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Yasuko Kobayashi's Kamen Rider Trilogy

So here's Yasuko Kobayashi, perhaps one of the best Tokusatsu writers before but tends to burn out sometimes.  So here's what I think about her trilogy.


Yasuko Kobayashi's first head writing job was Kamen Rider Ryuki.  Yup she beats those writers of Dragon Knight by a mile and the fact she had Toshiki Inoue along, allowed much darker stuff.  This was also a season where Shinichiro Shirakura (Toei's golden goose?) was the head producer.  IMO this is where Kobayashi manages to write something pretty different aside from the producer's concepts.  Everything in here felt like a sci-fi J-Drama I'd love to watch, memorable characters and a lot of conflict. However things got wrong when Odin arrived with that time paradox thing which I'd say was Kobayashi's bad point.  It's not surprising either considering she was the head writer of Timeranger herself.  For me the worst thing here was the finale where Kobayashi threw out all character development out of the window making me like Inoue's alternate ending better.  But here, this was Kobayashi's WORST ending ever written.


For Den-O, I'd say this season gave me time travel migraines.  Maybe because time travel gets pretty confusing and messy, talk about why Yasuko Kobayashi had the existence of Mirai in Timeranger happen when Domon from the year 3000 impregnated his reporter girlfriend Honami from the year 2000.  Pretty much, much time travel happens like the 'future self' and 'past self' which can get pretty hard.  The finale was average after a rather confusing yet awesomely intense final battle that saved the past and the future.  Yet you have to admit this season was a hit to kids everywhere so I'll let this slide. XD


Her third work was with Kamen Rider OOO which I think she was pretty consistent here and the ending well is like an imitation of Agito but not in a bad way.  Okay Ryuki's cool and perhaps my favorite from her works but that whole reset button finale for me is much worse than Gai Yuki's lame way to leave us so soon or the hanging ending in Kamen Rider Faiz or Nago marrying Megumi.  But yeah, for me Kamen Rider OOO was a focus on the destructive power of the wrong desires, the Greeed and everything around desire.  In here, character development is kept and there's none of that painful time travel conundrums that Den-O had to offer.  My complaint might be this show feels like Spongebob becoming a Kamen Rider in the person of Eiji though fortunately this show doesn't contain nuisances similar to Mr. Krabs who's ultra-cheap.  However this was also produced by Naomi Takabe who sadly produced the Super Sentai season I disliked even if it was written by Yasuko Kobayashi called Gobusters.

Comments

  1. I don't get what is it with Takebe that gets her a lot of hate...

    ReplyDelete

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