Terrible Toku Talents; who's work do you absolutly hate?

[chronoxiong]

After writing my last post I decided to rewatch that episode. Yeah, obvious symbolism is obvious. The Orphenoch King is a representation of someone very powerful who has been totally corrupted by that power, and because power inevitably corrupts it is inevitable that another person with lots of power will some day become similarly corrupted. The Orphenoch King will always rise again. I did wonder if I was just reading far too much into my weekly Bandai infomercials, but it's pretty much spelled out in the dialogue in the playground near the end so I don't think it's unintentional. IIRC Faiz had a lot of stuff like this in it; it's just a shame Inoue has all the subtlety of a brick through a window. :sweat: I don't see how it's any kind of serious attempt to continue the show though.

Edit: why the hell am I defending this show? I don't even like Faiz!

Now that you mention it, that is true and I do give Inoue props for using this symbolism for the ending. But I just can't get over it still because the fact that the final battle disappointed and yes, because the villain was still alive.

 

[Glamador]

The curious thing with tokusatsu is that most people who've been responsible for something truly awful were also, at some point, responsible for something really great. So there's not a lot of creators who work regularly in the field I can bring myself to hate. As much as fans villify guys like Inoue, I don't think tokusatsu really has a Howard Mackie or Chuck Austen yet.

As is so often the case, Lynxara hits the nail on the head. For every show I despise (of which there are, delightfully, very few) the same people have worked on something I've loved.

Part of that may be just that I'm mostly a Rider man (ha) myself and a lot of the same people tend to work on KR from year to year, so I'm bound to see familiar elements from series to series.

 

[Toku Prime]

You see, the symbolism and stuff like that is why I actually liked Faiz. Inoue had some great ideas and I think most of them were executed really well. I had a few problems with the ending, but mostly in the episodes leading up to it and how rushed they were. The final episode left me a bit disappointed with the final battle, but the episode as a whole didn't leave me as infuriated as, say, the endings of Hibiki or Decade.

The symbolism is interesting, but I think that in general the show has a habit of introducing a decent idea and then just running into into the ground. To use a different example:
Masato is a massive racist whose prejudice for Orphenochs leads him to try and kill them on sight, regardless of whether they've actually done anything wrong.
From the moment Masato meets Takumi, he hates him and keeps trying to kill him.
Oh, what's that? Takumi has a secret? Well I wonder what that could possibly be?
Now in of itself, this is a pretty interesting way of forshadowing/introducing the big reveal about Takumi's true nature. However, there are sooo many episodes devoted to Masato trying to isolate and/or kill Takumi where there is no reason for it beyond this as-yet-unstated motivation, and the repetition gets boring (and makes the rest of the group look like idiots for believing Masato yet again after all the times his claims about Takumi have turned out to be complete BS). Then they reveal it...and keep doing more stories about Masato trying to kill Takumi. For me, the initially interesting idea just turned into flogging a dead horse. Unfortunately it's something Faiz seemed to do a number of times.

Now that you mention it, that is true and I do give Inoue props for using this symbolism for the ending. But I just can't get over it still because the fact that the final battle disappointed and yes, because the villain was still alive.

That's fine. Understanding the intent of something doesn't mean you have to like it. I understand what they were doing with Kuuga's final battle, but a part of me has always been really disappointed that the only chance we got to see Kuuga's ultimate form was for 30 seconds, in the mid-distance, being obscured by heavy snow, before their transformations are undone and the series climaxes with two guys standing in the snow fighting like drunks after closing time. :disappoin I was just trying to explain what I got from it and why because of that I didn't feel as if Faiz was ending on a cliffhanger.

 

[DaikaijuSokogeki!]

I'm well aware that I'm probably only giving 555 props because it was the first toku show that had me hooked from beginning to end (this was right as I was starting to get into Toei toku and the only other shows I was watching were Kabuto, Boukenger and Black), so I give it a lot of credit for showing me that tokusatsu can have a pretty deep storyline (or at least attempt to have one). I mean, I know I'm in the minority when I say 555 is a more focused and complete version of the ideas Inoue had introduced in Agito but it's for that reason why I can never claim Inoue is one of the worst writers Toei has ever had.

Plus, I love Jetman to pieces (including its ending).

 

[kuroihikari]

On a side note, Inoue apparently wrote some of the episodes of the Ranma 1/2 TV series which I adored. Though Takahashi deserves the credit for most of that.