Series Review: Kamen Rider Ex-Aid

Kamen Rider Ex-Aid [2016-2017] 

"Mighty Jump! Mighty Kick! Mighty Mighty ACTION! X!"

A bit of a shorter review this time around, but this is a review that I've done several times before but it kept getting eaten by the blog. In any case, due to the subject matter, Ex-Aid has always held a special place in my heart. It's about a doctor gamer!

I actually first discovered Ex-Aid around the time I watched Zi-O. Back then I was just watching whatever my friend recommended me, so I went from Gaim to Build to Faiz to Amazons (and I watched Wizard around this time too), and around that time the currently-running series was Zi-O. So when I saw the Ex-Aid tie-in episode and saw the utterly bizarre giant chibi Kamen Rider that did not look at all like any of the other Kamen Riders before. 

And at which point I decided that this weird-looking motherfucker whose entire concept is a homage to Mario going from a short, chibi version of himself into a stronger one with a power-up is probably the most creative Kamen Rider concept ever. 

And, granted, I do have a slightly inflated opinion of Ex-Aid in general because I really do like the concept. It's a bit of a 'make it or break it' bit on whether you like the aesthetics of the show, but I really do feel that however unapologetically loud everything is does add to a huge charm. The other part of the show that's going to make it or break it is Dan "God" Kuroto, a godsend (heh) to the show, which we'll cover in a bit more detail later on. Ultimately, I find both of these aspects to be really fun, so the show ends up appealing a lot to me. 

Ex-Aid is one of the shows that slowly lead to the closing of the Heisei era, and I feel like it's easily one of the more solid ones. It gets compared a lot with Build, the series that succeeded this and tends to be hailed as one of the most solidly-structured Heisei shows ever plot-wise, and I don't think I can argue against that. One thing that I did like about Ex-Aid, though, is how it really does manage to juggle a large cast and a hilariously wacky concept and still play most of it well -- something that several other Kamen Rider shows didn't really manage to do. 

The show's concept isn't all too different with a lot of the Heisei shows. Our hero, doctor Hojo Emu, is a fledgling intern in Seito University Hospital, but he's also a huge gamer geek who alternates between being the genius video gamer "M" (pronounced identically to 'Emu'). Rather coincidentally, at around the time of his internship, a 'game illness' starts infecting humans and spawns monstrous creatures called Bugsters from the patients' negative emotions -- a very Super Sentai-esque concept to monsters. Emu finds himself drawn into the CR, a secret facility under the hospital, where it's revealed that the hospital employs doctors that use Gashat cartridges to transform into Kamen Riders. 

Yeah, it's ridiculous. It's honestly kind of stupid when I put it into words. Doctors transform into superheroes in jumpsuits with video game cartridges to fight a virus that manifests as giant CGI video game enemies. The fight involves getting power-ups that spawn randomly in the battlefield, and there's really no semblance of any actual science to this. The video game cartridges are even inspired by specific game genres, with Emu's Mighty Action X being a Super Mario platformer pastiche. 

And yet... and yet it's still surprisingly earnest. The first chunk of the show basically introduces us to the relatively large cast. We've got Kagami Hiiro, or Kamen Rider Brave, the arrogant but extremely skilled surgeon who can 'cut anything'. We've got the unlicensed doctor and Doctor Black Jack homage Hanaya Taiga, or Kamen Rider Snipe. We've got the happy-go-lucky and all-around goober of a medical examiner Kujo Kiriya, or Kamen Rider Lazer. All of them start off as one-note quasi-antagonists, but as the show goes on we peel back the layers and backstory behind Hiiro, Taiga and Kiriya and all of them get such good stories behind them that I won't be spoiling here. All of them carry their emotional baggage, and they end up working through their issues thanks to their exposure to Emu. 

Oh, and there's the gloriously-named Poppy Pipopapo, a nurse that turns out to be a colourful bubblegum-coloured friendly video-game Bugster being that helps our CR. These form the core of the cast earlier on, with Brave, Snipe and Lazer taking turns at being the guest star of the week. There is admittedly a bit of a frustration with some of the audiences at the time about how much of an uncommunicative jackass everyone is, but since I came into this show fresh from Gaim and Build, I didn't find it particularly jarring. 

Ultimately, as our heroes end up fighting stronger Bugsters and fight over the mysterious Gashats that allow them power-ups, a lot of these early episodes do a great job at being relatively standalone solid episodic stories, while also building up each individual members of the cast. While all of this is going on we've got two enigmatic sentient Bugsters who walk around in humanoid forms -- Graphite and Parad (sometimes translated as Pallad or Parado). Later on, the good guy cast would be joined by the peppy gamer girl Nico, who ended up basically being unlikely buddies with Snipe. 

