Kamen Rider Blade.
Now your power is at its peak
10,000 years ago, a group of immortal monsters known as the Undead faced off in an intense Battle Royale, each one representing a different species of life on Earth, to determine which species would become the dominant life on Earth. The Human Undead won, sealing all other Undead within playing cards, and thus was our civilization allowed to thrive. Now in the modern day the Undead have been released from their seals. The secret organization BOARD recruits Kenzaki Kazuma to fight as Kamen Rider Blade, fusing with the Category Ace of Spades Undead to use its power against the immortal monsters. However, it is not long before Sakuya Tachibana, who fuses with the Category Ace of Diamonds to become Kamen Rider Garren, betrays the organization. In the wake of that destruction only Kenzaki and Shiori Hirose emerge to continue the fight to defend humanity in the new Battle Royale.
To start off this review, I will talk about pacing, and how the first two episodes have some of the worst pacing ever. You have just so much stuff thrown at you in those episodes and next to no time to stop and process any of it, all this drama and character stuff going on and odds are going to be very good that you are not likely to care a whit about any of it, the writers are just so eager to get at what they see as the good stuff that they don’t take the time to set it up properly for the viewing audience. The pacing does gradually improve though as the show settles down and takes its time to set up and follow through on plot and character points, it just would have really helped if the show had done that from the start.
As regards the characters, the show is overall pretty strong with its main riders; Kenzaki himself is pretty bland, but in the latter half of the show it starts putting on lots and lots of pressure on him, which makes his resolve and determination that much more meaningful. Tachibana is very well done, he is a complicated character who suffers from set-backs and does the wrong thing believing it to be the right thing and so there’s a lot to chew over with him. Aikawa Hajime is another good character, a very distant sort who over time grows closer and closer with the rest of the cast, especially Kenzaki, and it’s a very believable and well thought out development. Then there’s Mutsuki Kamijo; there are a lot of good bits with him, but his overall development is sloppy and unrefined, pacing really needed to be tightened up with him.
As to the ladies, there are five principal recurring female characters in Blade; first is Shiori Hirose who is impeccably well done, she is very strong and intelligent and driven and her own character arc and resolution is all very good. Amane Kurihara is a young girl who is very strongly crushing on Hajime and is very pushy and strong-willed and so her connection with Hajime develops them both well. Sayako, a doctor and friend to Tachibana, is unfortunately killed off early in the show’s run to push Tachibana’s character arc along, but like Shiori she was a very strong-willed and active character, and she exercised her agency right until the end, which does help take off a little of the sting for me. Then there’s Nozomi, Mutsuki’s little girlfriend, and unfortunately she, like Mutsuki, is mishandled and not well developed. Fortunately, we end with the Tiger Undead, who ends up being a surprisingly nuanced and interesting character.
And speaking of, let’s talk about the Undead; while many of the Undead are bestial, more than a few are intelligent and even capable of taking on human form, displaying a wide variety of personalities, attitudes, approaches, and strategies, which keeps the action and story fresh from episode to episode. Another nice aspect about the Undead are the designs for them, each of them featuring heavy use of black bands and masks and other such things that really convey the idea of these things having been sealed for the past 10,000 years, resulting in a nice unifying aesthetic.
Having mentioned aesthetic, I’m going to talk a bit about the Rider suits; the rider suits each have two aspects to them, the species of the Undead that the rider is fusing with, and the Card Suit for that undead. This results in a design that is both simple and yet very distinct, setting them apart from other suits in the franchise at a glance. My favorite of the base suits is Kamen Rider Leangle, it has a very strong and regal build. The show itself has a nice aesthetic for me, but this is a purely subjective perception on my part that I don’t really have the language to explain, so you might well disagree with me and there’s nothing I can really do about that.
Now to finish things off with the story; suffice to say that the show did have issues with meandering and wonky pacing here and there, but once episode 31 hits the pacing tightens up considerably, plot points that had been dropped shortly after the start of the show are picked up again, new and interesting plot developments are brought up and given just the right amount of room to do what needs to be done, and the ending has that weight of inevitability that all good endings have. This is in fact illustrated beautifully by the Kamen Rider Blade movie, which posited an alternate ending for the series and was significantly worse for it; granted, a lot of that had to do with a lot of stupid choices that movie made that had nothing to do with the ending it was going for, but even stripped of that it was still quite inferior to what the Series had to offer.
So in the end, I think that Kamen Rider Blade is a very good show, but it does have some serious and real flaws that kept it from reaching its full potential.
