Kamen Rider Hibiki (2005)

Mild spoilers ahead:

Everything the show did well:
-The Teacher-student dynamics in this show are really fun.
-Easily one of the most unique tokusatsu ever made.
-Fantastic action that feels really different from other toku, pretty good CGI for the time too.
-Cases of the week feel really unique and experimental throuout the show.
-Really interesting monster dynamics. For the first half the fights consists in a duo monsters protecting a giant one. In the second half the fights revolve around fending off multiple monsters, at times swarms, simultaneously while they were also defended by the main viain duo.
-Really cool world-building throughout the show.
-All of the characters dynamics in the first half are great.
-The first half has a really comfy atmosphere around it.
-Really experimental way of directing, it might not be for everybody but makes the show stand out and ooze with style.
-Extremely cool fighting style where Riders fight with instruments.

Everything the show did bad:
-The second half introduces the single most hateable character in this franchise to date, Kyosuke Kiriya. He pretty much gives anti-character development to most of the cast and treats them like crap for pretty much no reason. Even though he seemingly gets character development and gets puts in his place a lot, he ultimately backpedals in the end and gets away with being a massive jerk. This just make the show's quality drop hard in the second half.
-The show has the worst final episode in the franchise so far.
-The main villain duo despite starting interesting, the second half ruins them by having a really dumb plot-twist at the end and never explaining their goals. The latter leads to some really cheap writing and plot convinience.
-The titular Rider Hibiki feels a bit more rude in the second half.
-The 3 main apprentices get done really dirty in the second half, specially Akira.
-Tsutomu Tsumura gets written out due to the introduction of Kiriya, so the rivalry that was being set up with him and Asumu goes nowhere.
-The introduction of the Hibiki's final form is really dumb.
-The whole conflict plotline with Ibuki near the end feels really forced.
-The opening shows a bunch of riders who don't actually appear in the show.
-Despite the show having a really unique world by the end, the world-building starts pretty cheap. Most of its detailed are kept vague but then the show decides to info-dump them on episode 11 which feels pretty cheap. After that the world-building is much better for the most part.
-The show doesn't really feel like a Kamen Rider show, which isn't necessarily a bad thing but I feel it should be point out.

Reasons for the show's strengths:
The producer was dead-set at creating something unlike any tokusatsu that preceded it.

Reasons for the show's problems:
This show is the Kamen Rider show with the most problems in its productions so far.
First it wasn't even supposed to be a Kamen Rider show. While Kamen Rider Blade is universally beloved nowadays it had done worse than expected back when it aired. During the Showa era the franchise used to enter hiatuses all the time so Toei originally wanted to take a break from rider after Blade and revive another Ishinomori franchise, in this case, Henshin Ninja Arashi (although this decision was mostly made because the staff wanted to reboot Henshin Ninja Arashi and the fear that Kamen Rider was doing too much Rider VS Rider rather than Blade's ratings). Blade's Jack Form was inspired by said franchise and was seen as at test run to see if this idea would do well. However during pre-production, news about the next Chouseishin season started circulating (a Tokusatsu made by a rival company Toho) that it would have ninjas as a focus so they had to drop rebooting the Henshin Ninja Arashi. Ultimately the show became a new IP, known as Ongeki Rider Hibiki and the show would enter proper production under this title. However the show ultimately rebranded into a Kamen Rider show at the last minute since it was considered that it would produce more money this way and it feared releasing a new IP due to Chouseishin still being a new franchise so they felt they would overlap, that combined with rumors of rival toy company Takara launching a Tokusatsu and GARO coming out (although the latter didnt overlap due to being for an adult demographic). So the show ended up not feeling like Kamen Rider at all initially and starts becoming slightly closer to the franchise from the second quarter onward but it stills feels really different.
The show's producer, Shigenori Takatera went really overbudget with the show since he expected this to be the start of a new franchise. The show's toys sold really poorly so he was adviced to reduce the budget significantly, however he felt this wouldn't allow to achieve the main writer duo's vision so kept going. This ultimately led to him being removed from the show after episode 29 and alongside him left the writer duo, consequently he would be fired after the show ended.
Producer Shirakura was ultimately chosen to continue due to being available at the time as the other producers were occupied with other projects. He would ultimately choose Toshiki Inoue as the main writer due to his experience with weird shows since Hibiki was really experimental, also he was the only main writer out of the ones he had worked on the past to be available at the time.
It's unknown why they didn't use the original script done by the previous staff, but either way Inoue tends to be bad at writing characters that weren't initially conceived by him so he ultimately did a really poor job. Due to the sudden change, there were ton of scheduling issues with the script. Due to rewrites and and issues with meeting deadlines on the finale, the riders that were shown in the opening didn't actually appear in the final battle like they were initially planned.

Overall:
The show's definitely among the most unique tokusatsu out ther, but the second is just such a massive disappointment that I cannot recommended this show. I feel that for most people this show is an overall mediocre 4/10 show, it does enough cool stuff to keep it from being bad but that's it. Personally the cool concepts behind some episodes and the cool fights made me come out overall positive out of the show, but that won't be most people. If you think this show's concepts look really cool, then I recommend watching this show up till episode 29 which feels climatic enough after that it really isn't worth it to keep going unless you're really REALLY curious for what happens next. But it really pains me that the production staff saying this was the "Kamen Rider Amazon of the Heisei era" back at the press conference ended up being a bit TOO accurate and the show ended up changing course halfway through just like Amazon.

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