held a grudge against the other, and Ren even ended up becoming his unwilling secret-keeper when he saved Kitaoka from Tiger only to learn about his illness.
Kitaoka struggles to try to fight for himself, only to be forced into alliances with the others, particularly against Asakura, who is too dangerous for one Rider to face alone. This grudge match against Asakura is a major portion of his character development, to the point that it would be impossible for Kitaoka to develop the way he did without Asakura there. He wonders for a little while if he should try to behave like Asakura in order to get an edge in the Rider War, but he quickly decides against it, disgusted with Asakura’s methods and view of the world. Eventually, it becomes less that Kitaoka is fighting in order to gain eternal life and more that he’s fighting to stop Asakura and the other crazies who would harm other people. In short, Kitaoka becomes a more heroic character.
Kitaoka’s wish is eternal life. Goro’s wish is for Kitaoka to be happy. Eventually, Kitaoka begins to fulfill Goro’s wish. As his illness becomes more and more pronounced, his relationship with Goro changes. Goro is Kitaoka’s caretaker, yes, but he’s much more of an equal—to the point that when Goro risks his life to save Kitaoka from Asakura, Kitaoka can’t bear to leave him in danger and risks his own life to get Asakura off of him and try to escape. When Goro checks out of the hospital afterward, it’s Kitaoka who drives him home, in a reversal of their usual roles. Kitaoka begins to realize, thanks to Goro, that he doesn’t need eternal life and that he’s no longer willing to fight in the Rider War. He decides to quit, to Goro’s immense relief, but it soon occurs to him that if he’s dying, he’s leaving behind Asakura as his legacy. For the sake of balancing his ledger, he decides to fight Asakura for the last time, no matter how it pains Goro for him to do so, knowing he will die this time. However, his illness claims his life before he can fight, and Goro carries out his last wish and fights Asakura. Perhaps because of his kind heart, Goro is unable to fight the way a Rider should and dies against Asakura, his last words a confused and yet completely lucid promise to Kitaoka to cook him something good when he comes home.
Kitaoka came out of the series with two image songs. His first, “Kienai Niji” (“Unfading Rainbow”), expresses his search for eternal life and his struggle with loneliness. He accepts that the world is a harsh and lonely place, but he finds himself trying to achieve more. Is eternity what he really needs? Taking that into account, I think it helps explain his attraction to Reiko, which I purposely left out of his analysis. His attraction to her didn’t contribute as much as expected to his development, though over time, it became clear he genuinely respected her as a woman and as a journalist—perhaps even came to love her. And I think he pursued her for two reasons. First was the clear shock that she did turn him down—after all, he’s the man who has everything (or so it seems). Why would anyone find him lacking? This is the same struggle he has with Shinji before he ever learns that the younger man is a Rider. And second, I think he pursued her so much because she turned him down. Rejection was safe. It meant he didn’t have to worry about somebody caring for him. Throughout the series, Kitaoka is subtly pushing people away, particularly Goro. For the most part, he insists that he can’t have friends if he’s going to be a Rider, since he believes that friendship is a weakness. And to some degree, he’s got a point—Shinji and Ren are both plagued with the knowledge that one day they’ll have to fight, and every time they come to blows, they’re hurting themselves more than each other because each knows he’s fighting his best friend. But Kitaoka even pushes away Goro, repeatedly suggesting that Goro can find a job elsewhere, and I think this is more a matter of his fear of dying. He seems to expect Goro to leave. He can’t fathom the idea that someone will be around to love and mourn him when he dies. So his wish of eternal life makes sense on another level: being immortal while everyone around him is mortal is a terribly lonely thing. When he begins to realize that he’s got a good life and people around who love him, then he lets go of that lonely wish.
