They had good ideas, and I liked what they did to begin with, but too many of the Capsems were one-off items. They could have cut a chunk of both halves, and not lost anything critical to the plot.

Or, they could have done more with Nem and Sieg.

Peter Eng
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Insert humorous comment here.

Just about the only shows I haven't seen that don't make this mistake are like... Gaim, OOOs and most recently Gavv, which got real mileage out of all of its early toyetic transformations (very consistent use of Gurucan) and even did stuff like brought back ZakuZaku Chips when it was relevant in the late game. Even Gavv having Chocodan and Valen having Chocodon, being essentially the same form, didn't matter because it reminded you 'this guy's only ever on the power level of one of Gavv's basic spinoff forms, and he's still kicking ass'.

Having CaKing directly interact with those early forms helped.... for a lot of the show CaKing felt more like a final form than OverMaster did.

Too many KR shows do the 'introduce a myriad of forms that exist only to sell toys, fight kaijin with them' for the first third of the show and then go 'right now we've hooked the audience, onto the main event' and the base forms and also the monsters of the week never really show up again.

Amusingly enough, in Zeztz's case due to the mid-season reboot, he's actually only used his Esprim, Technolom, Recovery etc forms literally once ever, and they all got bodied by Oblivion Gore, because all of their original uses were during the prophetic dream arc and thus didn't actually really happen.

It is a very rare Rider show which takes the initial bunch of sell-toys powerups and then makes them relevant in the long term course of the show. It's part of the reason why Gavv is so peak, IMO.

I do, however, mind how utterly chunky both the belts and the forms have gotten over the years. I mean, I didn't even know KR was still a thing until I came across an AMV for Den-O several years back and was amused by its breakdancing gunman style.

Those designs were pretty compact (except the end-of-year super form). And that was followed by a run of fairly svelte designs, all the way up to Fourze, who suddenly had this boxy _thing_ on his waist. But Wizard made up for it... until they started adding literal dragon parts to his Badass Longcoat™.

Since then, things have gotten worse and worse. Zero-One wasn't _too_ bad, and there were some suits in Geats I liked, but on average, all of the designs have been overdesigned messes.

(And yes, the mouse thing is silly. At least they acknowledged in the teasers that they are messing with the Chinese Zodiac lineup... haven't seen anyone address that since the Faction Paradox audios.)