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Kamen Rider Drive was a great series that had cool suit designs, a unique transformation device AND rider machine, and an energy-filled theme song. Tomari Shinnosuke and Mr. Belt were highly likeable and reflective of the series as a whole- sometimes light hearted and comedic, at other times dead-serious and intense. Likewise, Kiriko, Go and Chase, especially Chase, were all excellent characters with dark, but interesting, backstories.What also struck me about this series were the Roidmude, particularly the main trio- initially appearing to be cruel killing machines, their backstories painted them as being sympathetic and nuanced- androids made to feel pain and suffering, yet treated as objects to be abused and disposed of by their owner. Thus, they were some of the better Kamen Rider antagonists that I've seen.
My main complaint with the series is that, approximately until the reveal of Chase's identity, the series seems to trundle along in a monster-of-the-week type way and seemed fairly uninteresting, to the point where I dropped it for about two months before tentatively starting it again. The first 15 or so episodes required a bit of patience to get through. That being said, the story really shifts into top gear after this, so don't be discouraged.
All that's left to say; "Nice Drive!"
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So, I think to fully enjoy these characters, you need to watch the spin offs especially the Chase one, if nothing else. As for Drive and it's characters, here's what I think.
Drive had some fantastic characters and ideas especially the writing was strong and the antagonists were so well fleshed out when they become anti heroes or just victims of the main antagonists manipulative ways, everyone from Heart, to Brain, to Medic, I felt for them all. But while still a great show, I felt it lacking in some regions - first off Chase. Let's face it Chase was supposed to be the guy everyone was supposed to root for, through his interaction with Kamen Riders and the team sure, but the set up was for Gou right? So, their relationship shouldn't have felt so lacking.
What I mean is, we only see them interacting as Kamen Riders, and barely at all in actual life. I know that Gou was shown as being tsundere and supposed to be stoic but they could still have had actual meaningful conversations like they did those two or three times. Because of this their bromance felt incomplete. When the relationship between Heart and Brain, Heart and Shin Heart Chase was done so well. Even Shin and Gou was better than Gou and Chase. And the thing is its not like there was a lot going on plot wise in the beginning and Chase was introduced pretty early anyway.
The other minor gripe is the beginning part not being as interesting as the second part. Basically this was the time they could have used to develop Chase and Gou and both these problems could have been solved easily.
And okay I love Ryoma he's really done a good job but characters wise I just LOVE Heart Chase, and Gou!!!
But the thing about Drive and the reason I'm rating it high, despite those issues is because much like Build and W, Drive characters are the type that wont leave you alone. You keep wanting to go back. So this one and the spin offs have great re watch value for me.
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-Really great cast overall from both the heroes and villains side.
-The Roidmudes generals are among the best villains in the franchise.
-Everyone in the hero side is useful, specially this show's main girl Kiriko who is one of, if not the best main girl in the franchise.
-Pretty great action.
-Great final arc.
-Good plot overall.
Everything the show did bad:
-The show has a really slow start, this is mostly due the monsters of the week being amongst the franchise's worst, almost Wizard-tier and doesn't help how easy it's to predict the outcome of the cases if you've seen other tokusatsu. Since the main villains are barely involved in the first quarter aside of Machine Chaser who doesn't have a personality due to plot reasons, these make the beginning feel really draggy. However it's more stomachable due to how likeable the main hero cast is and by the second half they drop the monster of the week aspect.
-Mach/Go drops his lighthearted personality fairly early on and comes of as a jerk during most of the show's middle but at least he manages to be a really likeable character by the end.
-The Sigma Circular fight in the finale feels forced.
Reasons for the show's strengths:
The show's producer Omori is good at coming of with cool motifs and executed the car motif in a very different way from other tokusatsu.
The main writer Riku Sanjo is really great at writing characters and at world-building.
The popularity of Baron from Gaim lead to the creation of Chase but Sanjo and Omori didn't want to repeat concepts of previous shows and managed to make a pretty unique execution of the rival concept and it was done really well.
Reasons for the show's problems:
I honestly am at a complete loss a to what caused the first half's monster of the week so repetitive. Main producer Omori seemingly didn't request this idea in fact it seems that he was the one who requested for the show to become more serialized in the second half. Main writer Riku Sanjou is really great at writing episodic monsters of the week, even when they're 2-parters. Heck, his previous rider show W was good at having mystery-focused monster of the week. I guess he can be inconsistent since he made Ziga which was a pretty mediocre manga but I honestly felt that it could have been an issue of the manga's editor. He also was the main writer of Digimon XROSS which sucked but in that show the problem was that he barely actually wrote in the show and that the show shifted producers 3 times. The problem also cannot be this show having multiple side writers since he wrote most of the episodic stuff, W was made in the same conditions and the most recurring secondary writer was Keiichi Hasegawa who mostly wrote for the second half.
The only reasoning that comes to mind is that he already had a story draft prior to TV Asahi requesting the show to have detectives (which is honestly weird since this is the only time that comes to mind where TV Asahi had a major creative decision in a Toei's Tokusatsu since the early 90s) so he head to impromptuly scrap it resulting in the first arc being more sloppily written but even that feels far-fetched since that seemingly happened way too early in the pre-production to be a real issue.
Overall:
Really great show overall, its start drags it down but not by much and still manages to be a great time overall. Highly recommend to tokusatsu fans or to fans of lighthearted cop dramas.
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