Obligatory Kamen Rider Os first impressions

And so it begins. Watched episode 1 raw, so obviously I will have missed things. :D

The first episode kind of already confirms the impression I got from the press releases and character descriptions: that many elements of Os are very obvious nods in the direction of past Riders. To be fair, Kamen Rider is a franchise that relies on a specific, limited set of tropes; but what I’m talking about isn’t that exactly. A trope is an archtype basically, something honed down to its basic elements; what I’m talking about is the specific ways in which those archtypes are explored. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, particularly if one liked what is referenced, and it’s all revisited in a way that revamps the ideas.

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Kamen Rider Os

So they’ve done the press conference announcing the next Kamen Rider series, in this case OOO or Ozu (yes, like Faiz).

I kind of bailed early on in Double due to lack of interest and just not really getting into the story at the time, and I never did get caught up, but now I’m… let’s say cautiously excited for the new installment. The main reason is that the main writer is Kobayashi Yasuko, who is responsible for Ryuki (my favorite Rider series), Den-O, Shinkenger (which I love), and Timeranger (which I haven’t seen but have heard great things about).

I’m not crazy about the suit design, but it looks better than the initial magazine scans led us to believe, so we’ll see.

And obviously, the cast was announced, the characters introduced, etc, and here I’m intrigued by a couple of things. Read more “Kamen Rider Os”