Cleverly Titled Column: Kamen Rider Fourze review

 Cleverly Titled Column is my weekly (honest) column, where I'll be talking about anime, manga, and tokusatsu (live action special-effects shows) that catch my eye. My main focus will be on the mecha genre, tokusatsu hero shows, and romance manga, but I might branch out into other things if I feel strongly enough that I need to rant or rave about them.

Okay, so this isn't exactly anime or manga, but hey, it's close enough, I'm just expanding your horizons. What I'm reviewing this week is Kamen Rider Fourze, a tokusatsu (live-action special effects) hero show. If you haven't heard of this stuff before, think Power Rangers (or Masked Rider, which was used footage from Kamen Rider series). I assume most people in the society haven't heard of tokusatsu, or if they have then they've probably not watched it, but that's why I'm reviewing a show that's both a lot of fun and quite accessible.

The 40th anniversary entry in the prolific Kamen Rider franchise, Kamen Rider Fourze is the story of Kisaragi Gentarou, a transfer student to Amanogawa High School (AGHS), whose goal in life is to be friends with everybody. He's more or less a typical shonen protagonist, driven by friendship, hot blood, and good old-fashioned stupidity.

 

The first two people he meets at the school are Yuuki, an old friend of his who wants to be an astronaut, and Kengo, a cynic who has to spend a lot of time in the nurse's office due to a medical condition. It turns out that AGHS is, unsurprisingly, threatened by monsters. Someone mysterious is distributing switches imbued with the power cosmic to students with grudges, letting them transform into dangerous monsters called "Zodiarts". Kengo and Yuuki have the one weapon that can fight them - a set of specialised Astro Switches and a belt developed by Kengo's father, collectively known as the Fourze System - but Kengo's condition leaves him too weak to use them. Gentarou immediately get involved, both not wanting his new friends (i.e. everyone in the school) to be harmed by the monsters and wanting to make friends with the students who are becoming Zodiarts, and this leads to him using the belt to transform into Kamen Rider Fourze.

 The core theme of the series is, as you may have guessed, friendship, with Gentarou setting out every time to befriend the student who turns into the monster-of-the-fortnight (Kamen Rider tells its stories over two episodes to let them breathe and save money on monster costumes) and anyone else who gets wrapped up in the incidents. Along the way he makes friends with a core group of varied people, who form the "Kamen Rider Club" and hang out at the Rabbit Hatch, a secret base on the moon that they access through a disused locker at school (it makes more sense than you'd think, honest). Partway through the series, an exchange student from another school, Sakuta Ryuusei, shows up, with his own powers to transform into Kamen Rider Meteor. He pretends to be friends with Gentarou and the Kamen Rider Club, but has his own hidden agenda and sees Gentarou's focus on friendship to be foolish, which makes for some interesting conflict.

Kamen Rider Fourze doesn't set the world on fire with its originality, but it's a lot of fun in the right ways for a tokusatsu series. The series has a large main cast, each filling a cliché clique in the (surprisingly Americanised) high school setting - you have the nerd, the goth girl, the cheerleader, the captain of the handegg football team, and so on, and they all interact amusingly and feel like real friends in spite of their differences. Gentarou is a very endearing main character - he's one hell of an idiot, but he has plenty of spirit and if anyone so much of thinks of messing with his friends, he's going to kick their ass and befriend them in the process. There's so many times in Fourze where most shows would have the characters get stuck in big pointless drama, but Gentarou just trusts in his friends to do the right thing, which is quite refreshing. This doesn't mean that there's never any conflict between the heroes, of course - for example, the clash between Gentarou and Ryuusei's views on friendship is a big theme of the middle of the series and comes to an excellent dramatic end.

Of course, the action is what makes or breaks a toku hero show, and Fourze's certainly no slouch there. Koichi Sakamoto's fight direction is some of the best in recent toku, and Fourze's wide array of powers from 40 different Astro Switches (Collect them all!) mean the action doesn't get same-y. The costume designs are generally really nice too - Fourze's shuttle-head takes a little getting used to, but I found once I accepted that I liked the Fourze suits a lot, and Meteor's suit is really simple but elegant. The Zodiart monster suits are great as well, with a nice constellation motif that makes them stand out amongst Kamen Rider monsters. I love the soundtrack too, both the opening and instert songs and the BGM fit the show perfectly.

I'm not going to pretend everything's perfect about Fourze, though. The sub-plot about Ryusei's secret identity as Meteor drags on far too long in the middle of the series with little development between it start and end. Unfortunately, the writers seem to go too far in the opposite direction afterwards, with very few plots that last longer than the standard two episodes - I still enjoyed the story, but it could have been much more if they'd tried. Some of Fourze's Switch powers are quite goofy, which some people might see as a negative - they include a segway and a foot-mounted ink stamper that makes explosions, which kind of thrive on how ridiculous they are but can also feel too cartoony in live-action. Meteor's mid-series powerup is a disappointment too, since he goes from using martial arts to wielding a staff with a beyblade on the end - on the other hand, his fighting was a little underwhelming to start with, since the suit actor couldn't pull off the character's Bruce Lee-esque fighting style as well as the actor who played Ryusei out-of-suit, so it's kind of even win-loss outside of the less impressive new finisher attack.

Despite these problems, Fourze still holds up really well as a series. Unlike some Kamen Rider series, it never goes off-direction or loses its spark, and it's fun from beginning to end. It's definitely a more light-hearted series, but that makes perfect sense considering that it was the first Kamen Rider show to begin after the earthquake - the producers wanted to make something that would cheer kids up and it certainly does that. Despite being aimed at kids, it's still very enjoyable for older audiences too - which shouldn't be surprising since a lot of popular anime and manga like One Piece and Fairy Tail are aimed at kids too. The staff probably considered older audiences too, since it's the series released for the 40th anniversary of a prolific franchise. You don't have to know anything about the other series to watch Fourze, though - modern Kamen Rider series are all self-contained outside of crossovers in some movies. I really recommend Kamen Rider Fourze - it's a great show and an excellent place to start out on the Kamen Rider franchise and tokusatsu in general.

Kamen Rider Fourze has been subbed by Over-Time, and you can find torrents for the whole series on their website, along with the first movie, Movie War Megamax, which has 3 segments - one for Fourze, one for the previous series Kamen Rider OOO, and finally an epic climax that brings them together in an awesome crossover. The OOO segment will obviously make more sense if you watch that series, but you'll enjoy the Fourze segment and the finale just as much even if you haven't seen OOO. Megamax is best watched between episodes 14 and 15. If you prefer direct downloads to torrents, you can find all of Fourze (and basically all tokusatsu that's ever been fansubbed) at KRDL.