Kamen Rider Impressions Part 16: Kamen Rider Build and Kamen Rider Zi-O

Kamen Rider Build (2017-2018) Episodes 1 and 2 “The Ones Who Were the Best Match” and “The Innocent Runaway”

Well, well! While retaining many farcical and silly elements, Build feels like a return to a starker sense of danger and drama akin to Kuuga or Agito or even the original. The ideas prickling to the surface of this narrative really stoked me up. This time we get a secret civilization discovered on Mars (which seems like more of an Ultraman trope), and a Pandora’s box which creates massive walls across Japan and splits the country into three warring countries striving for superiority. In the midst of this, our hero Sento Kiryu appears—another amnesiac, this time dwelling in a secret Rider base underneath a café, and assisted by a sleepy chemical genius girl who cooks up powerful brews made from defeated monsters called Smashes; the liquid then enables Kiryu’s alternate Rider forms. When Kiryu hunts down an escaped ex-boxer jailed for murder who pleads innocence—and Kiryu ends up helping him, and so is tagged by the military police as an accomplice to murder. Both Kiryu and the accused have memories of a dangerous mad scientist complex where they were experimented upon, so Kiryu hopes the newcomer can help him regain his memories—but things get really hairy when the boxer’s girlfriend gets changed into a Smash, and a bat-themed villain appears and mops the floor with Build.

As with so many other Rider shows, I really like the spread of fresh ideas in this show—and the urgent sense of intrigue and mystery. Yes, the drama feels a bit overdone, but it also burbles up emotionally, and I could totally understand fans catching tears from the second episode. The humor can overwhelm the serious bits a little, but the at turns antagonistic and friendly relationship between Kiryu and the boxer hits with dramatic satisfaction. I’m a little tired of amnesiac heroes, since they have turned up several times already at this point, but Kiryu with his physics-genius background and Wolverine-esque creepy memories is pretty interesting. The new Kamen Rider design feels like a further iteration on Kamen Rider W, as he combines power liquids to create the best battle combinations—generally one liquid with an animal strength and another with a tech base, such as the standard Rabbit Tank form. The two forms combine in diagonal slashes across Build’s body, too, rather than the straight up bisection of W. Throw in military robot soldiers (perhaps borrowed from Shin Kamen Rider: Prologue) which can climb on each other and form bigger agglomerate mechs (perhaps inspired by the Indian sci-fi comedy Robot and its sequel), and we get some compelling Rider storytelling and hijinx.

Kamen Rider Zi-O (2018-2019) episode 1 “Kingdom 2068”

Zi-O is a kind of new version or spiritual successor to Decade, meaning it takes the last set of Rider shows, and smashes them together, opening again with a massive war sequence and a new Rider who possesses the ability to destroy… well, everyone. The grabber of the story is that our hero this time, teenage weirdo Sougo Tokiwa, is destined to become a demon king in the future and take over the world. In order to stop that from happening, a certain Kamen Rider Geiz also comes from the future to attack and kill him and thus prevent his reign, and a girl named Tsukuyomi tries to save him from Geiz while simultaneously attempting to dissuade him from his dire destiny. Tokiwa, however, has felt he was meant to become a king ever since he was a kid, and when he is given the opportunity to use a compass-like device to change into Kamen Rider Zi-O, he decides to take the chance and pursue a future as a righteous king instead of his supposed destiny of evil. There is also some kind of monster stuff going on, and a dude is turned into a warped version of Kamen Rider Build (he steals powers from normal people this time instead of monster essences), which I am sure will come into play later.

The characters bounce all over time, kind of like Kamen Rider Den-O, but this time zapping to dinosaur time, to 1600s Japan, and to 2017 and an encounter with the Kamen Rider Build crew (meaning that they exist on the same timeline and same universe, complete with the alien walls and three warring nations?). With Tsukuyomi and Geiz, we get big mech battles, giving added scale and perhaps a touch of Zord-flavoring borrowed from the Sentai universe… and when Tsukuyomi takes Tokiwa to dinosaur time, we even get a mech vs. rex sequence. I thought the rex looked pretty good—basically a Jurassic Park knock off that strikes a sharp-looking pose until it starts moving. Tokiwa’s Rider form looks styling, too—he is made to look like a big silver wristwatch, with his face as the face of the watch, the hands stretching out like prickly ornaments on the helmet. While Zi-O isn’t as immediately competent at combat as Build was in the previous show (since Build had had time to learn the ins and outs of Rider life before the story began), Zi-O still exhibits power and impact, and right at the end of episode one is facing off with Kamen Rider Geiz who has a similar power set. I didn’t get a really good feel for Zi-O’s abilities just from the first episode, but I like the premise, and I would be curious to see more, even if the story doesn’t quite grab me as hard as Build or Kuuga did.