I started watching Kamen Rider Ryuki on a whim a few days ago. I've been aware of its outsized influence on both Kamen Rider generally, as well as like, the entirety of anime, but I've never actually bothered to go in and experience it. Hell, Ryuki actually fits in with my long-standing tradition of experiencing popular media through fighting game adaptations before the actual main property itself. I'm now done with episode 10, so I'm just going to log a pretty loose collection of thoughts here.
I can't speak for the specific tones of the shows that immediately preceded Ryuki - Kuuga and Agito - but I get the feeling that Ryuki must have immediately struck audiences as something really different. It even strikes me as different, being someone who first started watching Kamen Rider right in the middle of the post-Decade Heisei era of the show. That's not just because Ryuki was produced in a time where television shows were all getting shot at 60fps rather than the standard 24fps, though - it's also just so tonally different from everything I've seen from the franchise, including the other seasons that were very directly influenced by it.
Obviously, as a Kamen Rider show, it's not afraid to be goofy with its characters, and there have been plenty of comedic moments that work well enough, but what really struck me right from the start of episode 1 was just how committed the show is to this almost horror-like tonality. The Mirror Monsters are already attacking people in visually disturbing ways, and one thing that really marks the show out from a lot of the other seasons I've seen is that these attacks have very real consequences. So often, you see the monster of the week/fortnight being defeated, and everyone who was victimised is back to normal. Not so with Ryuki - those people are actually just dead, because they have literally been eaten. I suppose this is also part of the legacy of Ryuki - a lot of the shows immediately after it tended to play around with much darker tones and themes (especially Faiz, but also Blade and even Kabuto to a certain extent).
The whole conceit of the Rider Fight is almost kind of cute at this point, given just how often it's appeared throughout the Kamen Rider franchise's history, but there's certainly a sense that it's a little bit taboo in Ryuki. Fights between Riders are treated as genuinely shocking, with everyone except Ryuki himself fighting with a kind of calculated brutality that really sells the violence inherent to whatever the hell it is that everyone has gotten themselves involved in.
Speaking of Ryuki, I can't say for certain, but surely Shinji Kido must be Kamen Rider's first loser protagonist? Like, you can see a lot of Shinji in future main characters like Fourze's Gentaro Kisaragi or even Revice's Ikki Igarashi, but I can't think of any other season of the show where the protagonist is explicitly depicted to be an extremely incompetent fighter. This isn't a knock against the show, of course - Ryuki, at least at this early stage of the show, really wants to hammer home the point that Shinji is absolutely, 100 per cent out of his depth, with zero understanding of what is actually happening around him. There's a tension - one very well-explored by future seasons - between the desire for Shinji's ideals to be realised and the sinking feeling that at some point, he's going to have to face reality and fight despite his moral objections. It poses a fairly simple question pretty early on: "Why do us Riders have to fight?" But compared to a similar show, Geats, not only does it ask this question explicitly, it also subtly signals that that might not even be a useful question. When Geats asks why the Riders have to fight, it does so to draw attention to the nature of its world, who is in charge of it and for what purpose the decisions are made. When Ryuki asks that same question, you can't help but get a sinking feeling that the Riders have to fight because there is simply no other option. 戦わなければ、生き残れない。Those who do not fight do not survive.
Show seems cool. I'm looking forward to seeing where it goes from here.
Also Ren is a total jackass, so I can't wait for him and Shinji to make out sloppy style before the final episode (READ: non-transformed fistfight in a body of water)
