*pulled from my LB review*

Duke half is fine, more of a shared backstory thing for all the Yggdrasil members individual origins, plot about some former researcher starting a brainwashing terrorist group seemed kind of vague and unmemorable, I think the highlights were really just the early bonding and backstories for the Yggdrasil members and how Ryoma showed his loyalty to Takatora but remained fixated on his own self-serving goals.

Knuckle section is more interesting but kinda complicated.

Don’t remember all the specifics of Gaim too vividly after watching so much Rider and having seen it as only the 2nd Rider series I’d completed, but despite moments even in the previous Gaiden for Baron showing Kaito’s troubled upbringing, he remained fixated on his tyrannical goals to the end of the series iirc (whether that “destroy this world” was figurative or not either I can’t recall) but he was still kind of a bad dude all the same.

This section—coming after the series end—is a nice further denouement for the series (to an extent), showing Team Baron’s side now trying to move forward without their original leader, who again, wanted to sort of conquer everything.

It deals with the formation of Team Baron and how it was a pretty friendly dance group before Kaito overtook the group by force, further showing his bad Machiavellian side, but Zack also trying to wax nostalgic about the group all the same. Kaito forcing his way into (and properly establishing) Team Baron was an event that seemingly created a severance and formed ideological sides in the wake of it, now furthered with Kaito’s death and the legacy he left.

It serves as the crux of the plot where the villain here, Shura, was exiled by Kaito from the group for being cowardly, and is now creating a Neo Baron team to carry Kaito’s philosophy of might makes right in a way. Zack believes Shura’s group is a misrepresentation of Kaito’s beliefs, and tries to end Neo Baron and its violent cult-like ways.

That kind of schism from a key formative event positively recalled Fist of the North Star for me, with some characters who walk different paths of life based on different interpretations of a philosophy or how they wrestle with grief, but again, iirc, Zack was kind of opposed to Kaito’s lust for power by the end of Gaim and tried to stop him, and Kaito was never really a very righteous guy, so seeing how Zack had those peaceful days with the dance crew pre-Kaito and was opposing Kaito towards the end, it seems strange that he would fight for some vague sense of honour for Kaito’s ideals, because if anything, Shura’s Neo Baron kind of emulates Kaito’s lust for strength pretty accurately, and instead of Zack trying to reconcile with the proper idea that Kaito was a bad guy, he just clarifies that Shura was exiled not because he was weak, but because he was a coward, boiling down to something kind of pedantic, and never trying to truly make a case for Kaito as some noble figure, even at the end when he sees a vision of Kaito and is communicating with him, lamenting he never truly understood him and might never do so either.

Again, it could be that this makes more sense if I remembered something more good natured about Kaito’s goals and that Zack might not have truly rejected him at the end, but it makes the actual conflict of interests here a bit muddier and Zack’s intentions harder to get behind, which is unfortunate because I liked how this was setup initially, but it just doesn’t totally click in the end, and closes on a weird, sort of ambiguous note after some of the more optimistic sentiments earlier about trying to build a happy world in the absence of Gaim’s major figures with this and Gaim’s actual ending.

More frustrating and ultimately less essential than the previous double Gaiden, it’s fine but a bit confused and lacking still.