This is quite a moving episode actually. I was rather touched by the story in this episode while working on it. And we get to learn how Godai had the 'thumbs-up' as his signature move!

This is a great episode, touching as you've said and with a nice ending.

I loved how the teacher even cared to visit the school (he could have just assumed that Yuusuke would have forgotten by now), and that in the end, they finally met. Also wonderful messages coming from the teacher.

This is indeed a great episode. The promise between a student and a teacher is made very well.

Don't you guys think it's amazing that Kuuga invents his own Rider Kick?

Do you guys find the latest Kamen Riders "After Kamen Rider Decade" getting a bit silly? I mean there are seriously mid-fights between 10:00 and 12:00 in every episode instead of exploring the story more to the last part of an episode around 23:00.

Sorry for posting something off-topic.

But, will you guys re-encode the previous AVI episodes too?

This epsiode has a high b'awww factor.


....


B'awwww

Nope, we're just phasing out the avi to bring in the new encodes. So no new avis, but we're not going to reencode.

I'm watching Kuuga now for the first time, and it's pretty amazing compared to some more recent KRs with bad CG or tacky gadgets or where no one really dies (or it's just not mentioned).

The sheer amount of people killed in just a few episodes really makes the whole thing more serious.

It's kinda hard not to have deaths in a story where the monsters are all about ritualistic murder.

I'm not one for the whole "More death = Better" equation. I've thought of OOO and Double as fairly serious even though there were very few onscreen deaths. Fourze.. Well of course since it's HOT BLOODED it can't really be serious all the time but it has its moments.

I mean, Kuuga still has a lot of humor in it.


All in all though, to me, a series's "Realness" factor comes from characters having emotions. It definitely doesn't come from redshirts dying. I mean seriously who cares about redshirts?

I've yet to see Blade, Agito and Hibiki, but compare that statement with later series and try to realize that THAT is the almost usual monster's routine.

Either that or exterminating humanity, replacing humanity, enslaving humanity, eating humanity. Etc.



That's an out of place reference.
A red shirt is someone that is already known to die shortly after entering the scene, already marked for death, a pawn.
It happens so often that it becomes expected.

Random mass murder is something else.

The 'reality factor' is that in one of the first episodes there's a police officer saying something on the lines of:
"If we count the cops, 240+ people died in a week, guns are useless".
In most other series police is avoided or already fighting the baddies (look at Kabuto or W).

So there's a lot of people dying, and people talking about it. Even the police is scared. That's a lot more realistic than a lot of... nothing going on in other series. (to the point that you start wondering why there's no police around, ever).

There was also an episode about a litlle girl's (potential) suicide.

It's still Ep 12 and there's more mature stuff than what entire series did later.

I still don't see how a high nameless bodycount makes for a higher "realness" factor.

If anything, it might make it less realistic. I mean, if there were these nigh-invulnerable monsters running around killing people by the hundreds in the real world, don't you think the media would be all over it, or that there might be some inkling of panic rising among the populace? Here, though, life goes on, no matter how many thousands of cops and civilians get murdered...

Well, it is Japan...