Kamen Rider Saber E07-08 Review: Too Many Characters!

Kamen Rider Saber, Episode 7: The Sword of the King Lies in Avalon; Episode 8: The One That is Sealed is Arthur

Episode 7: The Sword of the King Lies in Avalon

Been a while, what with all the breaks and whatnot, but... also because I really find these episodes hard to review? Yes, there's filming under a pandemic, which is something that's not enviable. But after the very, very strong first batch of episodes, I felt like these two are just kind of... messy? Like they are five episodes' worth of content jammed into two? I don't know. Maybe I'm being a bit too hard, but while I kind of get where the story and the series is going, it's also kind of a bit of a headache to follow the episode weekly. There are too many characters and we're not even ten episodes in, and there are so many moving pieces that I don't even have a grasp on many of them. There's the ninja manchild, there's the introvert swordsmith, there's the bad guy's kid, there's the one with the dead mentor... and none of them are fleshed out as much as I would like to. Even praising Rintaro last episode, all we got is an admittedly generic "vengeance angst" story. Which, while not terrible, is also pretty unfocused. And let's not even get to the villains at this point.

This episode basically brings up the extra-dimensional space of Avalon, and how Calibur is trying to reach there, and our heroes are trying to reach there... and basically introduces a prophecy about thirteen books and two dragons and whatnot, which barely gets any buildup before a resolution is accomplished. Even before the exposition is over, we get Espada swinging his sword around, thirteen random books show up and we open the portal. Touma and Kento go through and we get an admittedly great trippy-dimension thing going on. We get the first formal henshin for Calibur (with the actor's face shadowed for some reason?) but the fight cuts off awkwardly. 

Rintaro, meanwhile, spends the first half of the episode training in Liberacion, a thinly-veiled carbon copy of Dragon Ball's Room of Spirit and Time. Which would be cool if they put the same effort to Touma, Kento and Calibur's journey through Avalon. As it is, I just have to applaud the actor's commitment to grunting and rolling around in an empty room with a toy on his belt. 

We also have a bad guy plot going on, and the three personality-less minibosses basically unleash the Medusa Megiddo on the city, leading Buster, Kenzan, and also Mei (with a flyswatter!) to deal with it. The initial transformation scene for Kenzan and Buster is cool, but then Legiel transforms into his monster form and jumps in. And then Desast and Zooius shows up in their monster form. And the action scene is... a bit messy for sure. So many colours going around and everyone's exchanging enemies all the time and the fast pace of the scene means that it gets a bit confusing to follow. The fact that Medusa and Legiel share a lot of colours doesn't help either. 

What does work, I feel, is Mei's over-acting. She annoys me for the first six episodes, but I feel like her scenes here work very well and the actress clearly had a lot of fun with making those faces as she falls down from the sky. Zooius gets a huge CGI stretched out mouth as he prepares to nom on her, but we get the debut of Rintaro's three-book form, combining Lion Senki, Peter Pan and the new Pegasus book. Catching Mei was cool, the waaaw sound effects are cute... but the actual finisher feels a bit of a disappointment since it's just a glowy kick. The lack of a buff Tinkerbell is disappointing. Also, I get more than a bit distracted by the way the belt says 'Water', since it's exactly the same as Wizard's belt.

In Avalon, we get Espada and Calibur fight a bit, they run away a bit, then they fight a bit again, only for Touma and Calibur's dragons to swirl into the air and dump Touma in an enigmatic dimension with an enigmatic man. Touma closes his eyes and pulls out the "King of Arthur" (sic) book, and that's his first real power-up, I guess? He gets teleported into a 'test' ground and shows up in... Gaim's Helheim! Some shadow demon shows up, and... okay, Touma's dual-sword wielding as he turns into Dragon Arthur form is also kinda cool if it wasn't so abrupt. 

