A sum-up, eh? Here's what I hammered out when I tried.
[HIDE]The first glimpse the world saw of Kamen Rider W was in the climax of the long-awaited All Riders vs. Dai-Shocker film. In a sequence that made little sense, dramatic or otherwise, W rode into the ongoing battle against Shadowmoon and easily defeated him. W then had an argument with himself and drove off-camera (and, therefore, completely out of the plot's concern).
It was a sequence that was smart promotion but a curiously inauspicious beginning for W. It suggested that W was simply more of the same for the aging, increasingly creaky Heisei Rider franchise: a gimmicky core character who'd be defined by petty conflicts, ridiculous power levels substituting for compelling characters, and action that was too senseless and random to have more than the blunt appeal of spectacle.
Could that scene in All Riders vs. Dai-Shocker have been any more misleading?
W instead turned out to be a much-needed reinvigoration of the Kamen Rider franchise. Principal writers Sanjo Riku and Hasegawa Keiichi brought fresh perspective to the franchise, treating W less as this year's model and more as a chance to make their grand statement on Kamen Rider as both a franchise and cultural artifact.
Kamen Rider W is a detective-themed show, loosely building off of the themes of Western writers like Raymond Chandler. It takes place in Futo, a fictional Japanese "Windy City" that is sometimes Chicago, sometimes Yokohama, and sometimes obvious location shots of Tokyo with pinwheels digitally edited into the background. Futo is a literal "Windy City" where most of the power is generated by ever-turning windmills. One of the city's distinguishing landmarks is Futo Tower, a particularly enormous windmill that appears frequently in background shots.
The story concerns Hidari Shotaro, the former assistant of the magnificently hard-boiled detective Narumi Soukichi. Narumi is tragically killed in the series' first episode, when we see Shotaro and Sokichi attempting to rescue a mysterious boy from a grim industrial facility. One year later, we see that the boy is named Philip and he has a strange power to access all of the information that has ever existed on Earth. Shotaro is working with him to keep the Narumi Detective Agency operating, with Shotaro mimicking his hard-boiled boss's demeanor down to the slightest detail.
Philip has another strange power, too. With a belt called the Double Driver and USB drive-like devices called Gaia Memories, Philip can transform with a partner into a single fighting body that someone (probably Shotaro) has named Kamen Rider W. Philip forms W's right side, which uses the elemental powers Heat, Luna (water), and Cyclone; Shotaro forms W's left side, which uses the fighting techniques Joker, Trigger, and Metal (a staff). Together, the two are both a single detective and a single Kamen Rider.
Shotaro is a private investigator, but most of his cases end up concerning Dopants-- humans that use illegal Gaia Memories to become monsters and prowl the streets of Futo, doing as they please. Working with Philip, Shotaro tracks down clues that Philip can use as keywords that can search the Gaia Library. Once they track down the arc's Dopant, W engages the monster in combat and uses its finishing move, the Maximum Drive, to break the Dopant's Gaia Memory. The human culprit can then be hauled off by the police to be tried for his (or frequently her) crimes.
W's main enemy is the Museum, a mysterious organization that's distributing Gaia Memories throughout Futo. The Museum turns out to be a front for the Sonozaki Family, who present the image of wealth and power while turning a profit from Gaia Memory sales. The head of the family is the quietly menacing Ryubei (often romanized Ryubee) Sonozaki, who uses the power of the fearsome Terror Memory. His eldest daughter Saeko uses Taboo and runs day-to-day operations while his younger daughter Wakana appears to have nothing expected of her with regard to the family business.
Throughout the course of the series other memorable characters come and go as W's battle with the Museum (and the conflicts in the Sonozaki family) drive twists and turns in the plot. The show's first act is largely concerned with the life and death of Sonozaki Saeko's husband, Kirihiko, a Gaia Memory dealer who hoped to move up in the family only to find that the Museum was far more sinister than he could have imaged.
The second act introduces us to Shroud, a mysterious woman who seems to provide Philip and Shotaro with their gadgets and gear, and Ryu Terui, a young man driven by revenge who becomes Kamen Rider Accel with Shroud's backing. After Kirihiko's death, Saeko courts Isaka Shinkuro, the powerful Weather Dopant, to try and further her ambitions of replacing her father as the true head of Museum.