His second image song is a duet with Goro, ”Dear Friend”. Sadly, right now, I can’t find a streaming version of the song to listen to, so I can only work off of what I’m reading in the translation, which only gives half the story. This song seems to take place later in the series from “Kienai Niji,” with Kitaoka beginning to give up on his quest for eternity. He realizes he has everything he truly wants right here and now, with a friend he can’t bring himself to thank and could never thank enough. And at the same time, Goro realizes more and more of who he really is and can’t bring himself to ever say goodbye to his friend, only promising to see him again always.
Zolda is a bright green Rider supposedly based off a bull like his Contract Monster, Magnugiga, but he’s much more machine-like than that. Don’t worry; we’ll get another green-bull Rider down the line with Zeronos in Den-O. While Goro may be a good hand-to-hand fighter, Kitaoka’s illness means that he doesn’t have the stamina to engage in close-range combat for very long, and he sucks at it anyway. So Zolda is mostly a ranged fighter only. All of his cards are Weapon Cards. There is a single close-range Strike Vent, which summons Giga Horn (which I assume is a wrist-mounted weapon), but it never shows up in the series. Still, it’s included in the Advent Card Archives, so I’ll mention it. His Guard Vent, Giga Armor, is a pretty effective shield. Apparently, a second, unseen Guard Vent was included in a previous card release, but it’s not in the Archives, so I won’t count it toward canon cards. But he’s a gun guy, as seen with his Visor being a gun. He’s got two Shoot Vents. The first, with 2000 Attack Points, is Giga Launcher, a giant of a bazooka. That he loves to hold just below the belt. As you can see, I’m extremely mature. And missing the image I was originally going to link to. His second Shoot Vent, Giga Cannon, is a pair of cannons on his shoulders that blast off lasers for 3000 AP. His Final Vent is End of the World, where he sticks his Visor up Magnugiga’s butt (or in his back—the angle is hard to tell) and launches everything. Unsurprisingly, with 7000 AP, this is just between Ryuki’s Final Vent and Knight Survive’s. Too bad that it so rarely works.
Finally, we come to probably the weakest character in the series but a very memorable one all the same. Kamen Rider Odin.
That cheating bastard.
To be fair, I probably should be discussing him alongside Kanzaki, but I want to try and discuss him separate from his master for a moment. Moreso than any of the other Riders here, Odin has no story. He is nobody. In fact, he’s three nobodies. Supplemental information reveals that the first Odin was a down-on-his luck homeless guy that Kanzaki approached with a deck, but to be honest? We don’t need to know. None of the other Odins have identities even revealed in supplemental info. It’s what makes him creepy. He could be anyone. And he is no one.
The Odins are voiced by Tsuyoshi Koyama, who provides the voice of the Visors in the series (except for the Alternatives’ Slash Visors, as said before), which adds to the creepy factor. He’s inhuman. And that’s the whole point.
Odin was created to win. He breaks all the rules of the Advent Card system—summoning weapons without scanning cards, being frickin’ overpowered even compared to the Survive forms, and being able to reverse time whenever the hell Kanzaki feels like it. The power is so much that it overwrites the user’s personality, programming them as Kanzaki’s puppet. So why didn’t Kanzaki use it himself and leave out that reprogramming bit? Well, you need a physical body in order to use the decks, and Kanzaki sacrificed his, so Odin acts as his proxy. If you’re a fan of OOO, he kind of feels like a prototype for the purple Core Medals; Odin wants nothing—he has no desire of his own. He only does what Kanzaki wants.
He is the thirteenth Rider, the one that the last surviving Rider must face at the end of the Rider War. But Odin would defeat that Rider in order to gain the new life for Yui. Things, of course, don’t go as planned thanks to Ren Akiyama, who defeats all but one of them. Ren demands to fight the first Odin way ahead of schedule, with both Odin and Kanzaki warning him he’s not ready, and despite getting his ass thoroughly kicked, Ren kills Odin in self-defense—only because Odin let his guard down. This is a running thing, apparently, because Ren is able to kill the second Odin when he lets his guard down too; Yui screams and catches Odin’s attention long enough for Ryuki to hold him down while Knight attacks. The third one, for the sake of the Odins’ dignity, is the only one Ren doesn’t personally kill. He dies because Kanzaki forfeits the Rider War, apparently psychically killing him. Ren wins anyway, even if by default. That’s kind of a crappy record against the guy.
