Series Review: Kamen Rider Kuuga

Kamen Rider Kuuga [2000-2001]

"No fear, no pain!"

I finished Kuuga late last year as the final Heisei-era Kamen Rider show that I've watched. And now I can proudly say that I have watched and experienced the vast majority of what Heisei-era Kamen Rider has to offer!

The thing is, Kuuga is an... interesting show. After the end of Kamen Rider Black RX in 1989, the final 'Showa' era show (it's technically released in Heisei), the franchise was completely absent from Japanese television throughout roughly an entire decade. There were a trio of movies, each of which attempted and failed to reinvigorate the series and bring it to relevance like other tokusatsu shows... until 2000, where Kamen Rider Kuuga hit the airwaves, and the franchise never left since. And... and it's interesting. True, Kuuga does set up something brand-new for the franchise as a whole, even as it continues to develop over the course of the 20 Heisei shows and (at the time of writing) 2 Reiwa-era shows, and it's a classic. 

The premise for Kuuga is honestly pretty simple ,and anyone more familiar with the later shows will note the myriad of similarities with other Heisei-era shows, particularly the earlier ones. An archaeological excavation inadvertently awakens an ancient tribe of mysterious warriors known as the Gurongi (sometimes romanized as Grongi), and the members of this tribe begin to go around killing people... but all of them follow some mysterious rules in their own private 'gegeru'. As the body count rises, a young man, the ever-cheerful and optimistic Godai Yusuke, ends up coming across a stone device excavated from the same site, fuses with it, and gains the ability to transform into what the beleaguered police force simply calls "Unidentified Lifeform #4", but the Gurongi recognize and treat with reverence as "Kuuga". 

And... and watching this show is honestly an interesting experience depending on which version you manage to get. Americans (which I am not) are able to watch this show legally on the streaming site TokuSHOUTsu. Which you should! Support the official release! But the rest of us non-Americans have to try and find decently-subtitled versions of the show, and depending on which one you can find, some of them do add subtitles for what the Gurongi are talking about. (Most modern Japanese releases also add Gurongi subtitles, as I am informed) It's not going to make or break the show for you -- for the most part, the ones readily available to me left the Gurongi unsubtitled -- but knowing what these bizarre ancient race is talking about does add a lot of depth as to what they are and why they do what they do. There's a particular stretch of episodes in the late-30's where a lot of the drama revolves around what certain specific Gurongi are doing as they have a bit of infighting, which is something that's potentially a bit more difficult to comprehend in some versions of the show. 

Still, the draw of Kuuga is hardly the plot. For a vast majority of its 49-episode run, Kuuga is strictly two-part-episodic (although it doesn't adhere to the two-parter formula as closely as its successors) and a lot of the monsters are just participants in the gegeru trying to kill as many people depending on their own, strange rules. It's something that Agito would follow; turning each Gurongi into basically a hyper-fixated serial killer who has to kill in a certain way. It gives Yusuke and the rest of his supporting cast something to do, even as the Gurongi that show up become, of course, increasingly powerful while Yusuke himself also unlocks increasingly powerful forms and skills. 

There is a lot of simplicity to the show. Yusuke himself is a simple hero who just wants to make everyone around him smile and keeps giving everyone a thumbs-up (the signature gesture that would later prove important in showing Yusuke retaining his humanity), whereas the rest of his human supporting cast are nothing but supportive. Honestly, in retrospect, I suppose this is exactly the thing that Agito, and, to a greater extent, Ryuki and Faiz are trying to subvert? Because everyone in the show is nothing but supportive of Yusuke and his boundless enthusiasm. None of the human cast really end up being super-essential, but they all end up building up a world that really does feel lived-in. While a lot of them do blur together especially in the first half of the show, near the end I really do get myself invested in some of the personal plotlines of some of these characters. 

We don't quite have a 'secondary rider' per se, but the unquestionable second main character has to be police inspector Kaoru Ichijou, who quickly befriends both "Number Four" and his human alter-ego very quickly. He's essentially the more serious foil to Yusuke, and even gets to fight these monsters once or twice, being instrumental in obtaining some of the upgrades for Kuuga throughout the show and even gets to deal with one of the recurring antagonists without Yusuke's help. 

