Series Review: Kamen Rider Ryuki

Kamen Rider Ryuki [2002-2003] 

"Advent."

Here is another show that everyone seems to love! I feel like whenever I see someone recommending a solid, good Kamen Rider show, Double,  Kuuga and Ryuki are always pretty high on everyone's lists. Ryuki is the archetypal 'riders fight riders' show, something that everyone will note that shows like Blade, Gaim, Kabuto and pretty much every single show in the past five yeras have danced around with. As the third show in the Heisei era, Ryuki was done apparently with the principle that 'your justice might not be the world's justice', showing that in this Rider Battle, there are some people who call themselves Kamen Riders and fight for a cause that might not actually be a right cause to fight for. 

From a Doylist point of view, Ryuki is when Toei finally gave in and allowed the title "Kamen Rider" to be slapped onto villains and not make it quite as exclusive. It is, after all, far more marketable to sell "Kamen Rider Ouja" and "Kamen Rider Gai" merchandise than "Shadow Moon", "Heart Roidmude" or "Horse Oprhnoch" as much as anyone who has watched those shows would tell you that they are far more important than some other riders in their respective shows. 

Marketing aside, though, Ryuki is a pretty fun show to go through. It's the first to break through the admittedly pretty short duo of Kuuga and Agito of having a relatively similar looking feel of being a quasi-supernatural show with ancient artifacts. The concept of Ryuki is pretty interesting, and one that, while feeling somewhat repetitive nowadays, is definitely fresh for the franchise at the time. In the setting of Ryuki, there has been a lot of missing people that the audience see get abducted by monstrous beings from mirrors, and our main character, ORE Journal reporter Kido Shinji, gets sucked into one of these mirror worlds during an investigation. He quickly finds himself discovering a bizarre 'Advent Deck', and with the reluctant help of Akiyama "Kamen Rider Knight" Ren, Shinji ends up finding himself involved in this mirror world as he accidentally makes a 'pact' with a giant CGI robot dragon and becomes Kamen Rider Ryuki when he tries to protect innocent lives from all the monsters. 

Poor Shinji finds himself way over his head when he realizes what this 'Rider Battle' is all about, though. In a very anime-esque way, some higher power have given out these advent decks out to thirteen Kamen Riders (only around ten appear in the show, with the others only showing up in specials and movies), and these Kamen Riders have to fight to the death in a Battle Royale style Rider Battle, and the winner will have their wish granted. Again, something that feels pretty fantasy anime-esque and some of the concepts here have been repeated in other subsequent Rider shows (Blade and Decade borrows the card aspect; Wizard borrows the contract beast aspect) but, again, Ryuki itself does a pretty great job at keeping everything pretty fresh. Though I will say that it's kind of a shame that the creepiness of the mirrors and a mirror world tends to be downplayed after the first dozen episodes or so -- the mirror world ends up just being a convenient place for our heroes to run wild and blow shit up without causing a large amount of casualties. 

The main set of characters are pretty solid, and I would daresay that the pair of Shinji and Ren actually ends up defining the archetypal primary rider/secondary rider for much of the Heisei era. Shinji is kind of dumb, sort of clueless about everything that's going on, but is so positive and earnest about his desire to stop the 'tatakae' (fight!) and is basically a naive, positive influence thrust into a cast of characters that are cynical at best and outright murderous at worst. As the secondary rider, Akiyama Ren, meanwhile, is aloof, a bit of a jerk, contemptuous of our main character and knows more than our main hero, but ultimately gets infected by Shinji's positive attitude and warms up a lot. Plus, Ren's reason as to why he feels it's justifiable to kill the other Riders in the Rider Battle is to revive his comatose girlfriend, something that he feels absolutely guilty due to the events that led up to it. And Kanzaki Yui, the main female character... she's kind of there? She's heavily involved in the backstory of the Rider Battle, and she interacts a fair bit with Shinji, but I can't help but feel like she's one of those characters whose inclusion to the story is more of an afterthought. 

Rounding up the main cast of primary riders would be the show's most entertaining and violent villain, the snake-skin jacketed serial killer Asakura Takeshi, Kamen Rider Ouja, easily one of the most reprehensible people to walk around with the title 'Kamen Rider'. On the other side of the spectrum, the sometimes-antagonist, sometimes-ally is the older lawyer gentleman, Kitaoka Shuichi, Kamen Rider Zolda, who is the epitome of a lovable jackass. A bit of a flirt, a bit of an opportunist, clearly loving money and influence more, Kitaoka (and his butler/servant Yura Goro) nevertheless ends up being roped into Shinji and Ren's more kind-hearted plots, although it's a bit of a coin toss what Kitaoka will do because he, like Ren, has a reason that he's fighting for because he wants to win the Rider Battle. 

Having watched the very multiple-Rider-heavy Gaim and Build before this one, it's actually very refreshing to see just how much the series focuses on the four primary dudes -- Ryuki, Knight, Zolda and Ouja. Sure, the six other riders that show up in the show do hang around for a bit, and there are moments where characters like Gai, Raia and Imperer sort of hang out and muck around for a huge battle royale, but for the most part the cast is limited to the four main characters and maybe one other secondary member of the cast. 

And for the most part, a good chunk of the show revolves around the phrase 'fight' (tatakae, as it's often rendered in memes). As is, what's the reason for fighting? Ryuki himself notes that he doesn't care about what the magic wish or the reason behind the Rider Battle existing is. Knight has a fervent goal that he fights for and he doesn't care if he damns himself for it. Zolda is more flippant and self-absorbed, but he, too, is fighting for a goal... and there's Ouja, who just uses the Rider Battle for an excuse to murder the shit out of people. The other seondary Riders have their own reasons. Plus, there is Yui's brother, the enigmatic Kanzaki Shiro and his other cohorts that act as minor arc villains, too, all have their own reasons. 

