KR Fourze: Transformer ja nai yo ... mobile suits da....
After watching one episode and trying in vain to get over the Rocket Ship suit, I'm not quite sure what to make of the show yet. Let's start with the things I'm approving of.
1. It's been ages since we had an eager Kamen Rider. Lately, all the Kamen Riders pick up that mantle with some degree of reluctance or even outright dislike. Our hero here just grabs that belt and says, "This'll make me fight better? Mine!" and goes forward button mashing. I like that. It's nice to have a hero who's upbeat and nice. KR needs more of those.
2. The high school setting, while borrowing from every single high school drama ever, actually could be entertaining. If they keep it as tongue in cheek as I hope they intended the first episode to be, I see lots of room to lovingly mock 2 genres at once.
3. I like the old school opener. It's kind of a given seeing as this is the 40th anniversary, but it's fun anyway. Honestly the opening credits really made me feel super sentai. They were using all the Zyuranger and Dekaranger fonts..
4. Some sand throwing fan service is always appreciated.
5. It is way too early to make a call on our token girl, but I did enjoy that she showed the pose to our hero with extraordinary flare. The pose is part of the design. You gotta do it. Otaku know these things. Speaking of otaku, I didn't know that the word "Geek" had made it to Japan as slang. Anybody still in the country hear kids using this?
So yeah, I had fun watching the first episode, which is not to say I don't foresee some really silly things happening.
1. Transformers. Guys, that's Bumblebee. I don't care what you want to call it, it's Bumblebee. Also your little info hamburger robot is WALL-E. Borrowing designs, are we?
2. The suit/weapon designs in general are just not good. They look goony and maybe a little too old school on the weapons. Apparently, our little genius boy subscribes to the ACME school of weapon design.
3. They really failed to establish the monsters role in the world. When the MoD landed, people seemed a bit surprised and scared, but no more so than if say, a black bear had shown up. Okay, this is dangerous and I don't want to be around it, so I'm just going to stop what I'm doing and call animal control. I was thinking this was more in a Gokai style universe where we do just deal with monsters. However, the hero clearly has no idea what it is and we've got this secret WhiteBase which has been predicting these things would come... we either need a better reasoning for the crowd's reactions or we need much better writing and acting there. Just saying, guys.
Episode one is really too early to call anything, but so far nothing offensive has happened and it has a fun throwback feel. We'll see where it goes from there.