New account but the same old routine.
Android Kikaider: The Animation #01-13
I have now seen every televised/movie version of Kikaider, and this is the only version where they manage to use the 'conscience circuit' concept in a way that helps the story they are trying to tell! In short, this has the best story in any official Kikaider project (although I'd still say that Metalder is a better unofficial version of the Kikaider story) and yet it's also probably the least accessible for people who have not already experienced other versions. The pacing is frustrating and it's clearly being made on a tiny budget where they have to employ every cheat in the book to try and limit the amount of drawing that they had to do (don't come here for action as there's hardly any) and it hurts the show so much.
Kikaider 01: The Animation #01-04
The OVA sequel to the above and they totally blow the budget on making the first two episodes as action packed as possible. Sadly this means that the fourth episode looks kind of awful (Hakaider in particular spends most of that last episode looking horribly off-model).
Unlike in the original, where Ichiro is kind of the bland protagonist that manages to be less interesting than every other character, this keeps Jiro as the main character and re-imagines Ichiro as more of a hot-head who leaps into action without thinking anything through - and he's all the better for it! Also, they finally explain how he ends up hidden in a statue for the entirety of the first season.
We also get a new character called Rei, who is Kikaider 00 - a prototype that is not brought online until the events of the show who, as he's more primitive than his two brothers, exhibits little personality and really is only there because merch the good guys need more firepower to combat the villains this time.
Sadly there's no Waruder at all, but they just wouldn't have had the time to adapt his story in four episodes, so it's probably for the best. Even as it is, there are times where it feels like whole chunks of the story have been edited out for time. It makes me wonder if it was originally going to be five episodes and got cut down so they could make the next entry instead?
The Boy Who Carried a Guitar: Kikaider vs. Inazuman
One final special, and it's a crossover with Inazuman. This is heavily based on an issue of Ishinomori's Inazuman manga in which Jiro appeared. The problem with that is that the Inazuman manga made sweeping changes to the main cast compared to the televised version of Inazuman, and because it was part of an ongoing series it obviously had no need to introduce these characters. Whereas in this we've never met them before (and being familiar with the toku is no help) so you just kind of get dropped in and have to roll with it.
The lack of explanation also extends to not communicating the idea behind the whole idea of Inazuman's two stage evolution. If you didn't know about Sanagiman going in, you'll probably wonder what on Earth is going on. But the transformation from Sanagiman into Inazuman is probably the best looking sequence in this whole project.
tldr for all of the above: really one for diehard Kikaider fans only, but if that's you then you should certainly give it a look.