Series Review: Kamen Rider Agito

Kamen Rider Agito [2001-2002]

Here we go, count zero. Kamen Rider AGITO!

It's been a while since we've done one of these full-series reviews, huh? Nearly a year since I reviewed Decade! I guess part of it was me reviewing Kiva and Zero-One episodes concurrently which made me slightly burnt out on talking about tokusatsu, but also because my previous attempts tried to be a bit too comprehensive in talking about everything there is to talk about in a single article, and it ended up burning me out entirely. I've had drafts for all of the Kamen Rider series I've ever watched in this blog, but simply never touched them or revised them since I last reviewed Kabuto last year.

So anyway, during my little run of watching every single Heisei Kamen Rider that ever was throughout the years of 2018 to 2020, Agito was perhaps one of the last shows I picked up, alongside Kiva (which you saw me do on the blog), Hibiki, Blade and Kuuga. It's not because it's old either, because Faiz and Ryuki were one of the first series I watched, although I did admittedly try to go on a reverse-chronological order when I finally got through all of the ones I'm the most excited about. Agito, though, is an interesting one.

It's the second of the Heisei series, coming off after the great revival of the franchise brought about by Kamen Rider Kuuga. I haven't finished with Kuuga, but there certainly were a fair amount of shared themes with Heisei Kamen Rider's very first show. A more mystical/magical origin to all of these superpowers, plus an enigmatic, mysterious and near-incomprehensible enemy. It's just that starting from Agito onwards, we'll have so many series with this huge, incomprehensible, god-like force that's pulling at every single string happening in the show, and whether this would get resolved at the end of the series or not is going to be a coin-flip.

Agito was also the first series to spearhead the 'multiple Kamen Riders' dynamic which is something that most Heisei series take for granted. Of course there was going to be a secondary rider, and a token broody-slash-evil rider, and a funny rider. But while everyone liked to credit Ryuki and its huge battle royale as being the source of this, I'm surprised how much of the Agito series involved inter-Rider conflict, and how well-played the three primary Kamen Riders are. We'll talk about them in a bit more detail, but the interpersonal relationships between Tsugami "Agito" Shouichi, Hikawa "G-3" Makoto and Ashihara "Gills" Ryo is actually pretty well-done, particularly in the middle portion of the series where the show is the strongest. 

The first chunk of the show is relatively... slow-paced, mostly because the characters themselves are also just starting to figure out what's going on. There is a sub-plot that ran across three or four episodes of a bunch of government scientists finding out about some mysterious 2001: A Space Odyssey style ancient space alien artifact or something and a baby which was swiftly abandoned and handwaved into something else later on. There is a couple of brief nods to Kuuga as a show, making this one of the few Rider shows to be explicitly noted as a sequel until subsequent shows have this tenuous "we're each in an independent timeline unless there's a crossover in which case we shrug".

The enemies in this series are the Unknown, mysterious monsters who go around killing people in monstrous ways -- it's all early 2000's CGI, but I actually am very, very surprised to see just how creative they got at killing people in this one. Most early-Heisei shows with a decent amount of civilian body-count tended to just feature off-screen strangling or disintegrations, or more uniform killings. The Unknowns are magic monster serial killers, and one of the more effective things the show did early on is to emphasize just how creepy the serial killings are since the Unknown specifically hunt down blood relatives of their chosen victim, even estranged ones. 

Two defenders of humanity show up, then. The police have an experimental Iron Man style battlesuit, the G3 System (in a nice easter egg, apparently designed after "Number 4", a.k.a. Kuuga), worn by one of my favourite characters in the show Hikawa Makoto and his G3 team. But being the secondary rider and the local police department, G3 proves ineffective against the Unknown, and a mysterious bug muscle-man dude that all the Unknown seem to recognize as "Agito" shows up and begins to blow them up with glorious rider kicks that create giant symbols on the ground. It's not quite as over-the-top as Kiva's kicks were, but still pretty damn badass. 

So for the most part, the first one-thirds of the show follow these characters. Tsugami Shouichi is a young man who is utterly amnesiac, hinting at some strange backstory, and has been taken in by the Misugis -- the elderly professor Misugi, his son Taichi, and his orphaned niece Kazaya Mana (played by Akiyama Rina, who Den-O fans would definitely recognize as Naomi). Shouichi's amnesia is played down not only by the show, but by the character as well, who is perhaps one of the more happy-go-lucky protagonists and his personality just amounts to being a likable dude. It's somewhat trying to channel last season's Yusuke Godai, perhaps, but Shouichi's stronger family dynamic with his own supporting cast, and his very happy-go-lucky attitude does make him feel distinctly different. 

