Kamen Rider Revice E30-31 Review: Nonsensical Football Backstory

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Kamen Rider Revice, Episodes 30-31:

Episode 30: Seiyu, Say Me! The Aftermath of Youth!

Yeah, I'm not the fondest of this two-parter. It's kind of a bit of a filler as we go through the whole 'Gifu is rising, the apocalypse is coming' arc, but it's kind of... just messy. I get the meta-joke that we're getting Kimura Subaru, the voice actor that voices Vice, as an actual character in the show. I love that they treat him as an exaggerated superstar even in-univerese. I get that, and I appreciate that. But the actual story that spins out from it is... it kind of needs work, honestly, and I felt like it was put together rather slapdashedly. 

...but then the way that our heroes encounter noted voice actor Kimura Subaru is that... he's Ikki's old football coach? What? And then we get a plotline with Ikki's emo old friend Koji, who's pissed towards Ikki about some incident that Ikki apparently forgot all about.

Then we go jump into voice-acting, where Revi and Vice have some fun in a talk show, while Koji is also pursuing voice acting. As Koji continues to berate Ikki while refusing to tell him what he's pissed off about, a Rafflesia Deadman attacks, and ends up being far more powerful than Ikki anticipated because of Gifu's slow awakening. We get the return of some older forms like Mantis and Mammoth, but the Deadman escapes while Ikki and Vice gets gassed with the creature's spores.

Also, kind of low-key while everything is going on, but Sakura finally gets her Weekend uniform. Okay, sure. Papa Karizaki gives us some background on Director Akaishi, with the most important fact here being that he apparently never aged since his NOAH days, and they speculate that he's a Gifu descendant. Daiji, independently, tries to investigate Akaishi, but George and Akemi tell him to slow down, and try to do things his way. A neat little moment for sure!

Ikki speculates that red herring Koji might be the Deadman contractor, since the Rafflesia Deadman was attacking him, but Subaru kind of remains oblique about their shared backstory... and hey, turns out Ikki himself flashes back to how he and Koji used to make some sort of promise over football. Ikki then thinks he's fighting that lawyer Deadman after Subaru's talk about ego triggers something in him, but he's really just rampaging in Happy Spa while hallucinating, seemingly caught in a time-loop. 

Episode 31: Illusory Guidance, Dream Afterwards

A good chunk of this episode is just spent on Ikki's backstory with Koji and... it's not a bad story on paper. It's just stretched over two episodes when it could've been easily told in a single one. Koji himself is a pretty flat character, too, and the twist that Subaru is the one that has been creating the Deadmans to get his underclassmen to talk to each other is kind of stupid and only really works for the shock factor that the guest star cameo is a villain. I dunno. Ikki injured Koji in a practice match, causing him to have to give up his dream of soccer... but then Ikki's own memory problems caused him to forget that mistake? Honestly, I'm not at all invested with this storyline at all -- we might've gone somewhere if Ikki actually did make hollow promises to help everyone and didn't realize the impact of a half-fulfilled promise or something, but nope, just... memory loss, I guess. Sure, whatever. Ikki and Koji make up in their little mental world and it's pretty unsatisfying. 

Meanwhile, Aguilera burns her pretty red dress, and she's clearly trying to look for her path in life, setting her up for the next two-parter. We get Hikaru pulling out a real-ass gun on Aguilera and Aguilera notes -- with a good point -- that they're both reduced into Sakura's stalkers.

The Rafflesia Deadman bullies poor Lovekov, gets Sakura to hallucinate, and even tanks Holy Wing Live, while Ikki goes through his flashback-vision. Subaru owns up to his role and acts like it's some sort of huge wise thing for him to do, while giving up his audition role to Koji? Again, the interplay between voice-acting and soccer feels kind of messy, I do like the little juxtaposition of Generic Anime Power-Up Nakama Speech to Ikki arriving at the scene and Thunder Gale-ing the monster, but otherwise... eh. Kind of a messy two-parter, honestly. 

We also get the honestly rather confusing bombshell that Vice's memory-loss contract also applies to.... the entire world? What? In Den-O it kind of made sense because we were dealing with time travel and paradoxes and memories and shit, but here it's kind of weird that we went from "I blocked your traumatic memories as a child" to "the whole world might forget about you and you'll disappear from photographs", y'know?

Random Notes:

• Lovekov's voice actor also makes a brief cameo in some of the voice-recording booths, as does Horikawa "Vegeta" Ryo, who doesn't actually have any involvement with Kamen Rider at all. Presumably he was just hanging around and they asked him for a cameo or something?
• While all of this is going on, Vail has apparently been able to manifest in a spectral, almost Vice-esque form when talking to Gifu and Akaishi. 
• There's a fun comedic moment between George and Akemi with coffee. 
• I get that Tamaki is kind of a more comedic character now, but really? He spent time running around with that sombrero and turning into a wolf monster, and he's complaining about being hit? 
• ...poor Lovekov, you don't deserve to be abused like you were this episode. 
• George isn't going to transform into Demons as much, huh, based on his expression when he got briefly tempted to put on the belt. I guess he would be suffering from the same side-effects Hiromi did, and he can't do it all that often. 
• There's a brief scene of Dr. Akemi seeing Director Akaishi talking to an invisible Vail. That's another neat setup for next episode.