(Also, last spoiler warning for huge points in the show, I guess:)

But then things quickly delve around Dan "God" Kuruto, and I believe the enjoyment of this show really revolves around how much you tolerate Kuroto. Initially presented to us as the ultimate shady-yet-very-charismatic man, it's rather surprising to remember just how amazingly subtle Kuroto was early on in the show. While the show makes no secret that his company, Genm Corporation, is the creator of the Gamer Driver and the Gashats -- and the Heisei shows are no stranger to huge companies being behind the Kamen Rider technology of the year -- I do like the slow buildup that Dan Kuroto is secretly pulling the strings behind what's going on. It first begins with rather memetic shots of Dan looking utterly creepy and smiling, but Dan Kuroto would be remembered forevermore by the fandom as one of the biggest scenery-chewing lunatic that other successors would try to ape but not do so quite as well. Kuroto's insane god complex (renaming himself with various Japanese readings of 'god' over the show) is pretty fun, and even though the show does eventually give us a sob backstory for Kuroto,  the show also never really stops in preserving what made him memorable in the first place. There is no way to really describe Dan Kuroto without experiencing him in the show, but his status as the face of Kamen Rider memes is most assuredly well-deserved. 

What really makes Ex-Aid feel rather refreshing is how often the show itself evolves. Just at it seems like it has settled into a rather tame formula, it then shakes things up with the rather early killing of one of its supportive characters, Kujo Kiriya, in what's memorable by the fandom as the biggest WTF moments. Which I adored, since the episode where Kiriya figures out the true villain before getting brutally murdered by Dan Kuroto happens on the back end of a Christmas special that features Emu, Hiiro and Poppy singing a Christmas song. Later episodes of the show do end up exploring a lot about mortality and morality, and while it's still ultimately a show with a happy ending, there are several times in the show where I really did appreciate just how deep they are willing to explore the core themes. 

The show itself went through a bunch of reinvention as well as the main villains change. With Dan Kuroto as the hammy Kamen Rider Genm (particularly when he gets his amazing 'Dangerous Zombie' suit and powers) the show is a bit more straightforward in trying to get our heroes to figure out who the identity of Kamen Rider Genm is, and later on, how to kill him. We get a sequence of episodes which I think is probably my least favourite arc of the show where we discover Emu and Parad's backstory. And later on we get the revelation of the true true aim of what's going on, with a real-life MMORPG called Kamen Rider Chronicle... and then the revelation of the final villain, Kamen Rider Chronos. Throughout all this, we get some really great moments surrounding our main characters. Every single major character -- Poppy, Hiiro, Kiriya and Parad's stand out-- get at least a story arc that will make you quite sad. Without spoiling or detailing too much of the plotline in the best parts of Ex-Aid, there are a lot of points in the show where they really question whether Bugsters even count as people, which is easily the highlight of the show for me. 

And yes, I will go and note that the final couple of arcs are a bit... hit-and-miss. And while Dan Kuroto and Kujo Kiriya's first death and rebirth are handled relatively well, later on and especially near the end of the show, I felt like the show played a bit too deep into the whole 'death is cheap in video games' thing. Add that to the fact that while Dan Masamune/Kamen Rider Chronos is a fun villain in his own right, I felt like the show's huge, huge investment and focus to Dan Kuroto and Parad really meant that Masamune's role as the final antagonist does feel kind of flat in favour of having those two more popular antagonists fight on the side of the angels. 

Another very valid criticism about Ex-Aid is how much of its full story is told via spin-offs and movies, something that Hiiro and Emu's actors even made fun of in an interview. We've got a couple of rather fun but ultimately inconsequential spin-offs (though "Dr. Pac-Man" is still my favourite Kamen Rider movie ever); but after the ending of the Ex-Aid show, we've got the "True Ending" movie, and the trilogy of "Another Ending" mini-movies (Brave/Snipe; Para-DX/Poppy; Genm/Lazer) to truly get the final conclusion of the story. And that's not to mention that there are some technically-canon-to-the-show miniseries like the "Snipe: Episode ZERO" prequel series, the amazing yet bizarre "Gorider" crossover series or the tongue-in-cheek "Tricks" three-parter.

Still, unlike some other shows with a lot of supplementary material, I felt like Ex-Aid's cast and general aesthetic (and the sounds that the belts make!) are so much fun that I never felt like it was a chore to hunt down and consume more Ex-Aid material. I felt like Ex-Aid struck a great balance at having the perfect size of a cast, and having every single main character feel fleshed out... especially seeing how the recent Saber didn't do quite as good of a job at doing so. One thing that I also did like is that Emu's role didn't feel like he was just the everyman. In some shows where the cast is so large, sometimes the main character ends up falling into just being a boring, predictable generic hero guy. Which is, again, what happens to Saber but also arguably to the main heroes in Agito, Ryuki or Gaim to varying degrees. I feel like between his interactions with Poppy and Parad in particular, Emu did end up carving a niche for himself in the show and he ends up being a pretty memorable character by the end of the show. 

Ultimately, even with the slightly messy final batch of episodes, I did feel like Ex-Aid is still one of my favourite Kamen Rider shows overall. If nothing else, it has that consistent quality of wackiness and fun that I do appreciate in a Kamen Rider show.

(I've watched Revice's first two episodes. They're neat! I'm not going to do episodic reviews because I was extremely burned out with Saber. But maybe we'll do the same thing I did for One Piece and do like, five to ten episodes at a time or so?)