And that, I feel, is the best part of the show. Shinji, Ren, Asakura and Kitaoka are all very well-rounded characters, and while there's always a significant distance that Asakura keeps from the rest of the cast (being a reprehensible psychopath and all) the other three interact very, very well with each other and I'm an absolute huge fan of them. It's even better when some of the more well-realized secondary riders get tossed into the rider battle. Some are sort of one-off antagonists (Kamen Rider Scissors is basically a starter antagonist that gets killed off early just to show the horrors of the Rider Battle; and Kamen Rider Odin is an enigma wrapped in a mystery), but for the most part the show gets a lot of mileage playing the characters off against our main cast. 

Take, for instance, Kamen Rider Raia, Tezuka Miyuki (Ultraman Azul!), an oddball of a fortune teller that ends up helping Shinji out a fair bit before reinforcing just how brutal the Rider Battle is while being obsessed with changing the 'fate' that only he understands. Or Kamen Rider Gai, Shibaura Jun, a sociopath who delights in seeing all this as a game, but is very much willing to play the good guy ally to fool Shinji. Or the whole Tojo Satoru/Kamen Rider Tiger arc, which revolves around the poor dude and his desire to be accepted by his mentor, one of the people indirectly responsible for the Rider Battle. Or Sano Mitsuru, Kamen Rider Imperer, a person with such a warped upbringing that he believes that friendship and alliances are commodities to be bought and sold. They aren't counted as Kamen Riders, but the Alternatives are pretty fun arc villains for the short time they show up in the show. Again, all of these characters have their own reasons of fighting, they have their own reasons for Shinji to befriend and distrust, and it's very, very fun to see Shinji interact with them and basically mature throughout the course of the story.

One of the more interesting parts of the show is just how interesting Shinji Kido himself is... in that he's actually not a very good fighter, especially compared to how effortlessly powerful compared to other riders other main riders like Agito, Gaim, Kabuto, Blade and Build end up becoming over the course of their shows. He's not shown to be weak and has his share of monster-destroying kicks, but while it's not particularly on-the-nose, the show pretty distinctively shows off that Knight, Ouja and Zolda are far more experienced and far more willing to use more bloodthirsty methods to take out their prey compared to our good sweet nice protagonist Shinji. And yet Shinji still manages to be easily one of the most interesting members of the cast specifically because of this vulnerability and his staunch and naively positive outlook on life. A lot of observations has been done about Ryuki's story as a whole, with some noting that Shinji's role ends up becoming more of a 'voice of conscience' for Ren and Kitaoka, with the two of them being the characters with a reason to fight... and I honestly could totally see this story being framed as being Ren's story, and it just bills Shinji and Ren equally. 

There are some facets of the show that doesn't work quite as well, for sure. The Mirror Monsters end up basically being distractions while Shinji and the audience slowly learns about the rules of the Rider Battle. While they were not completely dropped, the Contract Monsters also feel somewhat underused; other than the brief subplot with Ouja's Genocider and both Shinji and Ren unlocking their Survive super forms, they are kind of handwaved aside. 

Especially early on, there's a lot of stuff with the ORE Journal side characters (which are wholly unmemorable) but it is another facet that gets dropped pretty quickly. I am especially not a fan of the handling of Kamen Rider Odin and primary antagonist Kanzaki Shiro... that Odin episode was absolutely badass and cool, but I feel like a lot of the revelations about the vague reality-breaking powers of Odin and the origins of the Rider Battle and Mirror world is sort of handwave-y. I think a bunch of details about the nature of Odin and the Rider Battle isn't even explained adequately in the show, and it's through word of the producers and spinoffs that they were made clearer. Thankfully, a lot of these are sort of relegated near the end of the series, and while I wouldn't say that Ryuki has the best conclusion... it's actually one of the better ones compared to a lot of other Rider shows. And, well, if you don't like the ending, Ryuki actually has several. 

Without spoiling that Huge Thing (tm) that happens in the penultimate episode, Ryuki has a bit of a alternate-splinter-timeline thing going on with the Rider Battle. In addition to the final episode of the TV series, we've got "Ryuki: Episode Final", a movie that serves as an alternate ending for the series; "Special: 13 Riders", a weird alternate retelling retelling of the Rider Fight with a completely different beginning and ending; and as recently as 2019, "Rider Time: Kamen Rider Ryuki", a three-part special tie-in to Zi-O that tosses the entire cast of Ryuki, even the dead ones, gets resurrected to continue playing this Rider Battle game, featuring nearly the entire main cast reprising their roles. It's a bit of a cop-out considering what a surprising (and very divisive) ending the actual TV series has, but ultimately I did feel like the actual series' ending might be one of the more poignant endings of others. Oh, and these side-movies feature the other 'missing' Kamen Riders from the lineup, with Kamen Riders Femme, Verde and Ryuga showing up in the former two specials.

Again, Ryuki is one of those shows that is a bit hard to talk about without spoiling specific moments in the series, but I feel like it strikes the perfect balance between a grimmer storytelling without losing sight of the optimism that the franchise is meant to be championing. I feel like I didn't quite get the hype of Ryuki when I first watched through it, but looking back at it, I feel like it's actually easily one of my favourite Rider series out there; it just stumbles quite a bit near the end. It's not perfect, but Ryuki is remarkably consistent in the themes and the stories it wants to tell from start to finish, which is certainly not something the next four entries in the Heisei era can claim. Slightly overhyped, but definitely a series that deserves the crown the fandom has placed upon it.