In contrast, on the other side of the story, is the little police drama in the police department. Again, it's something that feels like a holdover from the Kuuga concept, although they do enough of a twist to make it interesting. Instead of a single Commissioner Gordon esque figure who believes in the hero, Makoto "G3" Hikawa is more open-minded but also very much prioritizes police work first, trying to figure out and piece together what's happening. Makoto's supporting cast includes his 'base control' teammates Ozawa Sumiko (the competent one) and Omuro Takahiro (the comedic relief one), as well as his utter prick of an interdepartmental rival Hojo Toru. It's honestly pretty basic when you come down to it, but I must confess that I ended up liking the police department drama more than I thought I would. 

And then running through all of this is another storyline that ties in to how Shouichi randomly got superpowers out of nowhere. Very quickly the show also has one of its main premises told to us -- humans with supernatural powers. Shouichi's sort-of adopted-sister-figure Mana is shown to have these psychic/esper abilities, her dad seems to be researching that sort of abilities before his mysterious death (which Mana suspects Agito might be involved in) and in addition to Shouichi and the unfortunate targets, our third main rider, Ashihara Ryo, ends up with a far, far more monstrous and uncontrollable transformation into the bestial Kamen Rider Gills. The name's kind of hilarious, but there's a definitely huge Amazons feral quality to just how screamy, brutal and angry Gills is portrayed especially early on in the show. In contrast to Shouichi's very clean transformations, Ryo is shown having side-effects, panting and fainting, and even having parts of his skin turn mottled and mutating into Gills. 

Ultimately, the show really kicks it up into high gear in the middle portions. I'm not summarizing the entire plot, but suffice to say that this part of the show is amazing. Our heroes start to figure out that a mysterious marine incident on the boat Akatsuki ties together a lot of our main characters. Shouichi was there before his amnesia. Ryo's father died on it. Makoto was the policeman who rescued the survivors. And many of the victims -- which sort-of end up becoming quasi-recurring characters -- are actually survivors of the Akatsuki incident. Whether the backstory behind the Akatsuki, as well as the mysterious circumstances under which Mana's father and Shouichi's sister died, are satisfactory explanations is up for debate, but the build-up and the acting leading up to the revelations is certainly fun. I feel like a good chunk of the show is actually set up as a long-running mystery show, all the while in the present-day storylines we get to see our main cast be wholesome and pretty cute. Shouichi's whole deal is that he inspires everyone he meets to be better, teaching Makoto to be a lot less uptight, easily befriending the emo and angsty Ryo, and earning Mana's belief that he's a good man in every single possible way. The dynamic between the main quartet of characters -- Shouichi, Mana, Makoto and Ryo -- is amazingly well-done, especially since most of them don't share the same scenes or hang around the same characters all the time.

The fourth rider, "Another Agito", dr. Kino Kaoru, is... he's another one that ends up becoming inspired by Shouichi. Kino Kaoru is a delightful archetype that we haven't seen in a while, a deep-voiced older rider channeling his inner Hongo Takeshi and shows up as a very experienced warrior with the same powers as Agito. He, too, has a pretty well-told backstory, and being tied to the Akatsuki conspiracy in his own way. For someone introduced almost halfway through the show, he's actually quite likable. Kino only shows up for around a dozen episodes or so, but the show certainly got a massive mileage out of him for sure. 

Talking a bit more about the characters, Ryo ends up coming from just a mere angsty angry teenager into perhaps one of the more compelling characters in the show. Mana, too, elevates herself beyond the generic wholesome female main character that these Kamen Rider shows seem to love to put in but never do anything with. Having a superpower that's involved in the main series' plot is certainly helpful to that, yes, and Mana does have her own share of being a damsel in distress, but I actively enjoy her role in the series and her dynamic with Shouichi and Ryo. Among the G3 unit squadron, the creator of the G3 system, the strong-willed and sharp-tongued Ozawa Sumiko is easily one of the show's more fun supporting characters, and even the main antagonist among the police force, Hojo Toru, is an amazingly well-written villain. Toru is an antagonist and a prick, sure, and never really warms up from it, but his convictions are unflinching and there were a couple of episodes where he's forced to swallow his desire to see his G3 rivals fail because that would cover up a crime or something. That's cool. 

