My Top Seven Aspects of My Top Four Kamen Rider Shows: #2, Kamen Rider Ryuki

My apologies for the delay! For the third entry in this series, I’m going to be writing about the wonderous Kamen Rider Ryuki. It ran primarily in 2002, and unlike Agito, which initially began as a direct sequel to Kuuga until eventually morphing into a more thematic sequel, Ryuki contains no explicit references to prior shows. In Kamen Rider‘s English speaking fandom, Ryuki is one of the more popular entries on this list for a few reasons. One has to do with the existence of Kamen Rider: Dragon Knight, an American “adaptation” of Ryuki. The other simply has to do with its premise.

While investigating a lead, journalist Shinji stumbles upon a mysterious card deck. Soon, he learns from a woman named Yui that this card deck has granted him the ability to enter the Mirror World, where he can transform into a Kamen Rider. One of Yui’s friends, Ren, is another Kamen Rider, and he informs Shinji of a terrifying truth. Apparently, there are many more Kamen Riders other than Shinji and Ren, and all of them, without exception, are locked in a life or death battle royale… where only one can emerge victorious, and receive a miracle as their prize.

With the stage set, we’re ready to play. Here are my seven favorite aspects of my second favorite Kamen Rider show.

7. The music and how it enhances the atmosphere

When I express the sentiment that “Ryuki is the most early 2000s Kamen Rider show,” I mean that with completely sincere admiration. Every artistic era has its own aesthetic. When you look at an ’80s hair metal band, it’s easy to tell that something like that is from a specific time, place, and cultural landscape. And the early 2000s, for better or worse, were “edgy.” Anyone else remember nu metal? I mean, there’s some of that stuff that I still like, but, yeah. Edgy.

What I mean by my above sentiment, then, is that Ryuki is the Kamen Rider show that most embodies the artistic aesthetic of the early 2000s. There’s the way the characters dress, for one thing. Ren’s iconic black leather longcoat that he wears in wintertime is extremely Matrix-esque. There’s how the show takes the startlingly dark urgency of its Highlander-inspired premise and counterbalances it with some of the era’s most consistent comic relief (yes, I know Highlander was ’80s, work with me here). I’d say that the general approach to superhero storytelling would count, but every other entry in this series has that, too. I suppose it’s hard to describe. It’s more something you feel. And as someone who grew up in the early 2000s, it’d be difficult for me to mistake this show as being from any other point in time.

But the aspect of the show that is by far most evocative of the early 2000s artistic aesthetic is the music. The openings, endings, and insert songs do fit into this nicely, but again, this is true for pretty much all Kamen Rider shows of the era. No, what I’m talking about when I say music is more so the score. Most Kamen Rider shows have pretty engaging or at least serviceable scores. Not usually a standout aspect of any show, but nothing to complain about, either.

Ryuki, though, is a bit of a different beast. Aside from the usual orchestral tracks, Ryuki‘s score makes liberal use of electronic instrumentation, and occasionally takes influences from industrial or metal. The result is a thicker atmosphere, one that emphasizes the personal nature of the conflict. It gives you the idea that the characters are all cogs in the machine that is the Rider War. The only way a machine like that totally stops working is if all the cogs stop at once… or if all the cogs are removed except for one.

But even on a more literal level, Ryuki‘s score is one of the most straightforward ways in which it stands out among its contemporaries. No other Kamen Rider show from this point in time leans so boldly into the era’s musical aesthetic. While the scores for lots of other Kamen Rider shows are used to give the series a sense of continuity, Ryuki‘s score helps the show to single itself out. It’s something that could have felt horribly cheesy if done with any less authenticity, but once again, it is the era’s honesty and genuineness that helps to sell it. Remember nu metal? Ryuki sure does.

6. The mirror-centric cinematography

Not just Kamen Rider, but TV shows in general have something of a poor reputation for having rather uninspired cinematography. And with the real-life logistics to consider, who could blame them? A TV show obviously has a much longer runtime than a film, so the budget is spread more thin. It’s such that when a TV show does have an identifiably unique and inspired visual style, such as Breaking Bad / Better Call Saul or Mr. Robot, it’s something that’s almost universally lauded.

Kamen Rider also has the struggle of being a series that shoots without any season breaks. You’d expect, then, that Kamen Rider shows all have rather standard cinematography. And, most of the time, you’d be right. Not bad cinematography, not bad at all, just standard. But once again, Ryuki separates itself from the pack in this aspect.

Ryuki‘s conflict is centered in large part around the Mirror World. The Mirror World is where all the Kamen Riders and monsters go to fight, which makes for a nice way of keeping the fights personal and intimate, since civilians can’t get involved. But this focus on mirrors also extends to how the show stylizes its cinematography. Shots involving mirrors are the show’s visual trademark, and they are employed to great effect. This is difficult to describe, of course, but it’s impossible not to notice as you’re watching.