And that's really one of my biggest complaints here. People complain about Ex-Aid or Build or Zero-One dropping forms left and right, but it's nothing compared to how utterly rapid we're going through random combinations and forms here. And how quickly it's done. All the finishers blur together, and the debut of Rintaro's three-book power up form felt so... vanilla, and I feel like his two-book form got a better show than this. It's the problem when you're sharing the spotlight with Touma also getting a major power-up in the same episode, but at the same time after all the badass buildup they had for Rintaro's motivation to avenge his master, I feel like they kind of did Rintaro a bit dirty in this episode. And I guess Calibur's destined to have most of his fights be interrupted or offscreen? Eh. 

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Episode 8: The One That is Sealed is Arthur

Then we have this episode, which is a bit better. Mostly because after eight episodes, I feel we get something for Touma beyond him just being a nice guy. And it's presented in a way that even works well! Because despite him being the titular main character, I felt like Ryo, Rintaro, and even to a lesser extent Tetsuo and Kento got far more solidly defined as characters than Touma. 

And that characterization, granted, is something that's been done so many times with other main characters, even among Kamen Riders. But a combination of him struggling with being the 'chosen one' that can only use King of Arthur's powers (I feel Gundam vibes from this one) and him shutting himself off and not opening up to Rintaro or Kento when they ask him if he needs help... it's a simple story and not a particularly groundbreaking one, but I feel it humanizes Touma so much. Regardless it's still a very good moral anyway, you need help and should accept it from the people around you who care for you. 

Mei finally manages to show up on Sword of Logos and all the comedy revolving her excitement does actually work in this episode to contrast the (slightly) more somber tone later on. Touma is super-duper focused on beating the return of the Medusa Megiddo... which turns out to be the sister of episode 7's Medusa. As anyone who has read Greek mythology (or played God of War) would know, Medusa's got two sisters, Stheno and Euryale! We get another pretty messy fight and I don't really want to list who is in this one, but Calibur gets into Saber's head about his worthiness and Arthur's power, and this leads him to hesitate and stuff. This ends up leading to Ryo, trying to snap Touma out of his reverie, getting turned into stone by one of the Medusas, and Saber being beaten so badly that the second-stringers pull him out. 

Little Sora is optimistic that daddy "will always win", but at the same time I also really like the scene where everyone is all just somber and sad in stark contrast to Sora and Mei's utter excitement. Hell, we even get a pretty sad scene of Touma giving Sora his father's giant sword! But Sora and Mei basically cheer Touma up and...

Okay, the final stretch is kind of bullshit and relies a bit too much on contrived coincidence, but this is still a kid's show, and episode 8's story is so much better structured than episode 7. So Touma's skills as a novelist and writer basically gets applied to him being a strategist, "writing a story" in which he and his allies can win. It also evolves into a lesson for Touma in realizing that the strength of the Kamen Riders is working as a team. Again, there are a lot of characters and the action scene is... not the best I've seen in Rider, but they basically split the main bad guys up. And the individual 2-v-1 fights are a lot more coherent. Espada and Kenzan show off new powers (Lamp Hedgehog and Sarutobi Three Pigs) against Calibur, Rintaro fights Legiel, while Saber finally gives King of Arthur a proper debut. 

The base King of Arthur form just summons a giant sword, which kills one of the Medusa which floats suspended from the asteroids in the sky. In a very Sentai-esque move, though, as the final Medusa becomes a giant, the giant King of Arthur sword turns into a giant mecha, grabs Saber (who transforms into a sword) and his own sword, and slashes Medusa and the giant meteor she summons. Yep, Saber's new power up summons a giant sword, that transforms into a giant robot who also has a sword of his own, and then grabs Saber, who turns into a sword. Makes sense! It's ridiculous and it's over the top, I don't mind this one. A lot more fun than "kick with an aura". 

Then Ryo is saved, everyone returns to the base, and they kind of give Ryo a hard time for 'not doing anything'. It's... it's a more solid episode than 7, of course, but at the same time... I dunno. I'm just not really feeling these episodes? Honestly, with how much I broke down the Zero-One and Kiva episodes, I kinda felt bad because the initial draft of episode 7 and 8 was nearly just a paragraph each of me just bitching about how fast-paced everything is. It's honestly not quite that bad, but after the relatively higher quality writing of the past couple of series, it seems like the pandemic limitations have really taken a toll on just the amount of scenes they can shoot, huh?