The main 'villain' feels... very anime-esque in a cliched way, but he's so out of the way of our heroes that I find it hard to really complain about him. The "Overlord", or the Overlord of Light, is basically a god-like being engaged in a competition with his sibling over whether humanity has the right potential to evolve into a stronger, better form. (Lost vibes, huh) We get to see a bit of him sort of arguing with the enigmatic "Sawaki Testuya", a man from Shouichi's amnesiac backstory (again, something that I feel felt like it wasn't built up to an appropriate climax) but ultimately the Overlord and their backstory behind being godlike figures trying to judge humanity's potential and their potential evolution into something greater is handled more or less well. I'm not going to go too in-depth about what the Overlord's plot are, or what 'Agito' really means, since that'd just be a plot summary... but it's an interesting concept that has a decent resolution. 

That said, going through all the episode synopses in quick succession, I did remember being pretty bored of the show up until the mid-20's of its episode count, where the show falls into the general 'oh, yet another filler two-parter of beating up an Unknown'. The cast is charismatic enough, but the mystery does admittedly take a bit of a while to build up. But having every episode be "Shouichi wanders around, G3 team argues with Hojo, Unknown serial killer, G3 gets beaten up, Agito shows up to save the day". The action is at least fairly solid, with Agito's unique rider kick (a symbol shows up in the ground, then it swirls around his feet) being just flashy enough to look memorable without being too over-the-top to be jarring with the more grounded setting. Agito's Burning Form is also a personal favourite of mine, utilizing the limited CGI effects well. 

Unfortunately, the show doesn't stick the landing. The show has 51 episodes, and I would call the stretch of episodes around... oh, the mid-30's up to episode 46 the strongest stretch of the series' run. With so many established characters, the massive pile-up of new forms for our heroes (Burning and Shining Agito; G3-X; and Exceed Gills are pretty cool suits), the Another Agito storyline, the Overlord finally confronting our heroes, and so many revelations about Shouichi's original identity, about the Akatsuki incident, and so many other things ends up being so, so engaging. 

The suits are also pretty great. I don't have a whole ton to really say about it, but looking at all four primary rider suits next to each other, it's actually quite clever how each of them has such a different aesthetic, with G3 being so police-themed and so robotic and armour-like; Gills looking like such a primal man-monster; Agito being this sleek suit even in its super modes; Another Agito looking like a halfway point between Gills and Agito... and yet all of them feel like they're part of the same design headspace, and you can totally believe that the same process that caused the creation of Agito also ended up taking a divergent path to come at Gills and Another Agito. 

And then it crashed and burned. Perhaps that's a bit of an exaggeration, but after the resolution of episode 46 where the Overlord seemed to have been 'cocooned' for a while... we just have this bizarre one month time-skip that ditches half of the supporting cast and chucks Shouichi and Ryo into this odd 'look at them trying to live normal lives' with some shoehorned new love interests that come out of nowhere. And it's like, I get what they were going for with a coda, but as a conclusion to the show that has prioritized the interpersonal relationships among the characters so much, to have the final five episodes revolve so much around random brand-new characters (and not to mention that the actual 'confrontation' in episode 51 is much less impressive than the ones we saw five or six episodes ago) is utterly bizarre and leaves a very odd aftertaste due to how disjointed they are from the rest of the show. 

Being an early Heisei-era show, Agito only has a single tie-in movie, although surprisingly one that actually fits in the timeline of the TV show instead of being a weird alternate timeline or whatever. "Kamen Rider Agito: Project G4" is pretty much just kind of there, featuring a bunch of human villains trying to weaponize these people with supernatural abilities. A pretty fun watch, an
d G4 is a pretty fun one-off gimmick-personality antagonist that doesn't overstay his welcome. 

Still, that's two minor pacing hiccups to what is otherwise a very, very solid show. I don't actually see Agito being talked a lot when these Heisei shows are being discussed, but I can totally see why. It's just bereft of any sort of gimmick to the storytelling (even the amnesia plot feels like it's handwaved most of the time), or anything too wild in either spectrum. It's not like Gaim or Den-O or Double or Kuuga or Build where everyone keeps shouting that it's the best (and half the fandom doesn't see what the hype is). It's just... it's just a Kamen Rider show, y'know? But it's just such a great, solid and wholesome show that it's hard to not recommend this one at all. A very, very solid entry to the Kamen Rider franchise, and one that I had a pleasant amount of time watching.