Kamen Rider Zero-One E01 Review: A Jump To The Sky Turns Into A Rider Kick

Kamen Rider 01, Episode 01: I am the President and a Kamen Rider 

So with a new age in the Japanese monarchy, the Reiwa era, the long-running Kamen Rider series have sort of done a bit of a stylistic retooling with their newest show, Kamen Rider Zero-One. And for a series that has spent the last two decades getting reboots annually, it honestly is a bit hard to treat this to be as monumentous an occasion as the original Kamen Rider series or as the one that brought the franchise back from obscurity, Kamen Rider Kuuga. Still, it is a new series, and one that I'll reviewing either weekly or bi-weekly, depending on how I feel about the individual episodes.

As a side-note, while fans outside of Japan have had to contend on watching most Kamen Rider stuff by less-than-legal means, Kamen Rider Zero-One is actually uploading their episodes on their official Youtube channel. Sans subtitles, for sure, but it's neat that we might actually slowly going into a new era where even international fans can enjoy Kamen Rider through legal means.

And Zero One's first episode is... it's okay? The production values are great, and as a pilot episode, it did a pretty great job at selling how cool the main hero (and the toys, buy the toys) is, and to set up what's basically the main premise of the show. And with some 30+ shows to be compared to, it's easy to bring up numerous other shows and to draw comparisons from them. And, well, at least for now, we're leaning deep into a more sci-fi themed show. In the world of Zero One, the world's full with very humanoid robots called the Humagear, and a particular corporation, Hiden Intelligence, is the massive overlord that produces the Humagear. We learn most of this by way of a quick information dump that make up the first shots of the episode, before cutting away to reveal that the old president of Hiden Intelligence, Korenosuke, has recently passed away.

And then we jump-cut to his grandson, Aruto, our protagonist, and... and he's introduced as kind of a screamy, over-excited young man, in the same vein of some of our more recent protagonists (Sougo, Emu and Takeru come to mind). And... I dunno, I know a huge portion of the fanbase are out for blood for anyone that isn't super-duper serious and competent, and Arata is... well, he's basically a failed comedian. Apparently his whole shtick is that he makes particularly bad puns. My Japanese isn't good enough to see if his puns are actually dad-joke-level of badness, but the response he gets leads to him basically being fired, and most of his whole "please I just want to be a stand-up pun comedian" phase is played up for laughs.

And as much as this isn't the most interesting thing in the world, at least we're getting a solid showcase of what Aruto is all about, which... it's neat? He's quickly whisked up by robo-secretary Izu and basically handed the will of his grandfather, who predicts that a Humagear robo-apocalypse is incoming, and has left behind the company to the very inexperienced Aruto. And that's the whole gist of Zero One's 'civilian' plot, that he's a young man who is forced into the position of a CEO of a huge company. Aruto rejects this immediately, which I thought is neatly realistic considering what we learn of the dude, but of course this isn't going to stand.

Other than the brief bits of scene in the boardroom where we're briefly introduced to the typical obstructive-bureaucrat-asshole-egomaniac Fukuzoe Jun, we mostly just follow Aruto as he just wanders around, and we learn why he's so obsessed with making people laugh. His dad -- or at least a Humagear modeled after his dad -- was killed in the midst of young Aruto trying to make the robot laugh, and that apparently left such a huge impression on Aruto that he has made it his huge thing. And I guess like Fourze wanting to befriend everyone or Wizard wanting to protect people's hope, this is going to be Zero-One's "thing". Protecting smiles.

Which is something he ends up being forced to do, because a group of terrorist dressed in wacky post-apocalyptic purple cloaks and hoodies and living out of some bizarre city with robot corpses straight out of Fallout. These terrorists are called MetsubouJinrai.net, but other than vague proclamations of evilness, Jin and Horobi don't really do a whole ton but skulk around in the background, turning the Humagear into evil Magear (or Magia, depending on your preferred localization). And the one subjected to this is poor, poor Abdominal Collapser Taro. Abs-Collapser was sort of introduced as a one-off gag, where his simple "my abs are exploding!" gag ends up bringing in a full crowd in contrast to Aruto's, and despite being a musclebound robot, we are treated to scenes of Taro just smiling to himself and being happy that his whole purpose is to bring people joy. (And, y'know, to be a bit of a fanservice parental bonus to the moms watching at home, probably) So the scene where Jin ends up corrupting him with a belt and transforms him into a red-eyed monster that rampages, transforms into a mantis monster, and even infects other Humagears and turning them into creepy battle-ready Magias... We don't see any on-screen deaths, but the dialogue that the crazed Taro yells about makes it clear that he wants to murder every human.

And Aruto charges in to attack the monsters at the sight of the amusement park crumbling and people being put in danger. Izu shows up with the Zero-One Driver and basically goes "hey, do you want to protect these smiles? Transform!" while also cheekily noting that only the president of Hiden Intelligence can use the driver. We're treated to an interesting bit where apparently Aruto's drawn into some sort of cyber-space so that he can go through a 'tutorial mode', before finally properly doing his badass Henshin sequence. Which involves a giant CGI robot grasshopper buddy jumping around and spraying debris everywhere before transforming into the yellow armour pieces that wrap around Zero-One's body.

