The only shows I've really dislike are Go-Busters and Toqger. Both shows was boring, I didn't feel any connection with the characters, and the comedy felt forced. This may be an unpopular opinion but Kobayashi is overrated to me as a sentai writer and folks bypass her flaws because she can write an good end game. Also kind of irks me when folks wants to be blame Go-Busters problems on Gokaiger, Akibaranger, and Kyoryuger instead of the people behind the show itself.
Yeah, it really annoys me that people try to blame Go-Busters's failures on anything but the people behind it. It is NOT true that Toei "didn't give Go-Busters a chance!" because of Gokaiger. Yes, they continued the Ranger Key line throughout Go-Busters's run, but if a series is doing well on its own then toy sales will not be cannibalized (For example, the Gaia Memories line continued throughout OOO, but OOO still had a very successful toyline that outsold W's.) Toei invested a lot of money into Go-Busters at the start of the show and gave it plenty of promotion, seeing it as a new creative direction for the franchise after the big anniversary. Hell, even after Go-Busters had underperformed, Toei still gave it a Vs Movie that concentrated almost entirely on the Busters and ignored the Gokaigers. Even in Kyoryuger Vs Go-Busters where the Go-Busters were supposedly "totally shafted!" they still got more focus than the Gokaigers did in the previous Vs - and it only made sense to prioritise Kyoryuger, since it has
the second most successful toyline in the entire franchise while Go-Busters's performed poorly. Akibaranger, meanwhile, wasn't even aimed at the same target audience as the "official" Sentai so how the hell is it responsible for Go-Busters's performance?
I agree Kobayashi is hugely overrated and especially that she is praised for things that other writers in the franchise are criticised for (such as melodrama, unnecessary romance, contrived plots) If someone like Inoue or Sanjo does this, it's correctly seen as poor writing, but when Kobayashi does it it's just a sign of her genius! I even remember seeing people say during Kyoryuger's run that there was no way Sanjo would manage to write every episode by himself (which he did) because Kobayashi was the only person who could write a large number of episodes without relying on sub-writers. She isn't superhuman. She's just a moderately talented writer with a lot of flaws, whose work will suffer if she is under time pressure or being pushed by higher-ups to make changes (as anyone's would)
Go-busters saw a brief sign of recovery (even though second half kind of stumbled, thanks to Takebe decision)
Takebe's decisions? What do you mean? One problem Go-Busters seems to have had is that Takebe thought that what had made some of her past Kamen Rider series popular would work for Sentai, but she probably was advised/encouraged to do that by Toei, and they started to drop it from the series before the second half.
I'm not wild about Takebe after the Doubutsu Go-Busters movie, which was basically her and the show's creative team throwing a tantrum that audiences didn't like their supposed masterpiece and would have preferred a more "traditional" Sentai. I think that's an incredibly unprofessional, immature response. By and large, Sentai viewers in Japan see the franchise as basically all the same thing and are happy for it to stay that way. Franchises do need to take risks and try new things in order to survive, but a) it's supply and demand and b) even if Go-Busters IS a work of misunderstood genius, it doesn't give the creators the right to childishly lash out and insult the audience
IIRC Den-O had pretty average ratings and toy sales, but for some reason the DVD sales went through the roof. Given that they're one of the few ways Toei can make money without having to go through Bandai, it's not really surprising that they milked it until it went dry. Or that they kept throwing projects at her in the hope that she could do it again.
You'd think that having two series in a row where interference from above caused big changes (OOO and Go-Busters) might indicate that things were no longer going her way, but I suspect her involvement with anime hits (she was head writer for two massive manga adaptations - Attack on Titan and JoJo's Bizarre Adventure) has given her something of a stay of execution. Still, we'll have to wait and see if/when she next appears.
Well, not only did she write Den-O but also Shinkenger (still the last all-around hit that Sentai had) and OOO (whose sales were so good that Fourze didn't begin promotion until two and a half weeks before it was due to air, so that Toei/Bandai could get as much out of OOO's toyline as possible)
Were OOO's changes mandated from above? IIRC, Takebe is on record as stating that the original plan for the series was that Date would die, Ankh would be the final villain of the show, and Maki would have been killed off at the conclusion of the show's middle arc. It was most likely Toei's decision to keep Date in the show (which they do fairly often when a character proves popular; other examples include Hayami in Fourze and Bishop in Kiva) but that doesn't mean they mandated
all the changes.