Some of the show’s favorite techniques include: Shots that fit in two characters who are physically far apart by framing one in a mirror. Shots that emphasize a character’s expression by showing them from slightly different angles in different mirrors. Characters shown exclusively through their reflections in mirrors. Panning shots that show a character multiple times by showing different reflections. Panning shots that reveal that we’ve been looking in a mirror the whole time. Shots split vertically down the middle, reflecting each other on either side. The possibilities are boundless, and the show absolutely meets its potential in this regard.

Either way, the show’s cinematography was probably not something anyone was expecting to see on this list, but that’s just a testament to how unique it is. While most other Kamen Rider shows are content for the series’ typically great fight choreography to carry the visual style, Ryuki attempts something much more ambitious.

5. The feeling that any character can die

“There can only be one.” This famous line from Highlander has become something of a motto for all battle royale stories. While effectively all stories with action in them create tension with character death, battle royale stories are different. In a normal action story, character death is likely, but not necessarily a guarantee. Some character archetypes have better odds of making it out alive than others. But a story explicitly being a battle royale flips this on its head. Major characters dying is not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when.

It’s made clear from very early on in the show that only one rider can emerge victorious in this battle. This includes our protagonist, Shinji, and our deuteragonist, Ren. Nonetheless, we expect that the more important characters to last for a relatively longer amount of time. The last few episodes may be open season, but until then, most of the important characters are safe. Most of them.

The brilliance of this execution comes from not necessarily knowing who’s important and who isn’t. Shinji and Ren are clearly our big two, but even while one is evidently more important than the other, there’s a sense of interchangeability that creates this feeling that they’re both in danger. This balancing act makes them somehow feel both necessary and expendable. But I won’t say anymore about that for now.

The real highlight, of course, is all of the other riders. Ryuki far and away has more riders than any of the other three shows that I’m writing about as a part of this series. Even looking past that, most (but certainly not all) Kamen Rider shows like to keep their rider count reasonably low. But Ryuki revels in its abundance of riders. This is because each rider offers the opportunity to create more suspense. We know that this new character could die at practically any given moment. After all, even if they don’t die quickly, they do have to die by the end. There can only be one, after all.

The way the show balances its collection of riders who aren’t Shinji or Ren is similarly commendable. Some riders, thankfully, do go on to become important, recurring characters who last a refreshingly long time. Some riders die for the sake of tightening the plot. And some riders die tragically, their individual character arcs brought to a cathartic end. Which one will your favorite minor character end up being? There’s no way to know until it’s over.

4. The unique variety of riders

Tying directly into the prior entry is what is perhaps the most central aspect on this entire list. The show’s whole battle royale premise and the tense atmosphere that it creates would both fall flat on their faces if the cast wasn’t populated by a healthy amount of riders, each unique in their own way. It’d have to be a pretty big step up from Agito‘s much more manageable three.

No, for the show to be really interesting, there’d have to be at least five or so riders running around at once. It’d also, of course, have to alternate out some of these riders, killing off one and introducing another in their place. And the show would have to implement all of these ideas in a way that adheres to the slow-burn drama style established by Kuuga. Unsurprisingly, the show succeeds in accomplishing all of this with grace.

While Ryuki makes an early promise of having an entire thirteen riders, it never quite reaches that number in the show. The supplemental materials add some riders, but we’re not here to talk about that. Rather, less is more here, and what riders Ryuki does give us are, bar none, all memorable and interesting. There’s not a single rider that feels unnecessary, or feels like they have a great deal of unrealized potential. While the cast perhaps isn’t as much of a puzzle as Agito‘s, each character still feels lived-in, and the more important ones have plotlines and conflicts independent of Shinji or Ren.

Arguably the single most important alteration to Kamen Rider‘s status quo that Ryuki made was the addition of full-on villain riders. While the riders in Agito do occasionally come into conflict, there’s no doubt that Shouichi, Hikawa, and Ryou are all good people. The same cannot be said for many of the riders in Ryuki. Rather, in Ryuki‘s world, anyone with the desire to fight can be a rider. It’s perhaps a perversion of what it originally meant to be a rider, but damn is it a beautiful one.

Another great aspect of how Ryuki writes it riders is how it alternates how long it wants to keep them around. Again relating to the prior entry, I will say that Ryuki actually does have a pretty clear tertiary rider. He’s introduced like any other rider, and like every other rider, the threat of death looms over his head constantly. It’s only until over halfway into the show when it occurs to the audience to think, “Huh, this guy has been around for a while, hasn’t he?”