And as far as Zero-One's debut fight goes... it's decent? It's nothing super-duper unique, and there is certainly a couple of awesome shots. Zero One raising his hands up in a kung fu state while the bad guy's energy blasts create explosions behind him, as well as the rider kick are both pretty nice shots. Sure, the scene where Zero One jumps around the cars and through the bus has some wonky CGI, but that's part the course for Kamen Rider at this point. He gives this impassioned speech about protecting smiles and laughter and whatnot, and destroys the monster.

And he gets bonked in the head when Izu throws the briefcase weapon at him. That's adorable. Also adorable is when he mis-judges his landing, because while the rider kick (or well, "Rising Impact") is pretty damn cool, he ends up tripping while landing and crashing onto a building.

While all of this is going on, the side-cast do things. Izu's mostly observing and supporting and being adorable, while Jin (who reminds people of Parad from Ex-Aid for good reason) is... he's just jumping around like a maniac, before leading to one of the most tweeted-about shots in the scene where he just casually grabs one of the rampaging Magia and shoots it point-blank in the head while giggling. We get to see A.I.M.S., which the production doesn't make secret are going to be the secondary riders of the show. We really don't see much of them, though, just a bit of Isamu being a dick to Yua, and a brief showcase of the Vulcan transformation gun device, but ultimately they're just introducing them and giving the bare basics of their personality. Not a biggest fan that Yua is kind of just portrayed as being slightly incompetent and doesn't really do much compared to the competent-but-kind-of-a-dick Isamu.

Ultimately, the episode ends with basically hammering down the main concept of the series. Aruto's now tied to the presidential CEO position, and is going to face both literal monsters and company politics. MetsuboJinrai.net is all mysterious with some shots of destroyed robot parts and ruined cities and whatnot and we're still not clear what their plan is, as most Rider villains are in the first episode. And... well, a good chunk of this episode is mostly just to show off the world and its unique history, as well as the main personality and goals of Aruto. Colour me interested for the first part, but I'm not sure if I'm buying all that much into Aruto as a character. The motivations of protecting smiles and being able to give smiles if he's a superhero is neat if a bit cheesy (though Rider is always kinda cheesy), but there were definitely moments of super-comedic exaggeration in Aruto's acting that I'm not sure. It's something that really feels like it could grate over time. The action scenes are very crisp, though, and I do like that we're going back into mixing some slightly-darker themes (Jin executing the dude, but also the fact that Abs-Collapser is forcibly mind-raped and turned into something he doesn't want to, and had to be put down by the hero). I'm looking forward to see some of these themes explored in the future for sure!

Overall, a pretty neat pilot episode. We'll see how the rest of the series fares!

Random Notes:

• "JUMP! Authorize. Prog! RISE! Jump up and rise! RISING HOPPER! A jump to the sky turns into a rider kick." The Reiwa era is continuing with the large amount of words spoken prior to a transformation, although I'm pretty sure we're going to cut down on this. I do really love that text-to-speech reading of that final, grammatically-questionable sentence. The robotic tone reading that sentence right after the previous energetic yelling is just so funny. 
• MetsubouJinrai.net translates into "ThunderclapOfDestruction.net", which is probably intended to sound hilariously edgy. 
• The Gimmick Watch:

• Hiden Risephone: We have a lot of gimmicks here, and I'll do my best to at least cover them when we get to them. We get to see the Risephone multiple times, and it's meant to be a smartphone, but like the Build Phone, it's way too hilariously bulky and obviously a chunky, brickish toy instead of an actual smartphone. 
• Zero One Driver: It's the driver. Is has a text-to-speech robot voice. The belt's neat and sleek, especially after the chunky ones we've been getting since... oh, Fourze or something.
• Progrise Key: It's the transformation gimmicks, and... I think it's meant to look like weird SD cards? I'm not sure. They can flick in and out, and so far, we've only seen Zero-One's Rising Hopper, and the Berotha Magia's.
• Zero-One's weapon of choice is the Attache Calibur, which yells out "BLADE RISE". It also whacks Aruto right in his fool grasshopper face. It's a suitcase that transforms into a big-ass scalpel.
• Rising Hopper's finisher and rider kick is "Rising Impact". It comes with a very anime-esque set of katakanas that pop up on-screen. 
• The mantis monster is the "Berotha Magia". Like Kabuto, all the monsters draw names from the Latin names of creatures, it seems! Berotha drwas its name from the Berothidae, a family of lacewings, and is apparently specifically named for the extinct insect Kujiberotha teruyukii.
• The Magia's belts seem to look like heavily-modified Ryuki belts, as far as I can tell.
• That stage that Aruto and muscle-robotman performs in is actually a stage used in real life for Kamen Rider stage shows, which is a neat little trivia. 
• I did sort of shrug the CGI off, but that Ultron-esque robot swarm vision with the evil robots all crawling around like spiders is pretty damn cool. 
• How much of the robots-going-rogue stuff did they realize was going to be incorporated into Zero-One when they had the Kikai arc in Zi-O? Especially since both Kikai and Zero One uses a satellite in their transformations...
• In addition to the shot of Jin's maniacal execution, another thing that was made memetic was that Aruto was wearing a shirt that reads "The other day I bought a kelp at a convenience store, mistaking it for corned beef." in english.