Sean Akizuki's East Asian Drama and Movie Blog

Yasuko Kobayashi, well she's probably still well-loved and hasn't reached the status of "public enemy numero uno". I decided to revisit this post from a few years ago and UPDATE IT. Now, it's time to talk about her finales. Before that, you may want to read this post about Toshiki Inoue and his finales . I guess she's getting too much mention (aside from Judd Lynn  who I believe is just overhyped by the fans ) that some older writers may have been overshadowed. Yeah, I feel like Hirohisa Soda was unintentionally overshadowed as fans seem to prefer to mention her name a lot. Again, I don't blame them if their exposure to Super Sentai was based on anything after Mirai Sentai Timeranger .  Kamen Rider Ryuki We have to hand it over to her that this is her first head writer job for the Kamen Rider franchise. Ryuki was most likely intended to be the most serious series yet but was killed by executive meddling. Maybe, it's unfair to blame her for the finale...

Aside from Qiong Yao, one very important figure for Chinese drama fans that they should not overlook is the awesome writer known as scholar Dr. Louis Cha who is a lawyer and doctorate in philosophy.  His writing styles may have inspired other writers of Chinese fiction.  For one, his works were influential they went all the way from novels to becoming big screen.  He is mostly known for writing fictional martial artists, quite often doing impossible feats, non-existent martial arts styles mixed with existent martial arts styles.  One cannot deny the beauty of his fiction while he takes artistic license of using real life elements such as existing conflicts in history. His common style of writing were set at 6th Century B.C., 11th Century A.D., 13th Century A.D., 14th Century A.D., 16th Century A.D., 17th Century A.D. and 18th Century A.D.  He also was fond of creating various conflicting sects and schools of martial arts, rivaling each other aside from the im...

Qiong Yao was a talented writer, misunderstood early on but her writing style was a revolutionary, talented writer who published 200 articles back as a High School student.  Unable to enter College, she got married to her ex-husband and had one son.  However the marriage landed in divorce in the 60s where she started to write depressing novels as a result of that traumatic experience.she relied on writing as her only income though later, she became a screenwriter.  She had to continue writing in order to survive.  And her circumstances also proved a bit of what her writing could do especially during the 1960s.  Taiwan during that time was still at a dark era, recovering from the civil war and she beautifully weaved the circumstances into her writing, as well as what she knew of China back then to make her novels come to life. What I like about some of her writings (Okay I haven't read them all) is that she's not afraid to address the weakness of both genders....

I was thinking about how Toshiki Inoue wrote stuff.  So maybe he brought conflict to Hibiki but looks like the Shirakura/Inoue tandem isn't that good. Looking at how Hibiki was under Inoue's writing its second half it did suffer some problems like adding that annoying jerk who really irritates everyone.  Well she has more similarities to Inoue than differences but here's where she stands out over Toshiki Inoue are the following: Doucebag protagonists in her shows.  Maybe you saw Kamen Rider Ryuki which came before Kamen Rider Faiz.  You had to face Shinji, Renn and Shuichi but none of them can annoy you like Masato in Faiz.  I don't think that annoying kid Kiriya would be that annoying.  Looking at her writing the douches, they are not all that annoying compared to those in Kamen Rider Faiz. In Super Sentai, most of Yasuko Kobayashi's finale arcs are pretty well-written to passable most of the time compared to Inoue's in the long run. Okay she wrote tha...

After considerably being known for darker and edgier stuff, like Inoue, Kobayashi also shifted into the world of lighter stuff which can be evident with Shinkenger for Super Sentai.  In fact, one may take a look at this series... Compared to Kamen Rider Ryuki, Kamen Rider OOO was basically a lighter and softer season which had these kinds of jokes. Eiji was no better of an idiot than Shinji in Ryuki, in fact here he is even worse.  I thought it was funny though.  I'm just glad that Eiji isn't like Spongebob Squarepants in terms of character development or having some useless gags going around. Obviously blatant silliness.  Yup, I thought Haim Saban ahem Kosei Kougami the Cake Boss can seldom get annoying aside from the fact he's a cheapskate of sorts.  Well Kougami may not be as annoying as Mr. Krabs in Spongebob but still, his cake gags can get really old fast.  I guess Kobayashi was fond of parodying real life people and I wonder who Dr. Maki wa...

Pacing is a very important part in writing drama.  Some shows do suffer from slow pacing like TV drama in the past from the Philippines tend to drag even for a year or two landing in no real ending.  Zaido may have been advertised as a TV drama but still, it was no excuse for its lame execution.  As said, there were good ideas but rather poor executions.  Now to see why pacing does matter. Kamen Rider as a Tokusatsu drama really required proper pacing.  During Kuuga, Naruhisa Arakawa and Toshiki Inoue were careful about the time pacing.  That is, okay maybe you don't see Yuusuke beat up a monster in the first episode but they were careful not to spin things around too much.  The whole way Kuuga did its pacing was pretty much the model to follow and improve for later Kamen Riders, that is provide some plot even if there are some plots that run around in circles like Faiz, you still get the right pacing.  Faiz despite its rather redundant pass ar...

Toshiki Inoue was known for originally being fond of darker and edgier stuff but after Faiz (which was one show I dislike for being overly edgy), he switched trying to write comedic stuff while thinking he's so funny.  Are his finales the worst mix (worst finale is Faiz and Hibiki) or his humor?  Let's now analyze his humor in Kamen Rider now... The instance of Inoue's humor showed up in Ryuki but with the addition of Megumi?  Megumi is hardly contributing to the plot material plus her silliness ruins the show's intended darker and edgier mood. In Kamen Rider Blade, you could consider episodes 29-30 are really stupid.  I mean, what's up with  that stupid war of Taiyaki vs. Takoyaki thing when Blade is supposed to be a SERIOUS season?  This was just shortly after he wrote Faiz and man those two episodes are pretty silly but I still got a laugh, but he can't reach Junki Takegami's level of silliness (Go-onger is still funnier imo) or Naruhisa Akarawa...

