Kamen Rider Ex-Aid (2016)

After hearing many good things about Kamen Rider from some of my close friends, I decided to give the newest series — Kamen Rider Ex-Aid — a watch for the second time, despite how daunting it felt to cram in finishing over 34 episodes before the newest series came out.
Regardless, I ended up enjoying Ex-Aid a lot more than I did trying to watch it the first time around.

While at times Ex-Aid carried itself with brilliant pieces of script, interesting concepts and likeable  characters, other times it unfortunately felt lacking.
Characters lacked believable and understandable motivation, some interesting concepts that I looked forward to seeing more of were pushed to the side in favour for things that really only added trivial things to the story, and the script fell flat and lifeless in places.
Despite this, Hiroki Iijima and the rest of the cast did a great job carrying the bulk of the emotion and story when it seemed to become almost stagnant in places.

Kamen Rider has a history of catchy openings and insert songs, and amazing soundtracks, and in that department I was not disappointed. Ex-Aid's opening 'EXCITE' is catchy and you'll easily find yourself singing along after a few episodes and humming it when you least expect to be doing so.

Visually the speaking, the production value in Ex-Aid is phenomenal, if somewhat cheesy at times. It makes frequent use of bright colours and visual video-game tropes that make you feel you're watching several genres of video games go head to head right in front if your eyes.

The story, while intriguing, leaves many holes in the lore the show is trying to capture in a way that you don't quite notice it until you break down certain motivations of the characters, or find yourself explaining certain aspects of the show to a friend. Despite this, I was not all too annoyed as, as holey as the story was, I remained entertained and engaged throughout; whether that be in annoyance, awe or shock.

The acting of Tetsuya Iwanaga, Hayato Onozuka, Shouma Kai and Ukyo Matsumoto especially shone through the entirety of Ex-Aid, and their performances always roused some kind of emotion in me— No matter if it was anger, sadness, happiness or pity.  

As an introduction to the world of Tokusatsu, Kamen Rider Ex-Aid was brilliant.

Is it the best series Kamen Rider has to offer? No.
But if you want a show that's a little more filling after Ex-Aid, there are tons more Kamen Rider series to chose from, new or old, take your pick and have a look around. Something will strike your fancy eventually.
After all, there's a Kamen Rider series for everyone.

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Mild spoilers ahead:

Everything the show did well:
-Really likeable cast of characters overall, both in the hero and villain side.
-Really great action throughout the whole show.
-The fast pacing makes every episode feel important. It never feels like there's a filler episode or an episode that feels like a waste. Manages to properly develop the cast and expand the world in spite of said fast pacing.
-Cool world-building.
-Consistently great mysteries and reveals, almost every episode leaves you wanting more and see what happens next.
-Good story overall.
-Really unique soundtrack that stands out from other tokusatsu.
-Entertaining monsters of the week in the first quarter.

Everything the show did bad:
-The secondary rider Hiiro is pretty unlikeable from episodes 34 to 38 (and arguably ruins his character) and is the only time in the show where there's a considerable drop in writing quality, but even then it's really just the Hiiro stuff that's bad during this period, everything else is still great.
-Nico can feel like "too much of a brat" at times.
-Due to the show's fast pacing there's barely any downtime for the characters to interact and have slice of life moments.
-Taiga's backstory isn't properly shown and it's left to a Blu-ray spin-off which cheapens some of the emotional weight of his scenes.
-Despite Poppy being a really likeable character overall and arguably one of the best main girls in the franchise, she sucks as a rider as the show barely gives any reason for her to not transform. Her not transforming feels especially weird since she's canonically one of the strongest riders in the show for a while.
-The show revives too many characters to take the stakes seriously and this can make the writing feel cheap. However it's not that bad of an issue since the revived character actually serve a purpose in the show and doesn't feel like they're reviving them for the sake of it, these characters manage to be properly developed after their revival. So it's a more a divisive aspect rather than a straight up problem.

Reasons for the show's strengths:
Main producer Omori wanted to have video games as a main motif for Kamen Rider since Drive but was rejected back then. However this time he was able to convince Toei that the video game motif would do well due to the popularity of Yokai Watch at the time with children. In order to bring more realistic stakes he came up with the idea of the show having a medical motif too, due to the irony that the portrayal of life in video games was the exact opposite of a medical setting which would make for an interesting story.
Main writer Yuya Takahashi excels at making fast-paced stories and Omori created a perfect constantly changing setting to exploit his writing style as much as possible. Both of them and main director Shojiro Nakazawa were inspired by wrestling and thought making the riders lose and seem pathetic initially in order to build them up getting stronger and becoming more likeable.

Reasons for the show's problems:
Main writer Takahashi didn't know on what direction to Take Hiiro's character which led to his actions in the final arc.
Both Omori and Takahashi wanted to write the specials and movies in away that coordinated with their release so that they could relate them to the episodes of the show, and also to improve the pacing of the show. But due to this stuff like Taiga's backstory ended up being relegated to the Blu-ray special.
The popularity of certain characters led to their revivals, however these were at least made with enough anticipation that these characters were written with enough purpose.

Overall:
This show's is a great time overall but whether you love the show or not will hugely depend on how lenient you are on character revivals and how much you enjoy the cast. I still would recommend this show to any Kamen Rider fan or if you're into modern shounen anime/manga.

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An Unfortunate Diagnosis

It is with a heavy heart that I must say I was a little disappointed by Ex-Aid. I had heard it lauded as one of the greats of the franchise alongside favorites such as Build and OOO. Unfortunately, I could not find myself to become as attached to this one. Ex-Aid has some truly terrible costume designs. A large majority, save maybe 1 or 2 suits, look pretty bad. The general gimmick of this season is one that takes a *lot* of watching before you finally get over the hurdle of how dumb the idea of a "Doctor who saves with the power of Gaming" is. The series can feel a tad repetitive at times, especially due to how often suits tend to be reused. The belts themselves have a really odd, clunky, ugly design. Overall, it's just a series that isn't pretty.

Thankfully, partway through the series, the story has ways of exploring themes that could only really be seen in a story like this, with such an odd and honestly dumb concept. It leads to a story that has a majority of its runtime being bogged down by a plot that's difficult to connect to with characters you don't really want to see in action, but has some shining moments of interesting writing and characterization. Overall it's an odd beast to say the least.

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