Kamen rider series with best/worst action

[NoirSon]

Kiva had good fights. The problem was that Kiva himself was the LEAST interesting to watch in action.
It was always the same: Run forward - punch punch punch - finisher.
IXA and Dark Kiva were much more interesting to watch.

Yeah, I actually have a hard time think of a Kiva fight alone that was any good.

I personally really liked some of the Kabuto fights, especially early on, Clock up led to some nice fights.

 

[Sentaifan'07 Xman]

BEST:
-Amazon
-Blade
-Kabuto
-OOO
-Wizard
-Gaim
-Ryuki
-Den-O

WORST
-Fourze (Except for Meteor)
-Kiva
-555
-Decade

 

[TheNoMoreHero]

For Best:
Honestly when Koichi Sakamoto directs an action scene in Fourze, and in Kamen Rider movies (A to Z, Megamax, the Fourze movie, and Ultimatum), the action is top notch and easily trumps the rest.
Also Wizard, despite it's overall bland storytelling and characters, the series has great action scenes, although a lot of later fights, with Wizard's power ups, got very boring for being completely one-sided in Wizard's favor.

For worst:
I have to say Kiva and OOO.

 

[Tsukumo Yuma]

Agito, Black, Shin, and even though a lot of the fights scenes were so bad it was good, I am nominating Amazon as well.

Worst, would be the original Ichigo and Nigo, V3, and OOO's.
Ichigo and Nigo's fights scenes were kind of sad in the first series they were in, same with V3 but it got a little bit better later on. OOO's losses to many times and gets smacked around to much, and he can't seem to be able to hold coins in his hand without dropping or losing them left and right, but I still like the series.

 

[Scissors]

The problem with many of the early Showa-era fights was that they were slowed down for no reason.
This has nothing to do with the age, because there are tons of old japanese movies with fast-paced action.

I may be wrong, but I think it has something to do with the fact that many action directors back then were used to giant monster battles.
Sometimes it really did look like the suit actors were moving around as if they were giant sized.
It looks great in a show like Ultraman, but when you see two guys fighting like that on the street, it looks really REALLY bad.

I do think the action improved in V3 and continued to do so after that.

I would say that there are exceptions were the action was actually good despite of having a terrible choreography. Black RX comes to mind.
The choreography in this show was medicore at best. Okamoto is a great suit actor, but he never gave RX any distinctive fighting style. Of course it didn't help that the character relied so much on weapons as he did.

HOWEVER, I think that many of the battles in Black RX had you on the edge of the seat due to the creativity behind them and the mood they were set in.
The villains in KR have always had special abilities that were there to make our main hero sweat, but I feel that RX was the first show where they could actually make those abilities look cool due to the better effects.
I remember the episode where RX has to fight a villain that can travel through mirrors. That was actually pretty damn cool for the time, and while they didn't really pull off any stunts, it was still a very cool action scene.

 

[The Monster of Surrealton]

Looking back, I don't like Kabuto's fights.

He never assumed a battle pose, which takes away from the energy of the fight when one participant doesn't appear to be into it.

 

[Lynxara]

Looking back, I don't like Kabuto's fights.

The first quarter or so of Kabuto has really interesting action for this very reason. The direction was doing a lot of interesting things to compensate for Tendou simply not behaving like a formulaic Rider protagonist in battle. It made you curious about the character and wonder why he was behaving this way, and made you genuinely wonder what the hell he was going to do next. Unfortunately, a lot of those things were expensive, and the show simply stops doing them after awhile. By the end of Kabuto, the fights have gotten painfully generic and lazy, and there's been countless threads on this forum discussing how unsatisfactory the handling of Tendou ends up being.

I think the real difficulty of a topic like this is that a lot of Rider shows just don't take a consistent approach to fights. Frequently, fights in a particular portion of a show are a lot better than other parts. With Wizard, it was the typical "fights start good and get lazier over time." With OOO, the series began with dull, generic fights and gradually worked to make them more interesting as the toy line's popularity swelled. Agito's fight quality is all over the place, depending on how much the writing cares about the action at that particular point in time. Shows with consistent fight choreography are relatively rare, let alone consistently bad or good.

For a lot of the Showa series, this especially holds true. Amazon begins with attempts at very distinctive action scenes, and then the show just gives up and starts phoning it in toward the end. The attitude behind fights in the original Kamen Rider changes up frequently as the show goes through different production eras. Even a show as relatively recent as Kamen Rider Black still has fight choreography that's all over the place, sometimes reveling in camp, other times attempting to be tense and atmospheric. It really begs the question of how an uneven-but-sometimes-inspired show like Black stacks up to say, Black RX, which was very consistent but never really hits any of Black's action highs.

 

[Kamen rider sol]

well sometimes for me

in gaim the action can look lame when there are no sparks. without sparks it looks really fake and boring in my opinion

 

[Green Mario]

in gaim the action can look lame when there are no sparks. without sparks it looks really fake and boring in my opinion

Sparks coming out of cloth is realistic?

 

[Tendou Soujiro]

Sparks coming out of cloth is realistic?

It looks a lot more realistic than a sword slashing at spandex/plastic with zero sign of impact besides them touching each other for a second.