Series Review: Kamen Rider Faiz

Kamen Rider 555 / Faiz [2003-2004]

"Complete."

The first time I saw Faiz in any significant capacity was that one Showa-vs-Heisei movie where they got Faiz's actor back as a pretty major secondary character in that movie. And my number one takeaway from Faiz? "Holy shit, what a motherfucking cool son of a bitch this rider is." Everything about Kamen Rider Faiz is cool. The transformation sequence with the red glowing Tron lines enveloping the human before the suit materializes. The absolutely sexy sleekness of the suit with its two giant eyes that take over nearly the entire face. The lightsaber. The Transformer motorbike partner. The beep-boop-beep sounds and the very robotic 'complete' noises that the smartphone henshin device makes. Most importantly, that rider kick. How about that rider kick, huh? A swirling cone that appears pointing at the enemy, then Faiz jumps straight at the cone, slams through the enemy then reappears on the other side as the bad guy blows up while Faiz's Phi symbol appears in the background? It's the Rider Kick equivalent of one of those cool "you're already dead" iai cuts in samurai movies. Faiz is fucking awesome. 

Helping things a lot for me was the fact that we actually did get to see a bit of Faiz's storyline in the Showa-vs-Heisei sequence, and it feels pretty interesting... Inui Takumi seems like a pretty interesting main character, a bit of a dick and kind of afraid of responsibility, but being a main Rider he's obviously a good guy. And since Gaim was one of the first series I watched, I ended up picking and choosing who among the Heisei riders I saw in Showa-vs-Heisei seemed the coolest. 

Even its monster designs are the coolest! People might say that it's boring, but I did really enjoy the fact that all the Orphnochs are these exaggerated animal monsters whose sole design feature is that they are all white, which tends to be a boring design choice unless you really commit to it like Faiz does. And that's not to mention the absolutely fabulous Tron-lines vibe of the three main rider suits -- Faiz, Kaixa and Delta. Sure, you do lose some of that 'bug cyborg man' vibe of most of the traditional Kamen Riders, but this far, far more robotic feel does make Faiz stand out a lot from the pack while maintaining a 'classic', sleek vibe. 

And... and, hoo boy, let's just say that Faiz's visuals and its suit design are probably the best thing about the show. 

Faiz (technically 555; it's always pronounced 'Faiz', as in 'Fives' or 'Phis') was the fourth show in the Heisei period, following Kuuga, Agito and Ryuki. I watched Faiz long before I watched any of those three shows, but I could definitely see the team behind Faiz attempting to cherry-pick the most popular elements behind those three shows and toss them in a blender with their own concepts for their new show. We've got the long-running mysteries common to all of the Kamen Rider shows of this era. We've got a bunch of characters engaged in a massive recurring battle against each other and we're not sure who is in the right and wrong (like Ryuki, and a bit like the middle portion of Agito). Some sort of old conspiracy revealed in flashbacks (like Agito). We've got a couple of massively assholish 'good guys' and heroic antagonist monsters. We've got a vague government organization conspiracy. We've got a lot of interpersonal conflict, but also the cast keeps to a recognizable homey locale.

And, let's be kind of frank here... the central six or seven characters? Takumi Inui, Sonada Mari, Kusaka Masato and Kikuchi Keitaro on the human side; and Kiba Yuuji, Osada Yuka and Kaido Naoya of the Orphnoch side? I absolutely love these main characters. It's surprising how this show actually manages to make me really, really care about these seven characters (well, six of them, at least, Keitaro is just a character that works best as a foil to everyone else). But halfway through this show, one of the observations I made about this show while discussing it to my friend is that... it's like the writers wanted to make a really, really compelling drama. And there's nothing wrong with enjoying a whole lot of drama and soul-searching, it's just that it's not the right backdrop for a monster-hunting weapon-stealing tokusatsu show, and even moreso when the action scenes keep interrupting any attempts at good drama, and vice versa. 