Yup these are the two writers who have written some good series but also have written some bad ones too. So far, the two have been a tandem for some time considering they were together in working out with Timeranger (Inoue was a secondary writer), Agito (Kobayashi was a secondary writer), Ryuki (Inoue had a lot of it with Kobayashi and both shared some weird sense of humor and don't forget, Inoue wrote Megumi's part as an ultra useless character) and Decade (as secondary writers to where they still managed to add some good plot, otherwise Decade is already too kiddie). In fact, it seems to be that both got cocky after their successes or not, I mean Inoue got cocky after Jetman and Agito, Kobayashi well I dunno but it seemed she got cocky after Timeranger. Both had also worked with Shinichiro Shirakura (Toei's reason why they get a lot of value on toy sales) and Naomi Takebe (Inoue with Kiva, Kobayashi with OOO, and in Super Sentai, Gobusters). Now for their points in commo...

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...

So yeah Yasuko Kobayashi and Toshiki Inoue did some work together.  Remember Toshiki Inoue was the secondary writer of Timeranger to the point I even thought he wrote how Time Fire died.  Now moving on... Toshiki Inoue was the head writer of Kamen Rider Agito while Yasuko Kobayashi was the writer of episode 28.  I dunno what degree of influence that Yasuko Kobayashi had or if she co-wrote some episodes with Inoue but so far, Agito was a really good series that for me even beats Kamen Rider Black. Yasuko Kobayashi's first headwriting job was with Kamen Rider Ryuki.  Toshiki Inoue wrote episodes 7-10, 15-16, 24-25, 29-30, 41-44 and the Alternate Ending.  For me, this is where a lot of the darker and edgier come together considering this show imo was pretty dark and depressing but with the interesting Rider War story.  Things go from bad to worse then back, of course knowing Kobayashi and Inoue, they seem to love really cruel villains with the likes of K...

Well I'd like to compare these three writers whose works I usually like though they had their bad moments too.  Nobody's perfect but let's examine them shall we?  Pictures are credit to Shougo B'Stard of Them's Fightin' Words.  Here's what I thought about these notable writers and their ups and downs with Kamen Rider: Okay one has to admit he did more Super Sentai than Kamen Rider but he should always be credited and remembered for the guy who brought the well done new era of Kamen Rider writing in Kamen Rider Kuuga.  Yup Kamen Rider Kuuga is a template of how Heisei Riders are... two episode arcs, lots of drama and mysteries but sadly later series seem to ignore the stuff this guy introduced with his writing of Kuuga that made Kuuga a huge success after the long hiatus of Kamen Rider having another TV series (the last was Black RX which I still enjoy but it's not as good to me anymore).  Just made me think this guy should be a J-Drama writer if he...

I was thinking about Toshiki Inoue and his love for drama like it was evident in Jetman that there's been a lot of conflict, he brought conflict to Hibiki when he took over (but I NEED to watch Hibiki first so I can review it), wrote Faiz and then Kiva.  So far, I would say Faiz was his worst work for me due to it being overly depressing while he had the cartoony Kiva.  Made me think though that with his success in Agito, he could actually write non-Tokusatsu J-Drama himself.  Makes me think that while it's Inoue x finales can go from passable (Agito) to really bad (Faiz) to intensely silly (Kiva), he might actually pull off with J-Drama considering that J-Drama tends to have shock value at the end of it.  But I can say I think it would be a fair thing to give him a chance though maybe it might be better if his daughter (who is now emerging as a writer) wrote J-Drama.  I dunno but maybe Toshiki Inoue might do well in J-Drama though he really did burn out with F...

Okay I'll admit I wasn't very easy on accepting Kuuga until a second rewatch, I thought it would be good to have Naruhisa Arakawa do another head writing job for Kamen Rider.  Why's that?  Here's my reasons: Kuuga was his fresh start. Though I wouldn't credit it as his best work BUT this is his start.  So pretty much, he defined the writing style of what Kamen Rider for the Heisei era should have and can improve.  So pretty much, he's got a lot of success in his first job as Kuuga which would help define the new era. He's a very disciplined writer.  So he may have examined his blunders from his previous works (like that Jetman episode featuring Dryer Jigen), resolved them and then transformed his good start with Kuuga for better writing which he did with Super Sentai.  He's the head writer of Abaranger, Dekaranger and Gokaiger.  Okay I'll admit he's not very good with villains in Gokaiger but hey, he can certainly enhance the villains from...

Well Naruhisa Arakawa did a good job with Kuuga though not exactly much of my personal preference he has really revolutionized Tokusatsu by taking twist and turns.  For Kuuga, he started with a darker and edgier season but as time passed he has managed to create lighter and softer seasons like Abaranger, Dekaranger and Gokaiger in Super Sentai as well as he is a very disciplined writer on top of that.  So pretty much, I think he could be a good J-Drama writer as well and two, I think he should be the head writer of another Kamen Rider series because I believe he can do much better than what he started out as a "prototype" now has revolutionized Kamen Rider even if he sadly didn't do more head writer work.  But still, I think he can do a good job especially with how he writes drama elements in a very disciplined way which made us look past his earlier mistakes while doing some Jetman episodes.  For starters, maybe Arakawa could do fantasy-based drama that's outside t...