Truthfully, though, the best part about the variety of riders is how it ties into the show’s main theme. What was once a mark of being a hero has now become something that anyone, regardless of morality, can wear. What are we to make of this? Well, what do they all have in common? They all have the desire to fight. So maybe, then, that’s all there is to it. Maybe all it takes to be a Kamen Rider is the willingness to fight for what you believe in. Don’t you think that’s beautiful? Because I sure do.

3. Shinji Kido, unresolved protagonist

One thing that struck me about Agito on my first watch is how similar Shouichi is to Yusuke. This is not to say, however, that I think Shouichi is a bad or uninspired character. In fact, I wrote something similar in my Agito entry about how much Hikawa resembles Ichijo. Indeed, the way that Agito compares and contrasts with Kuuga is actually one of its strongest points. But we’re not here to talk about Agito, are we?

The reason I bring this up is because Shinji, in many ways, is a clean break from the one-two pattern established by Yusuke and Shouichi. (Except for his hairstyle and voice, which both bear a striking resemblance to Shouichi.) While they all have the important commonality of all being good people with a strong sense of justice and great reverence for life, Shinji bears a few key differences when compared to Yusuke or Shouichi. The former two protagonists, even before becoming Kamen Riders, are very reliable people. Their friends and family trust them, and while they’re not particularly intelligent, they’re certainly not dumb, either.

Shinji, on the other hand, is the opposite of all of these things. The only reason he has a job is because he’s old friends with his boss. Our first impression of Shinji, one we get before even meeting him, is one of his co-workers dreading that he’s going to tag along on a job, since his “help” almost always amounts to him making matters worse. Yusuke and Shouichi certainly aren’t geniuses, but they aren’t idiots. Shinji is. Surely it’d be foolish to trust someone like this with the mantle and responsibilities of being a Kamen Rider, right?

Of course, the picture that I’ve painted of Shinji is only Shinji as he is at the beginning of the show. The most important feature of these differences is that they allow Shinji to grow and evolve in ways that Yusuke and Shouichi were unable to. Watching Shinji mature and gradually become more worthy of the title of Kamen Rider is one of the show’s most engaging through lines. All of this meshes nicely with the fact that Ryuki, especially later on, is one of the more serialized entries on this list.

However, if you can believe it, we haven’t even discussed the most important difference that Shinji has when compared to his predecessors. This distinction is tied directly into the show’s premise itself. In Kuuga and Agito, there’s no doubt that Yusuke and Shouichi are fighting the good fight. Monsters are running rampant and killing innocent people, and a superhero like Kamen Rider is the only thing that can stand in their way.

In Ryuki, however, the monsters aren’t the only facet to consider. Aside from protecting innocent people from monsters, Shinji also has a desire to stop the battle royale between other riders. But it is in this goal, however, that he falters. More than Yusuke or Shouichi ever did. Often he stops and asks himself, “Is this the right thing to do?” After all, everyone who’s entered the battle royale knows what the stakes are. They all have something that they want so badly that they’re willing to bet their lives on it. Is it wrong to deny people that chance at a miracle? For as strong as his heart is, Shinji doesn’t know the answer. Watching him spend the series looking for it makes him one of the most unique and engaging Kamen Rider protagonists.

2. The artsy ending

All right, time for a somewhat controversial one. Obviously I’m not going to spoil anything, but it’s suffice to say that Ryuki‘s ending is very unorthodox. Audience reaction to this ending tends to vary wildly. Similar but different to Kuuga, some people, like myself, adore it. Others, well, don’t.

The most likely aspect of Ryuki‘s ending that causes so much disagreement is how open-ended it is. Kamen Rider shows typically have very complete endings, where justice prevails and everything is tied up nicely. But anyone who was actually paying attention while watching Ryuki would’ve realized that this show was never going to end like that. Ryuki presents its audience with a moral conundrum that the show’s protagonist spends approximately the entire story trying to answer. To end all that in a denouement where Shinji turns to the camera and says, “The right answer… is this!” would go against everything the show stands for.

What we get instead is, in my opinion, much more memorable and impactful. The conclusion to Shinji’s quest to find his answer is both shocking and frighteningly beautiful. The remaining riders, too, all get resonant sendoffs that are as poetic as they are unpredictable. While Kuuga and Agito certainly had memorable casts in their own right, Ryuki‘s is on the whole is much larger, with more evenly distributed focus throughout. That each and every character arc conclusion is as superb as it is makes the ending feel very well put-together.

