Kamen Rider Kabuto (2006)

'Clock-up!'

The main selling points of Kabuto are the suit designs and the dynamic fight scenes. Both the worms and the riders are based off insects, highlighting the similarity of their powers, but the sleek, almost robotic rider designs contrast with the creatively monstrous worms- this, I find outstanding.
The characters were, on the whole, well executed, and had great interactions with each other. An issue to point out was how Tsurugi's shifts between a driven, serious character and comic relief felt fairly jarring, but he too was enjoyable nonetheless. The worms were interesting villains, their 'Thing'-like gimmick and hyperspeed making them formidable foes- however, the paranoia factor around the aforementioned ability could have been utilized a bit more.
The issue with Kabuto was the pacing of its story, especially towards the end. The show spent too much time on comic, filler episodes (such as the ramen cookoff), and thus didn't have enough time to develop its crucial endgame. The events that set the ball rolling happened too fast and too late, and the revelation of the true antagonists and their motivations felt underwhelming. This badly ruined my experience of watching the show, and I felt it ended on a sadly insipid note. Even so, it's still worth watching.

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The show that stumbles during its walk to surpass god

Kamen Rider Kabuto has a lot of potential when it starts. It has an exciting, suspenseful premise, fun and strong characters, *stellar* suit and monster designs, and a great gimmick in the Cast Off and Clock Up mechanics that lend to some impressive and awesome fights. Unfortunately, at a certain point the director of the series changes and with this change comes a change in tone, direction, plot, and characterization. This leads to the series dropping a large majority of the interesting original concepts of the show for a large majority of its runtime to focus more on sillier concepts until the end of the series when the plot picks up. It actually kind of reminds me of Kamen Rider Black, but for some reason Kabuto's execution of the concept makes me a little more disappointed. I suppose it's because it comes up with a lot of concepts that they end up resolving or executing with far less potency than they could have.

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