The set-up of the series is relatively strong. Chaos at the (amazingly named) Smart Brain corporation's science lab. A woman escaping after stealing a powerful set of weapons disguised as everyday electronic appliances. Monsters that are able to stab human hearts and turn them into dust. A mysterious jerk who hates hot food and just wants to be left alone, but somehow also one of the only people that's able to activate the Faiz belt. On the other side of the pond, we've got the very, very sad stories of Kiba Yuuji and Osada Yuka, people who lived through absolutely terrible lives with very terrible families and friends that essentially drive the two into death or suicide... but then they wake up, not dead, but instead as monsters? This ends up with these rogue Orphnochs on the run from Smart Brain, but find their monster forms unaccepted by the humans or Kamen Riders. 

Oh, and there's also Smart Brain itself, a massive super-company with mysterious goals, the 'wild' Orphnochs who just want to murder humans, other Kamen Riders that show up with the 'kill them all, salt the earth' attitude with the Orphnochs, the Lucky Clover group of elite Orphnochs, and the fact that any given Orphnoch can steal the Kamen Rider belts and become Kamen Riders themselves? Again, so much of the setting actually is pretty interesting.

And, in a way, a lot of these play into tropes that I adore. Self-discovery, self-acceptance and responsibility, disguised as coming to terms with your 'monster self'? Pulpy young adult vampire/werewolf stories and superhero stories have done marvelously with using these sort of topics as a way to address those issues and make wonderful storylines out of those. Throw in the constant meetings between the human identities of the main leaders of both camps, Takumi (Faiz) and Kiba (Horse Orphnoch), who respect each other a lot without realizing that the other person is a member of the 'special' race that they hate and want to destroy so much? Takumi's "I don't have dreams of my own, but I'll protect my friends' dreams" line? And toss in the happy-psycho Kaido Naoya on the Orphnoch side, and the grumpy-psycho Kusaka "Kaixa" Masato on the humans' side? Again, there's a lot of recipe for great stories here. And, arguably, the stories are still told pretty well, especially if, like me, you actually find Kaixa's constant assholishness to be a love-to-hate thing instead of just finding him a dick. 

Unfortunately... the show doesn't really live up to any of its promises, and it's a huge, huge shame. It is clear from the few moments where the characters are allowed to act that the actors are very talented. The action scenes are consistently great. It's just that everything around it is kind of... a gigantic hot pile of mess. It gets near-incomprehensible near the end with the convoluted ending (so much that the only way to get a good conclusion out of Faiz is to watch the aforementioned Showa-vs-Heisei movie from Gaim, then the Kamen Rider 4 specials that is a Kamen Rider Drive tie-in), but the problems already exist from very early in the show. 

A very meme-able criticism of Faiz is that "miscommunication is the main villain", and that certainly seems true. A lot of the storylines in Faiz, in theory, could be genuinely dramatic and shocking. Kusaka, a human Kamen Rider who wants nothing more than Orphnoch genocide out of a combination of possessiveness over Mari and a burning vendetta against Orphnochs, framing things in such a way that Takumi and Kiba think the other person's alter-ego is an irredeemable monster? It's a bit mouthful, but there's a great, great story to be told there. Unfortunately, as much as the actors try so hard, a lot of the storytelling around them end up falling flat on its face in the delivery. The cast and the story around them is also miserable and grim. Nothing wrong with that! Some of the best stories are the ones that make their protagonists as miserable and tortured as possible. But with Faiz, there is a comically jarring contrast between the amount of shit that our characters are put through... and the cause of their suffering. Which, more often than not, is the ever-memetic miscommunication. And when so much of your show's screentime is devoted into the human drama, it's jarring that the impetus for said drama tends to almost always be underwhelming. 

The show tries its best to make everyone be likable with their own character quirks, but with them being assholes sometimes (Takumi is one of the first Riders that is a big jackass; and both Kaido and Kusaka are meant to be 110% jackasses) the combination of them being assholes and sometimes being overly gullible in being manipulated does make one's patience wear thin. And this is coming from someone who actually likes nearly all the characters of the show! With how Takumi and especially Kusaka behave, I can definitely see viewers who get absolutely turned off by these characters. I would like to go on record and say that Kusaka, by the way, is Kamen Rider's best 'hateable' character. He's not quite a villain but definitely not a hero, and technically wants to help Mari and the humans... but he's also such an irritable, insecure and jealous anti-Orphnoch jackass. I actually really do like just how assholish he's portrayed in this show... although, again, as I keep repeating, while the individual characters are done well, the show as a whole is kind of a hot mess. 