10,000 years ago, a group of immortal monsters known as the Undead faced off in an intense Battle Royale, each one representing a different species of life on Earth, to determine which species would become the dominant life on Earth. The Human Undead won, sealing all other Undead within playing cards, and thus was our civilization allowed to thrive. Now in the modern day the Undead have been released from their seals. The secret organization BOARD recruits Kenzaki Kazuma to fight as Kamen Rider Blade, fusing with the Category Ace of Spades Undead to use its power against the immortal monsters. However, it is not long before Sakuya Tachibana, who fuses with the Category Ace of Diamonds to become Kamen Rider Garren, betrays the organization. In the wake of that destruction only Kenzaki and Shiori Hirose emerge to continue the fight to defend humanity in the new Battle Royale.
To start off this review, I will talk about pacing, and how the first two episodes have some of the worst pacing ever. You have just so much stuff thrown at you in those episodes and next to no time to stop and process any of it, all this drama and character stuff going on and odds are going to be very good that you are not likely to care a whit about any of it, the writers are just so eager to get at what they see as the good stuff that they don’t take the time to set it up properly for the viewing audience. The pacing does gradually improve though as the show settles down and takes its time to set up and follow through on plot and character points, it just would have really helped if the show had done that from the start.
As regards the characters, the show is overall pretty strong with its main riders; Kenzaki himself is pretty bland, but in the latter half of the show it starts putting on lots and lots of pressure on him, which makes his resolve and determination that much more meaningful. Tachibana is very well done, he is a complicated character who suffers from set-backs and does the wrong thing believing it to be the right thing and so there’s a lot to chew over with him. Aikawa Hajime is another good character, a very distant sort who over time grows closer and closer with the rest of the cast, especially Kenzaki, and it’s a very believable and well thought out development. Then there’s Mutsuki Kamijo; there are a lot of good bits with him, but his overall development is sloppy and unrefined, pacing really needed to be tightened up with him.
As to the ladies, there are five principal recurring female characters in Blade; first is Shiori Hirose who is impeccably well done, she is very strong and intelligent and driven and her own character arc and resolution is all very good. Amane Kurihara is a young girl who is very strongly crushing on Hajime and is very pushy and strong-willed and so her connection with Hajime develops them both well. Sayako, a doctor and friend to Tachibana, is unfortunately killed off early in the show’s run to push Tachibana’s character arc along, but like Shiori she was a very strong-willed and active character, and she exercised her agency right until the end, which does help take off a little of the sting for me. Then there’s Nozomi, Mutsuki’s little girlfriend, and unfortunately she, like Mutsuki, is mishandled and not well developed. Fortunately, we end with the Tiger Undead, who ends up being a surprisingly nuanced and interesting character.
And speaking of, let’s talk about the Undead; while many of the Undead are bestial, more than a few are intelligent and even capable of taking on human form, displaying a wide variety of personalities, attitudes, approaches, and strategies, which keeps the action and story fresh from episode to episode. Another nice aspect about the Undead are the designs for them, each of them featuring heavy use of black bands and masks and other such things that really convey the idea of these things having been sealed for the past 10,000 years, resulting in a nice unifying aesthetic.
Having mentioned aesthetic, I’m going to talk a bit about the Rider suits; the rider suits each have two aspects to them, the species of the Undead that the rider is fusing with, and the Card Suit for that undead. This results in a design that is both simple and yet very distinct, setting them apart from other suits in the franchise at a glance. My favorite of the base suits is Kamen Rider Leangle, it has a very strong and regal build. The show itself has a nice aesthetic for me, but this is a purely subjective perception on my part that I don’t really have the language to explain, so you might well disagree with me and there’s nothing I can really do about that.
Now to finish things off with the story; suffice to say that the show did have issues with meandering and wonky pacing here and there, but once episode 31 hits the pacing tightens up considerably, plot points that had been dropped shortly after the start of the show are picked up again, new and interesting plot developments are brought up and given just the right amount of room to do what needs to be done, and the ending has that weight of inevitability that all good endings have. This is in fact illustrated beautifully by the Kamen Rider Blade movie, which posited an alternate ending for the series and was significantly worse for it; granted, a lot of that had to do with a lot of stupid choices that movie made that had nothing to do with the ending it was going for, but even stripped of that it was still quite inferior to what the Series had to offer.
So in the end, I think that Kamen Rider Blade is a very good show, but it does have some serious and real flaws that kept it from reaching its full potential.