Series Review: Kamen Rider Hibiki

Kamen Rider Hibiki [2005-2006]

One of the harder series in Kamen Rider that's proven to be the most controversial and base-breaking among the fandom has to be Hibiki. And... and it's not hard to see why. Sort of like the odd man out among the Heisei-era Kamen Riders, Hibiki almost feels like it belongs in a completely different genre, something that's way far from the explosive wire-fighting and loud gimmicky belts and big arc villains and all the stuff that dominated much of the Heisei era. There were even (unconfirmed) rumours about how Hibiki wasn't even meant to be a Kamen Rider series at all and they just slapped the Kamen Rider brand so the 2005-2006 period did have a Rider.

And that's before we get into the huge troubled production that the series has, having its entire writing staff and producer replaced 29 episodes in, trying desperately to retool the show to be a more generic shonen fighty-fight action TV series and retooling the show so heavily that it sort of train-crashed all the way to its end, ending as a bit of an abomination that neither has the unique, introspective, melancholic charm of its first half but didn't quite reach the sort of generic-toku-action levels of energy that the retool promises. Instead it's just a huge mess of character assassinations, convoluted mysteries and plotlines that make no real sense. Click here for a far more in-depth discussion on the changes to Hibiki's production schedule.

There's a long, long discussion that could be had, and one of the bigger points of contention is whether the first half of the series is even that good. As someone who watched chunks of six or eight episodes at a time throughout the past couple of years, Hibiki is... it's an interesting show all right. The best part of it has to be its mood -- the very Japanese vibe of a slice-of-life story of a young boy who meets and gets to witness this fantastical world of Oni (roughly translated as 'demons', but has its unique connotations in Japanese culture), particularly to this man that the boy, Asumu, idolizes -- the very cool uncle-figure Hibiki. We slowly peel away this interesting world of monsters based on Japanese folklore, as well as the oragnization known as Takeshi, employing people who are able to transform into Oni and fight against the Makamou, giant beast-like beings that wreak havoc all over the Kanto region. I really do love that while the series focuses on a central cast of characters -- Hibiki, Ibuki, Todoroki, Zanki and the supporting cast that run a sweets shop -- unlike shows like Blade or Kiva, the fact that Takeshi is meant to be a far larger organization actually shows when random episodes will have mentions or even brief appearances by a random Oni like Danki or Sabaki or whoever that is in charge of a particular region. No, they don't really matter much (and out of the non-main Oni only Shuki ends up being relevant as a quasi-antagonist of a two-parter) but I do really like it.

There's also a very significantly different vibe to most Rider (or Sentai, or Ultraman) shows. Hibiki and company don't yell out 'henshin' or even do a lot of bike-riding (to be fair, a lot of modern Riders forget they have bikes too), they don't really hammer home things like form changes or collecting a bunch of plot devices, the action scenes take place mostly in rural forests and cliffsides instead of the cities that Kamen Rider prefers, most of the enemies are huge CGI animal monsters... and, hell, there's not even a proper Big Bad that the show is building up to. I realize that it isn't necessary for every series to have a super-huge overarching plotline or whatever, and it's fine that Hibiki's superhero plot is more episodic and the actual overarching story is more about the characters, but it's something that becomes particularly noticeable as the series goes on and particularly in the second half of the series.

One other thing that I really do enjoy about Hibiki is that it's one of the few Kamen Rider shows to be themed around music. It's almost treated as a way of life for these Oni, where the unique leathery design of the Hibiki suits are tied into a specific instrument they are proficient with -- taiko drums for Hibiki, trumpets for Ibuki and electric guitars for Todoroki and Zanki, and I absolutely love the actual effects team's work for this show, incorporating the respective Oni's favoured musical instrument into the background soundtrack. The first half of Hibiki also likes to cut away to huge black screens with Kanji, which is a bit surprising at first but ends up being a pretty neat part of the show that I'm certainly pretty sad to see it go when the show swapped producers halfway through.

Also something that's pretty simple but I really love? The suits. They just look so different from all of the other suits in the franchise, from the nice leather undersuit to the music and oni themed decals they all have. There's just something that's so inherently neat about how the suit is equal parts badass and ridiculous, particularly in conjunction with Ibuki and Todoroki's weapons. I don't think I tend to really talk too much about how I feel about suit designs, but despite (or maybe because of) the vast departure compared to how Riders or Tokusatsu heroes in general tended to look, Hibiki's suit designs just look top-notch.

The first episode is... it's kinda weird, and one thing that the show quickly drops is making it a bit of a quasi-musical. And the show's certainly not for everybody, with the first 29 episodes really hammering home the 'slice of life' part of things -- we genuinely have episode B-plots of Asumu having an appendicitis or Asumu failing at class that have absolutely nothing to do with Oni monster-hunting, but there's a neat, poignant feel of soul-searching and identity-searching that is well-told throughout the interactions between Asumu and the mentor he idolizes.

And it's a nice show, really feeling more like two intertwining stories between Asumu's regular day-to-day life (which is admittedly boring) and the supernatural oni stuff happening in the background, and a huge chunk of the series' theme is self-discovery and self-improvement. It's nice stuff, and the different tone and vibe it has compared to all Heisei-era shows makes it feel like such an interestingly different experience.