There’s also one specific scene that I want to vaguely talk about. Without saying much, there’s a scene in the final episode that I think is one of the most visually and artistically ambitious scenes in the entire Kamen Rider series. Those who have seen the show probably know exactly which one I’m referring to. Harking back to the sixth entry on this list, the one about the show’s cinematography, this scene makes exceptionally striking use of that strength to deliver perhaps the only scene in Kamen Rider that I would refer to as… artsy. Yes, I just referred to a scene in a Kamen Rider show, a series for young children, as artsy. Make of that what you will.

Oh, and while we’re on this subject, I want to quickly clear up a misconception about Ryuki‘s tie-in movie, appropriately titled Episode Final. This movie tells an alternate ending to the show, one that’s overall more straightforward and less ambitious. But putting my admittedly rather negative feelings for this movie aside, it’s important to note that this movie was not made in response to the divided reaction to the show’s finale. The movie was released around the middle of the show, one day before episode 29 aired. The amount of people that think that the movie came out after the show had finished, like it’s The End of Evangelion or something, is concerning!

To get back on track, Ryuki‘s ending incorporates a twist that a lot of people tend to react to negatively on impulse. It’s one of those things where, when you take it out of context, it sounds pretty lame. But look at it in the context of the story and consider how it ties into the show’s theming, and you’ll find that it’s not a disappointment at all. Rather, it’s the perfectly ambitious ending to a perfectly ambitious show.

1. Shinji and Ren’s romantic subtext

Well, this seems awfully familiar, doesn’t it? I promised you all that Kuuga‘s entry on the romantic tension between its two male leads would not be the last, and here we are. Except, with the entry for Kuuga, I had already written about Yusuke and Ichijo in separate entries, elaborating on their characters independently and then bringing them together at the end. I’ve written about Shinji already, but what about Ren? How could a character whose arc didn’t make this list have such a good dynamic with the protagonist that it tops it all?

First, please let me try to justify myself. Ren’s arc is unique and special in its own way, but it shines its brightest when taken in the context of the show as a whole. You could argue that the same is partially true for Shinji’s arc, but that one also has the advantage of expertly subverting the traditions set by his two protagonist predecessors. While Shinji is the perfect subversion of series tradition in service of leading a particularly unique entry, Ren is the perfect distillation of the show on its own.

Ren, deep down, is a good person. This is despite him trying to kill Shinji within the first few episodes. But, to his credit, he’s stuck in a situation that’s either kill or be killed. Echoing the dynamic established by both Yusuke and Ichijo as well as Shouichi and Hikawa, Ren is a much more fallible and relatable character than Shinji. While Shinji’s commitment to pacifism is commendable and inspiring, Ren’s struggle against the temptation of victory makes his struggle feel deeper. Like with Kuuga and Agito, Ryuki thrives off of this protagonist and deuteragonist dynamic where both characters struggle with distinct but interweaving inner conflicts.

Of course, how Shinji and Ren’s character arcs intersect and impact each other is the greatest factor in what makes them so incredible. Like any good romantic pairing, you can’t have one without the other. Shinji’s commitment to pacifism softens up Ren and helps him to better enjoy life in the moment. Ren’s commitment to his goal helps Shinji realize just how desperate the battle royale really is. They are polar opposites that meet in the middle to create a balanced whole.

Similarly, they come into conflict much more often than other Kamen Rider male lead pairings. Whereas Yusuke and Ichijo were sworn partners, and Shouichi and Hikawa were separated both by plot and lack of communication, Shinji and Ren come into conflict very often and very naturally. They both see the battle royale for what it is, but their differing perspectives and personalities cause them to disagree.

Of course, Shinji and Ren’s relationship is steeped in inherent tragedy, too. That they are both participants in the story’s battle royale means that one of them, by the rules of the plot, has to lose. There can only be one, after all, and as well as Shinji and Ren complement each other, those feelings don’t create an exception to this rule. As the story goes on, Shinji and Ren acknowledge that, at some point, they will surely have to fight each other. Their relationship bobs and weaves between acknowledging the tragedy of this unavoidable fact and outright ignoring it. This fluctuation is incredibly endearing, and is one of the cores of what makes this show so memorable.

To summarize, let me put it this way. Imagine a man. He’s just lost something very dear to him, and the only way to get it back is to do something that he really, really doesn’t want to do. But he commits himself, regardless. Along the way, though, he meets someone else. Someone who makes him feel like everything’s going to be okay. That he’ll be able to live on even if he doesn’t get this very important thing back. But is that really okay? Is it really okay for him to just… move on? For him to be happy with what he has instead of fixating on what he’s lost? The guilt has him denying his feelings over and over again. But as time goes on, it becomes harder and harder for him to deny what has been blatantly obvious since the beginning.

If I told you, without any lead-in, that the above story was from a superhero show for children, one that’s designed partially to sell toys, would you have believed me? I’d hope that after all the detail I’ve given on how great these shows really are, you would.