Am I the Only One that Misses Many Riders vs. Multi-Form Riders?

[KingRanger]

When you start cramming to many riders in one series you get crap like Kabuto. Double had 2 main riders. The show was damn amazing. Ryuki had to many riders. I mean a few of them were just pointless to the plot. All they did was sell another toy. I am fine with that, but like Scissors.. What a waste of a character. I also don't see why it matters. Form changers or more riders. If you have fun watching a show, what does it matter.

 

[Painted_Outlaw]

(Faiz might be different, but that's because it has other problems.)

Who's Delta again?
( ﾟ∀ﾟ)ｱﾊﾊ八八ﾉヽﾉヽﾉヽﾉ ＼ / ＼/ ＼

Kick Hopper & Punch Hopper, [..] were such complex people the mere comparison of them to one of Ryuki's characters feels like an insult.

How were they complex? Everything I've heard about them just paints them as two wimps who are comfortable with wimping around with their wimpyness.

 

[KingRanger]

Each of Kabuto's riders had a multi-layered personality that was unraveled over time whether they had a lot of time to do it or not. Sasword, Kick Hopper & Punch Hopper, and Drake were such complex people the mere comparison of them to one of Ryuki's characters feels like an insult.

There was nothing complex about those characters. Sasword was a spoiled rich kid who turned into comic relief. That they ended up making him a worm just seemed tacked on and stupid.

The hoppers were just emo dudes who whined a lot.

Drake was... Well it was hard to decide what he was because he was never there much.

I take it you haven't seen much Ryuki? I mean to say that the hoppers were more complex than say.... Ren....:redface2:

 

[Glamador]

Glam has seen all of Ryuki. There's a list in my sig.

Ren was the 1/10 Glam referred to earlier. Him and Kanzaki Shiro, if you count him.

 

[Switchblade]

When you start cramming to many riders in one series you get crap like Kabuto. Double had 2 main riders. The show was damn amazing. Ryuki had to many riders. I mean a few of them were just pointless to the plot. All they did was sell another toy. I am fine with that, but like Scissors.. What a waste of a character. I also don't see why it matters. Form changers or more riders. If you have fun watching a show, what does it matter.

It's better to think of Scissors less as a character and more as a plot device. He wasn't meant to be around for long or to be a deep character, his role was to show the audience early on that: 1) not all Riders were good and 2) not all Riders will survive. To those ends he served his role perfectly.

 

[lazycoconut]

On a purely personal level, I don't care how much "development" a character has/doesn't have (especially not for its own sake - a static character can be as important to the story as a dynamic one) as long as they have a few traits I enjoy. I'll take OOO, with two Riders I liked, over Kiva with multiple ones I didn't. But I'll also take Kabuto, whose Riders at least entertained me, over Den-O with Zeronos whose teeth I wanted to punch down his throat every time he was on screen.

 

[Glamador]

It's better to think of Scissors less as a character and more as a plot device. He wasn't meant to be around for long or to be a deep character, his role was to show the audience early on that: 1) not all Riders were good and 2) not all Riders will survive. To those ends he served his role perfectly.

On a purely personal level, I don't care how much "development" a character has/doesn't have (especially not for its own sake - a static character can be as important to the story as a dynamic one) as long as they have a few traits I enjoy.

These two posts work amazingly well together. Indeed a static character can be just as good if he serves his puposes well. "Complex" doesn't mean "developed" either. It just means having multiple layers to the personality.

 

[Wing Saber]

I always thought that having 2-4 Riders was better than having too many at the same time. While Ryuki & Hibiki had so many, they kept the focus on the main four. Where as Kabuto, it was all over the place.

 

[bleachjoj]

Honestly in Kabuto you really could of just had Kabuto, Gattack, and the hoppers and not much would be lost. The other riders became useless when Tendo got his God sword. 2-3 riders I feel are best that way development is a little more concentrated.

 

[Blaze Dragon]

It depends a lot more of how the Riders are used than the amount of Riders, honestly. And as said before, you can have heavily important characters that aren't Riders.

I'd say Kamen Rider has never been a team series, though. At best, you had three Riders working together at any given time, excluding crossovers. Agito is probably the best at this, even the opening puts Agito, Gills and G3(-X) in the same level, but the fourth (debatable) Rider of the series, Another Agito, is not shown, and never really joins the core characters (and has a far shorter lifespan, too). Newer series like W (W, Accel), OOO (OOO, Birth, Proto Birth) and Fourze (Fourze, Meteor) show it well too.

Even in those "teams" there was always conflict, and it wasn't unusual to see the teams barely holding together and outright breaking at times. Faiz is the most extreme example of this, because everyone in that series has serious problems with interaction, and heavily require psychologists to teach them that beating each other up Zeta Gundam-style is NOT the way to go.

Usually, Riders outside those teams tended to be very undeveloped, and basically there for the story's sake (Ryuki, of course, is the strongest example of this, with only three really developed Riders (Ryuki, Knight, Zolda), one extremely important character with no development but awesome nonetheless (Ouja), and everyone else as one-note characters, especially Scissors. It's definitely not the only example though, there's Delta, Sasword, Drake, every evil Rider ever...).

How the Riders are used is heavily important, I'd say even moreso than having them as well-developed characters. Taking Ryuki as an example, again, only Ryuki, Knight and Zolda ever get developed, but most Riders has a role in the story, since it's centered around the Rider War and all (I'd say Scissors, Gai and Verde weren't really needed). I'd say Decade does the same thing, but that'd require making sense out of Decade's non-story. In Faiz, Delta is heavily important while on the enemy's hands, especially when its used by the Dragon Orphenoch, however, when Mihara gets it, he becomes a non-entity, and it'd have been the same or even better if the Delta Gear had been destroyed, because Mihara!Delta served no purpouse and had no personality whatsoever.

Of course, one must have in mind how Rider Systems change hands and fast. Ixa is the best example, having a crapton of users. Otoya, Jirou, Yuri, Nago, Megumi, and even two Fangires, Spider and Rook. All of them are heavily important to the story at large, and being Ixa is important for their characters. In Rook's case, it exploits Ixa's weakness as an advantage, which I found a moment of genius in a series that definitely lacked those (though it happened in 1986, the best moment of Kiva...).

Basically, what I want to say is what I said at the beginning, what matters is HOW they're used, not how many there are. Double does great things with its four Riders (Double (Joker included), Accel, Skull and Eternal), exploiting its movies to fully tell the stories of the Riders that didn't get the chance to shine in the series proper (namely, Skull and Eternal). Ryuki uses the Riders to generate conflict, as the framing point of the story, to challenge the viewpoint and ideals of its leads (Namely, Shinji and Ren, though again, Kitaoka has development as well). Then you have Kabuto, which had a great amount of totally useless characters (Sasword, Drake, looking at you. TheBee, why do you even exist if everyone will just leave you for another Rider System?), Kiva which had a Rider I'll never get (Saga was totally pointless, Taiga could've easily been Dark Kiva to begin with and nothing would've changed), Den-O which keeps getting more movie Riders that are never interesting enough (then again, considering Den-O is now five Riders instead of one with multiple form changes, you can say that Den-O himself is a Sentai...of one-note jokes that stopped being funny years ago).

In short, character dynamics are everything. How sizable the cast is hardly matters if it's not used properly.