Post by Yuri Petrovitch on Feb 1, 2014 12:51:43 GMT -5
Awaken the soul!
KAMEN RIDER AGITO
SYNOPSIS
Long ago, there was a battle between two godlike entities--The Overlords--one representing light, the other representing darkness (the latter of which created humankind) These beings couldn't decide who got to rule it and the humans on it, and so they fought, with the Overlord of Darkness ultimately destroying his brother. The Overlord of light had prepared for this, however, and fractured his power among the nascent human race, "seeiding" it within humankind. Gradually, they would awaken to their power and evolve into Agito and surpass their dominion. The Overlord of Darkness, determined that this wouldn't happen, ruthlessly hunted down all the human with the Agito seed and destroyed them.
Or so he thought.
Aboard a ship called the Akatsuki ("new dawn") the Overlord of Light appears to the passengers, blessing all aboard with power. Almost immediately one of the Lords--the agents of the Overlord of Darkness--is sent to attack the ship and slay all aboard. The Lord is fought to a stand still by a man named Tetsuya Sawaki, who awakens to the power of Agito. Sawaki is thrown overboard and recovered days later without his memory, clutching a letter addressed to "Shoichi Tsugami." This is assumed to be his name. Eventually he is taken in by a family called the Misugis and becomes their housekeeper and cook. Posessed of some sixth sense/compulsion to go fight and destroy the Lords whenever they attack, he uses the Alter Ring belt to transform into Kamen Rider Agito
A police officer named Hikawa rescues the Akatsuki, and with his bare rescue, his star is on the rise and he is soon seconded to Project G3, an attempt by the Metropolitan Police Force to create an effective defence against a threat like the Grongi attacks from two years ago (yes, Agito is an extremely indirect sequel to Kamen Rider Kuuga) Their efforts are stymied generally by internal friction within the department, but when the Lords begin their attack anew, a renewed effort to perfecting the G3 System begins.
Some time later, some beachcombers find a strange object washed up on
shore. The object is taken to a lab and studied, but unbeknownst to the
researchers, the puzzle is actually a machine designed to resurrect the
Overlord of Darkness.
Meanwhile, Ryo Ashihara, formerly a promising young swimmer, being to suffer crippling physical changes that threaten to kill him. Eventually it turns out these changes allow him to transform into a flawed version of Agito, Kamen Rider Gills.
For a right good while, this is how the series goes, because short of these four threads (Agito's continuing evolution, Gills trying to understand the the hell is happening to him, and the G3 unit trying to fight the Lords and stop people from within their department undermining them, and the Overlord wandering around and jibbering about metaphysics while the Lords murder random people) It's only after a fourth Rider, Kaoru Kino shows up, that things begin to coalesce for the final battle.
ANALYSIS
By people who are not me, Agito is considered one of the best Kamen Rider series in the history of the franchise.
I consider it to be "kinda like Kuuga, if Kuuga was four times as slow and 90% less interesting."
Most of what I described in the synopsis? The stuff with the puzzle and all of that? That maybe happens in the first ten episodes. The stuff with who the Overlords are and what the Lords are (they're not named as such in the show, nor is their connection to the Linto tribe from Kuuga explained--in fact, your most blatant crossover with Kuuga is that the G3's helmet design rougly mimics Kuuga's Mighty Form and they mention the Unknown Lifeform attack in the early episodes. That's pretty much it.) Then literally nothing of lasting importance (beyond Agito getting a few new forms, the G3 evolving into the G3-X, Gills dying and then returning to life a few times) happens for about twenty episodes until Kino shows up and turns into Another Agito (no, really, that's his official name) Then we have another ten or fifteen episodes of doling out the backstory on Agito and the Akatsuki but you don't really get the point of all of it until the very end of the show and . . .ghhhaahhh.
If I have to read pages full of ancillary material to understand all the stuff you COULD have explained during the run of the show and chose not to, your show fails for me. You don't get credit for things that are not in the show if they're not in the show. It's a rule. If, as Agito does, you have a show where 75% of all the wheel-spinning could have been solved by people just answering questions directly, well . . .
Kuuga, if you'll remember, didn't exactly have the most coherent plot and would often cut away from fights to focus on its supporting cast, which was fine, in that they had a pretty charismatic lead and you had a pretty well fleshed-out supporting cast. Agito has none of these. Shoichi is positioned as a "likeable doofus," but is more the latter than the former, Arashihara/Gills is brooding and is usually dead or otherwise disconnected from the main action, and after awhile the G3 stuff with the police department falls into a predictable formula of "we have to perfect the G3 system, G3 system kills one of the lords, Jerkass co-worker says something snotty or tries to get the G3 unit shut down" lather, rinse, repeat.
For all of that, it has some virtues. The action and the stunt-work is incredible. There's been a sizable budget bump since Kuuga. The suits looks sharper, the CGI a bit less naff, and the fights are hard-hitting and of a more physical style than you would see from latter Rider series. It's the very last of the Showa-esque punching and kicking style fights and with the next series, the focus moves more to gimmicks taking the lead which is . . .it's different, let's say.
But good fights can only take a show so far and really, I can't recommend Agito unless you want to complete the timeline of Kamen Rider series and see how we got from the Kuuga paradigm to the current Ryuki-inspired paradigm. There's very little good stuff here to recommend it so, it's really only for completists.
Thankfully, the next series after this, Ryuki, would really knock over the table as far as what a Kamen Rider series would be and sets the mold for them going forward, and we'll get to that one soon.
IN 2 WEEKS
I'm off entertaining next Saturday, so no review then, but join us the Saturday after for our first Showa rider (kinda) and our first review of the movies. Someone's been trying to create artificial life and naturally ended up creating monsters. In fourteen, it's Kamen Rider ZO!