Odin has a beautiful design, based off a golden phoenix. The grill motif is kept by having lenses on each of the feather-like designs on his helmet. His Visor is a staff topped with a phoenix with its wings folded. Hell, even his belt is gold, showing just how different and more powerful he is. This guy set the standard for phoenix-based and birdlike characters in the franchise. We expect them to have some kind of design motif similar to his. His body language was kept for the loopy swan Imagin Sieg in Den-O, and you can bet that when I see the Phoenix Phantom in Wizard, I’m judging him based on Odin.
Odin has a Survive card in canon—one never seen in the series, so it’s unknown if he’s in Survive mode or not. S.I.C. did release their interpretation of Odin Survive, and quite honestly, it looks like what would happen if Sephiroth became a Kamen Rider. But his trump card is Time Vent—which I guess I’d classify as an Attack Card. This turns back time, apparently to any time he cares to, but we see the series restart from episode one. Note that Kanzaki apparently has the ability to do this without the Time Vent card, given the finale and the movie, but I guess the card is to be used in case Kanzaki isn’t in the right mind to do it himself. Or the power relies on Kanzaki. I don’t know. Wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey.
In addition to Time Vent, he has the Weapon Card Sword Vent, which summons either one or two swords, the Gold Sabers, with an Attack Point count of 4000—putting him on par with the best sword-user in the series, Knight Survive. Guard Vent conjures the Gold Shield, with 4000 Attack Points. It’s clear that he was created to fight Survives. Only Shinji and Ren were worthy to battle him, but throughout the story, it seems more and more evident that it was Ren’s destiny to fight him. His Attack Card is Steal Vent, which allows him to take the weapon of any Rider he’s fighting. This is, of course, trouble if you’re a melee fighter like Knight, who depends on his sword. It also knocks out defense really damn well. His Final Vent, Eternal Chaos, has an overwhelming Attack Point count of 10,000. As a reference, Ryuki Survive’s Final Vent is only 9000. Insert Dragonball Z meme here. We never see it all the way through, since the only time it’s used, we cut to Knight Survive charging into it and then to Kanzaki’s emotional crisis. What we do know is that his Contract Monster, Goldphoenix, comes behind him as he levitates, and presumably Goldphoenix attaches to him as wings like Darkwing does to Knight. I don’t know if Dragon Knight expanded on this attack, but Climax Heroes shows that he just proceeds to fly into his victim headfirst with gold flames around him. Given that it’s Odin, we know that it’s devastating, and Knight is barely left standing out of sheer willpower alone.
But while each character has their own story, the story of Ryuki itself is revealed by an unlikely group. Next time, we explore the plot and the support staff of the main characters.
Odin's Final Vent
Date: 2014-04-24 07:54 pm (UTC)So, having been stuck watching Dragon Knight for a while now (I agreed to watch it for a friend who I've been showing Toku to, he'd seen it before we met and I introduced him to the original Kamen Rider series.) Overall, it's... not terrible. There's enough interesting stuff in it I haven't stopped watching altogether, even if it makes me annoy said friend constantly picking it apart. :p
(DRAGON KNIGHT SPOILERS, if you care follow, describing not!Odin's final vent in it.)
Anyway, I finally got to where Wrath (Dragon Knight!Odin)'s Final Vent shows up, and it's... basically as described, only we see it start up, Dragon Knight tries to interrupt it with his own Final Vent Knight vs. Scissors-style, Wrath just teleports out of the way and starts it up again at his target ... flying straight at him on the ground at a 45 degree angle and smashing into it. It looks kinda goofy. Especially since he somehow manages to vent himself with it in addition to the target he hits. Kinda failtastic.