Weather murdered Ryu's family, a tragedy that drove the young man to become a Kamen Rider, but also one that Shotaro thinks Ryu must overcome to be a true Kamen Rider who protects others. In time, we find that the Museum was in turn just one operation funded by Foundation X, a throwback to the days when Rider villains were organizations that simply wanted to rule the world.
W's plot is much too complex to be neatly summarized here, owing to a very large cast and a very deliberate pacing of plot events. Instead I will urge you to watch the series and discover it on your own. W is a series with a strong sense of construction, with plot arcs moving logically forward and virtually all resolved by the show's finale.
The few questions W doesn't bother to answer are generally minor and not of immediate importance to the plot, often the sorts of things where a mystery with a few clues provided tends to be more interesting than any possible explanation. For instance, we never know exactly what Shroud is, but at the end of the series, that's clearly less important than who she was.
Character arcs are also a strong point with W. Most of the principal heroes and villains progress through a clearly defined arc with a beginning, middle, and end. The few characters left largely static (Isaka, Akiko, Jun Kazu, and Ryubei) are all characters who would actually be less interesting if we were to accept them as dynamic beings rather than forces of nature. Leaving them simple clears the way to develop the rise and fall of characters who desperately need an arc to be interesting, like Ryu and Saeko.
Plot holes are a recurring problem in Rider writing, especially in the plot-heavy Heisei series, but W has relatively few. What plot holes exist are of a very minor nature, forgettable things like "how did they know to go there?" and "how did they get there so fast?" These are the sorts of cheats that directors like Hitchcock used freely, so I figure it's okay to excuse W for letting its characters move rapidly to interesting places where interesting things can happen.
Tone also tends to be a problem, but W it is likewise minor. W tries to balance heroic melodrama with situational comedy, usually doing a very good job. Humor tends to come directly from who the characters are and how they act in given situations rather than the sometimes random silliness that tended to characterize the humor of earlier shows like Den-O.
The comedy tends not to be over-exaggerated nor are we often asked to think that something is funny because a character is simply having a very exaggerated reaction. Some of the comic relief sequences involving Akiko are a bit heavyhanded and occasionally the show drags out an otherwise-funny bit way too long, but the comedy is never allowed to drown out the action.
W's resounding strengths are both in action and in making the action mean something. A lot of the Heisei shows made after Ryuki (and including Ryuki itself, at times) were content to provide viewers with a lot of action that was wholly empty. Characters would have fights that might look cool or feature neat stunts, but more often than not had no significance whatsoever to the storyline. In W, there is the occasional shameless setpiece fight but there's more of an effort to use fights to resolve major conflicts or at least illustrate who the principal characters are and how they might be changing.
In general, W reinvigorated Kamen Rider by reminding us that Kamen Rider used to mean something. Kamen Rider used to be the name of a hero that little kids and romantics could look up to as a defender of justice and righteous destroyer of evils. The first decade of Heisei muddied that theme, presenting us with Kamen Riders who had no true moral imperative for the first time. That was interesating when it gave us a character like Ryuki's Ouja, who was the saving grace of his series, but in time it lead to Riders being added to shows just so they'd be jerks and fight the other characters ad nauseam.
W is a series that absolutely refused to engage in that. Accel is permitted to fight W only a few times and then often against his will. Accel instead becomes W's ally through the course of Ryu's plot arc. In time Accel accepts the show's high ideal of Kamen Rider as a true superhero tasked with protecting Futo and everyone who lives there.
That commitment on the part of the Kamen Riders gives them a sense of purpose in W that is simply lacking in earlier Heisei shows, which tended to substitute portentious exposition for proper character motivations. You feel like Shotaro, Philip, and Ryu are actively changing their world because of their own personal experiences and you want to see how that turns out.
There is some debate over whether or not W is the greatest Rider series to date right now. I feel that it isn't-- I feel Rider is much too varied for any single show to be "the best"-- but W is definitely a show that deserves to be discussed in the same breath as V3, Black, Kuuga, and Agito.
W built up strong characters and a whole new approach to setting in a Rider show, while also reinstating Riders as unambiguous heroes (for however long that lasts). It is a series well worth a viewer's time and, I think, among the first shows I would recommend to a friend who wanted to understand what Kamen Rider as a franchise was really about. [/HIDE]