Again, I absolutely love the concept behind the show. The fact that the first episode is actually more of Kiba Yuuji's origin story as he wakes up an Orphnoch after the shit that befell him than it is Takumi Inui's makes this one of the very few Kamen Rider shows that actually ends up properly exploring the storyline of the main villain and seeing him grow alongside our main hero. The screentime is also split very evenly between Team Takumi and Team Yuuji, and that is such an enjoyable and refreshing format that makes me genuinely care about most of these main characters as they basically try to live in a world full of mystery and conspiracies.

And while some of the other characters in the show are poorly handled (Delta's 'heroic' and 'true' user is utterly forgettable), at least the handful of recurring Lucky Clover antagonists are memorable enough? They aren't as strongly defined as the main septet of characters, but they're memorable villain tropes and pretty fun recurring antagonists especially in the middle portions of the show when we start getting less and less episodic enemies and more 'deal with the mysteries of Smart Brain'. 

Unfortunately, again, the writing sort of puts a kibosh into that. Kusaka and Smart Brain's bizarre and sometimes inconsistent manipulations is one thing, too, and the villains' methods and motives feel absolutely muddled just for the sake of building up the mystery or conflict. A lot of the revelations -- like the existence of the Orphnoch King, the true identity of the orphanage's founder -- feels like they were unearned and popped out of nowhere. (Takumi's little secret about his identity, meanwhile, is cleverly foreshadowed from the very first episode) And honestly, let's not forget just how awkwardly the final arc of this show is handled. If Agito had a bizarre 'coda' for its series ending, Faiz ends up unceremoniously giving all its relatable Orphnoch characters a significant dose of angst and evilness, turning them from 'monster with a heart of gold' into 'angry angry Light Yagami', then again unceremoniously getting rid of them and most of the Smart Brain antagonists just to make way for the very underwhelming Orphnoch King.

That's not to say that the final episodes are the only thing terrible about this show, though. As eye-rollingly ridiculous as those last batch of episodes are, the show's attempt to shoehorn drama via poor communication is absolutely frustrating to watch, and honestly, one of my biggest irritation in this show is that they had a great concept, a great format and a great set of characters and actors that get absolutely squandered because the writers are simply unable to present the conflict in an engaging way. 

Also, another major complaint I have? One of the things no one ever complains about the show is the suits and the equipment. It's something that seems to be a bit of an afterthought when discussing these TV shows, but Faiz's little toybox of rider weapons and transformation devices are some of the classiest and coolest things in the franchise. Hell, the idea that anyone suitable would be able to steal these Faiz/Kaixa/Delta suits and transform is an amazing idea that gets a bit of a mileage with the Delta belt being in the possession of a Lucky Clover member for a significant amount of the show. And yet... the suits themselves are treated almost like an afterthought. The action scenes are cool, of course, but things like power-ups and whatnot are treated irreverently, with Faiz's two power-ups being very underwhelming showcases (one of the power up tokens even literally gets tossed at Takumi out of nowhere). Hell, some of the random accessories like Kusaka's missile platform bike Transformer get like, two episodes maybe before no one ever mentions it. Sure, sometimes some of the newer Heisei shows try to over-hype these super forms to the point of exhaustion or whatever, but Faiz is the exact opposite where it ends up making these super forms feel absolutely un-exciting. 

There is an alternate-universe movie, Paradise Lost, which features our heroes in a post-apocalyptic world where the Orphnochs have taken over the world and humanity is the rebel forces fighting the Orphnochs. It's... bizarre, and will start a trend for many Heisei movies up until Den-O taking place in alternate universes.

So yeah. Faiz is a bit of a guilty pleasure for me because I did enjoy watching through it. And I absolutely love the main characters and their suits. But in no way am I going to ever say that this is a solid show objectively. I think I enjoyed it a bit too much to ever call it the worst show ever, and the show certainly has a lot of good things going for it, as my review keeps trying to say. It's just that generally poor writing and poor handling of plot points end up sort of causing this show to be remembered for all the wrong reasons.