The thing is, even as much as the first half of Hibiki is clearly building up to something... it's slow-paced as hell. Sure, the odd episode that focuses on something like Todoroki finally rising to become a full-fledged Oni is neat, as is the focus on Ibuki's apprentice Akira (a girl Asumu's age), but moreso than most other Rider series you do kind of feel like a lot of the plots for the episodes are just kinda there. The characters are charismatic enough, I suppose, and the mystery of the enigmatic Hime and Douji who keeps appearing all over Japan is an interesting one, as is the fact that "oh, the Summer Makamou is coming" that escalates things... but nothing really moves forwards. What it does have in lieu of a solid plot or story is good characters and an interesting world, and if nothing else, I do appreciate the world-building -- a lot of the new information we get focuses more on world building, more about how one actually becomes an Oni (told via Zanki/Todoroki's mentorship), or how important the different schools of musical instruments are. I do wonder if the original crew had been allowed to stay on the show if the conclusion of the storyline would've been something more grand.

Sadly, we'll never know. A combination of a huge cost in making the show and low toy sales means that the show's main crew was axed and replaced. The action now alternates between more traditional city streets and the forests, a lot of the stylistic filters and camera work are gone, a lot more focus is placed onto Hibiki earning his final form, and there's an attempt at a 'main villain' style plot. And none of these are bad per se, but at the same time the way this is handled is so haphazard. The supposed huge 'main villain' is the nebulous Orochi phenomenon and a mysterious "Man and Woman", neither of which ended up really panning out to much. Orochi is defeated in the penultimate episode without much fanfare, and the enigmatic Man and Woman remain an enigma that's unexplained at all throughout the entire series.

We're also introduced to Kiriya Kyosuke, played by the same actor who would go on to become Den-O's Kamen Rider Zeronos, and Kyosuke is a little twit that's shoehorned in with flimsy motivations beyond "being a dick to everyone", but no one really calls him out on his dickishness. It's a transparent attempt to shoehorn in a generic asshole rival character, except Kyosuke is such a caricature that it's hard to take him seriously and when his last couple of episodes randomly throw in some half-baked 'character development' that came out of nowhere and felt genuinely unearned, it's almost parody-level of hilarity.

The side characters are also sort of shuffled off to the side in order to give Hibiki, Asumu and Kyosuke a bit more focus, although at least Todoroki and Zanki did get to finish a pretty neat (if expected) storyline with a big bang. Ibuki gets shuffled off to the side and isn't given much to do (although arguably he didn't get much in the first half either) beyond sort of angst on whether he's a good teacher, while Akira gets basically rewritten to somehow not want to be an Oni other than a vague handwave by the writers who clearly just isn't happy with the idea of having a woman Rider that doesn't die after the arc that introduces her (poor Shuki).

The thing is, other than the Todoroki/Zanki stuff, so much in the second half of Hibiki is handled in such a slipshod manner that it's almost worth it to just stop at episode 29. It's not even the conclusion that irks me, it's that it's genuinely unearned and came out of nowhere in the final two episodes. Apparently it got so bad that the actosr had reportedly refused to film the final scene of the episode if it didn't get rewritten in a satisfying manner. Basically, Kyosuke ends up becoming the Oni student instead of Asumu, which at its core isn't something that's inherently bad. Sure, sometimes you chase hard after a dream and turns out that it isn't what you really want in life, but the way they randomly shoehorn in Asumu's desire to, uh... help a dying little girl smile with a little stage play and then randomly decide to be a doctor? It all came out of nowhere and it wouldn't have irked me as much if it was actually explained and developed well.

There's also a single tie-in movie, "Kamen Rider Hibiki and the Seven Senki". It's... it's an all right movie. It's completely an alternate-universe bit giving an alternate origin to Hibiki's Armed Form (which is IMO a bit better in the movie?) but it's mostly a chance to introduce no less than six brand-new random Kamen Rider suits, a bunch of characters that really don't do much other than stand around and advertise toys, and a plot that is a ripoff of the Seven Samurai. Best part of this? You get to see Matsuda Kenji (Zanki in this series; Jiro in Kiva) randomly get recasted as Kamen Rider Touki, a monk lugging around a gigantic pipe. 

Anyway... yeah, Hibiki is such a strange, strange beast. It took me a while to warm up to the vibe and tone of its first half, but when I actually did end up liking it as such a vastly different experience to my normal Toku fare... it's all taken away and replaced with a mess that's neither here nor there. It took me a long, long while to finish this, and I think I watched five other Tokusatsu shows in the time it took for me to finish Hibiki. Honestly, one of the shows that I'll just say to 'skip' entirely, or if you do check it out, stop at point 29. People who prefer traditional Kamen Rider fare won't find what they're really looking for here, whereas people who are enthralled with the more interesting feel of the show (or are just interested enough to keep going) will be invariably disappointed when the show takes a jump off of a cliff. It's a shame, because Hibiki has a fair bit of good things going on for it, but the final product we got was so lacking and unsatisfying that as much as I do enjoy the actual visual and storytelling themes of the show, it's hard to really recommend it to anyone.