The rest of the cast are... well, the other 'main' character is probably archaeologist and researcher Sakurako Sawatari, but she really doesn't leave too much of an impression beyond being helpful and being a good friend. The rest of the cast could easily be divided into two parts; one half hanging out in Yusuke's civilian life in a cafe, and the other being part of Ichijou's police-and-researcher support squad, most of which end up interacting with Yusuke as the show goes on and Kuuga ends up cooperating with the police in a surprisingly painless manner. To wit, among the civilian cast we have "Uncle" Kazari Tamasaburo, the laid-back owner of the cafe; Asahina Nana, the part-time worker with a huge crush on Yusuke; Godai Minori, Yusuke's equally-cheery sister who works as a kindergarten-teacher. Plus a couple of recurring civilians like Yusuke's old teacher Kanzaki-sensei and one of the murder survivors Natsume Mika. Among the police and investigators, we've got the weapons development head Enokida Hikari (who gets a surprisingly in-depth sub-plot about her being a distant mother); the upbeat archaeologist Jean-Michel Sorrel; Ichijou's partner officer Sugita; and the secret-keeping doctor Shuichi Tsubaki. Again, none of them really get too much of a spotlight, but Hikari and Nana in particular, I remembered, had a pretty great sequence of episodes highlighting them. 

In something that we've sort of taken for granted, particularly in Heisei, Kuuga delves very deep into tropes that were groundbreaking for the franchise at the time, and basically kick-starts something that, as its tagline promises, 'a new hero, a new legend'. No longer is the hero a cyborg created by some sort of sinister cult-like organization, but we get something that's far more supernatural or magical. Or at least heavily more sci-fi. Likewise, while Black already has shades of this, we get a very rapid showcase of Kuuga's many alternate 'base' forms, before later gaining a couple of stronger and stronger forms. It's nowhere as blatant as a lot of the newer shows (particularly post-Decade shows) and a lot of Kuuga's forms are honestly pretty same-y, but it's going to be something that the rest of the franchise will most certainly build up on. 

Also, something that really struck me as being different is the simple pacing of the show. A lot of the Heisei series do have this in some degrees, but I feel like Kuuga, Agito and Faiz are the ones that are content to keep things relatively slow-paced and allow the characters to be the focus of the show itself, instead of going breakneck into "look at this major plot development and this new form and this new character" the way that some of the newer shows can sometimes feel. 

There's also the murders -- which... Kuuga has a pretty high body count -- even younger victims -- something that the show isn't afraid to actually wave in front of the eternally-optimistic Yusuke at one point as a plot point for Yusuke to go "I need to be stronger, since this thing is something only I can do". It's pretty interesting comparison to most modern Rider shows, which tend to be pretty bloodless as far as civilian casualties go. The fight scenes are also pretty interesting -- it's nothing too over-the-top as far as action scenes at the time goes. None of the special effects that its successors would have (even compared to its immediate successor Agito), and most of the fights rely on pretty simple punching, kicking, martial arts or shooting -- and they tend to be pretty quick, too! But on the other hand, this show does give us a lot of motorcycle stunts, particularly in the episodes centering on Go-Bada-Ba, the Gurongi who is a huge, walking homage to Kamen Rider #1.

The show itself is, again, very slow-paced, but still very neat to watch. It really takes us around half the series before the show actually has some themes that it develops, like the idea that Kuuga gets increasingly more and more destructive as he unlocks his 'Rising' forms -- the first of which causes a huge explosion in a city block that leads Yusuke and his police allies to consider how to lure the more powerful Gurongi out of populated areas. Eventually, the final batch of episodes focuses on the fear that in the process of chasing a very necessary power to protect others, Yusuke might lose his humanity and become the 'Ultimate Kuuga', a powerful but destructive warrior. It's a 'final form' that debuted only in the last two or three episodes, and is even treated as a bad thing... something that no other show except for maybe Zi-O has ever done. And yet, of course, good ol' Yusuke is just happy to help others, very light-hearted and cheerful in the way that a lot of the early Heisei main characters are. 

Ultimately, it's... it's a different show from what we are used to, particularly to anyone introduced to later iterations of the Kamen Rider franchise (which is most of the fandom nowadays). The vibe and the feel of the show is pretty different, the surprise bloodiness of the show, the lack of interpersonal conflict between the primary human cast, and the lack of emphasis on the action (a vast majority of Kuuga's final battle with N-Daguva-Zeba is off-screen) and the fact that the show is more of a character piece and one that discusses themes of power, corruption and the goodness of humanity does end up making Kuuga a different beast from most of the Heisei run. A classic one, for sure, and one that really ends up being a great show to watch. It's not a show that, I feel, is built well for energetic binge-watching the way that I would argue a lot of the newer shows are. But for one that's just something you play and watch a couple of episodes every week or so, it's certainly one that I highly enjoyed.