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Yeah I love the first half of Hibiki. Beautiful camera work and settings, epic opining, characters were fun and really gave off that team feeling. The second half, well... one big problem is Kiriya as you've seen. And oh god that second theme is horrible.
 
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It feels like they ran out of money to do something creative with it, which is what the show was striving for compared to the other rider shows.

(Note that this is all stuff I've heard/read about, as I haven't watched Hibiki properly myself. Some of it may very well be wrong, so take it with a pinch of salt.)

The thing about Hibiki is that it was too different from those other Rider shows. If I'm not mistaken it was performing poorly in terms of merchandise sales, nor were the ratings all that stellar, which is part of the reason why they not only changed the crew halfway through, but also went in the completely opposite direction with the next show, namely Kabuto, which is a much more 'back to basics and true to formula' Rider show.

Another problem was that the show was very costly to make, due to fairly heavy CG use on the Makamou and the filming in the mountains, hence that was changed.
 
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Sure, the disc animals are a gimmick, but it is a sword that has nothing to do with music, which is what the show has been centered around.

The sword is also a microphone.

And where is cinematography the show had been using? The unique camera angles, the lighting, and the flashes of kanji on the screen have all disappeared suddenly. It feels like they ran out of money to do something creative with it, which is what the show was striving for compared to the other rider shows.

They didn't run out of money, the new staff just decided to make the show more "normal" to make it more popular (and it worked with Japanese audiences, somehow, even though even in Japan there was a massive outcry against the changes).
 
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The thing about Hibiki is that it was too different from those other Rider shows. If I'm not mistaken it was performing poorly in terms of merchandise sales, nor were the ratings all that stellar, which is part of the reason why they not only changed the crew halfway through, but also went in the completely opposite direction with the next show, namely Kabuto, which is a much more 'back to basics and true to formula' Rider show.

Another problem was that the show was very costly to make, due to fairly heavy CG use on the Makamou and the filming in the mountains, hence that was changed.
The ratings were actually pretty good. In fact, no show since Hibiki has matched it in ratings. The retool, from all I've ever heard, was primarily a reaction to the poor toy sales and location filming budget.

The whole thing backfired horribly, of course. Not only did it not increase toy sales (you can still find discounted Souchaku Henshin Hibiki Rider toys at HLJ), but the reaction from fans was overwhelmingly negative. It didn't help that the cast also came out vocally criticizing the change in direction. Toei publicly got a lot of egg on their face over this.

Oh, and I'd recommend that any Hibiki fan watch Daimajin Kanon. It has Hibiki's original producer and head writer on it and the show is pretty much what Hibiki would have been like if it hadn't been for that meddling Toei.
 
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Yeah they changed the behind the scenes team to the people who'd been doing the Rider movies, and like flicking a light switch the show becomes totally different. The first 29 episodes of Hibiki are awesome. In fact I think the episodes in the mid to late 20s are some of the best the franchise has ever had. Had it ended on episode 29 it would be my favourite KR show ever. Unfortunately it all goes to hell from there. I actually think that the Hibiki world in KR Decade makes a better final episode than the one they gave the actual show. Also, the movie is one of the weaker ones (though I've seen the original Seven Samurai, on which the Hibiki movie is meant to be based, so that could have altered my viewpoint on that).

From what I've heard they immediately alienated a lot of fans by abandoning a lot of the usual rider tropes (bug eyes, Hibiki can't ride a bike, lots of tech etc), and the show was expensive in part due to the CGI but also because they constantly filmed on location (which also caused constant delays meaning they nearly didn't get some episodes finished in time to air). Supposedly Bandai was also less than pleased, believing the show had relatively little to make appealing toys from. So in theory it wasn't unreasonable to put the guys in charge of the successful Rider films in charge instead. The new guys basically removed some of the more expensive elements (flame breath went, filming in cities rather than wilderness etc), and threw in more weapons and traditional rider elements. Unfortunately by that time the people who had watched the show had come to love it, so all they did was piss the remaining viewers off and it didn't bring in anything like the desired numbers of new viewers. There were also lots of behind the scenes issues (apparently the finale was still being rewritten while they were trying to film it, the new staff seriously clashed with the actor playing Hibiki and so on) and this spilled out and became public (which was considered somewhat scandelous).

Bearing in mind that Blade had started with a minor outcry concerning it's lead actor, and Faiz had REALLY pushed things content-wise, it's no surprise that the next series was a back-to-basics bug theme that took no risks, and then the year after they made a big kid-friendly tonal shift.
 
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The ratings were actually pretty good. In fact, no show since Hibiki has matched it in ratings. The retool, from all I've ever heard, was primarily a reaction to the poor toy sales and location filming budget.

That's counting the ratings of the 20 Inoue episodes too though - the first 29 episodes averaged around Blade's level - which meant that it was on par with the lowest rated Rider at the time (although even that would still beat every later series, aside from Decade and W). Inoue's episodes had better ratings than the ones of the original production crew, making the overall rating average significantly higher.
 
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I'm still missing the last 5 episodes of Hibiki, but, IMO, while there is a very obvious change between the two parts, I can't really say that I like one over the other.

Sure, part two has many annoying elements in it, but the first one had some really, really boring episodes (not to mention the foggy camera in the earlier battle scenes)
 
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Did you watch the movie? It was filmed and came out before the executive meddling struck, so it's like the first half.

But the movie was made by the staff that went on to do the show's second half... It doesn't have the whole "distance yourselves from the previous episodes" direction though, so I guess at least visually it fits in better with the first half.
 
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Another problem was that the show was very costly to make, due to fairly heavy CG use on the Makamou and the filming in the mountains, hence that was changed.

Those horrible looking CGI things cost them a lot of money to make? :sly: How? They look like utter crap and you could tell they were fake. They looked like CGI that belonged in a 1992 movie.

Oh, and I'd recommend that any Hibiki fan watch Daimajin Kanon. It has Hibiki's original producer and head writer on it and the show is pretty much what Hibiki would have been like if it hadn't been for that meddling Toei.

Sorry, I don't see the resemblance. I downloaded the first two episodes from Nihon and I do not understand how it is anything like Hibiki other than starring another overly emotionalyl depressed girl instead of Asumu.

I mean, the original trilogy was about a stone statue that comes to life to fight bandits and stuff. How is that similar to Hibiki?
 
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