What if Sho Aikawa stayed for Decade for the whole time?

[Lynxara]

I don't mean the part about crossing the gate, but the nebulous mechanics involved around it, especially regarding the flow of humans souls that is in the gate by itself, and supposedly was what really powered up alchemy, if I'm not misremembering those episodes.

That's more or less what I'm talking about. IIRC, that idea originated with Mizushima because he wanted to specifically use it to get to the gate-crossing bit of the plot. Which might also explain why the mechanics aren't detailed, that's also typical of Mizushima's work. (So is the entire concept being in extremely poor taste, but that's a digression.)

It can be hard to compare a writer's work from series-to-series without considering director/producer information. Mizushima is an "auteur" director of the sort that you see a lot in anime but simply don't see all that often in tokusatsu TV. I really feel like the Mizushima in the second half of FMA drowns out the Aikawa pretty decisively in everything save the dialog style.

Now, tokusatsu has its handful of auteur directors-- Kieta Amemiya comes to mind offhand-- but more frequently you get guys like Kouichi Sakamoto who are mainly distinct visually. Tokusatsu seems to breed auteur writers of the Yasuko Kobayashi and Toshiki Inoue mold moreso than directors. The reason why probably has something to do withe production process.

 

[NeonZ]

Mizushima is an "auteur" director of the sort that you see a lot in anime but simply don't see all that often in tokusatsu TV. I really feel like the Mizushima in the second half of FMA drowns out the Aikawa pretty decisively in everything save the dialog style.

Can you really call Mizushima an "author" director? Now that you mentioned the real world comparisons, I can see that pattern in some of his work, so it's probably really Mizushima's, but I don't think he's such a big influence in general due to the lack of other matching elements. More than half of his work was just on adaptations or some other kind of derivative work, and his original content varies wildly.

The final arc of a FMA is very different from a Dai-Guard which is really unlike 00 (and even that series had huge reformulations between its two seasons). He doesn't seem like someone with a big hands on approach. In FMA's case, the use of a single writer for most of the anime original content is also pretty rare.

However, some parallels between Blade's and FMA's later halves can easily be drawn, like the non human antagonists cursing their unfair existence (elements absent from both works previously to Sho Aikawa's writing) and the bittersweet ending about the characters staying away from each other. Both series were big fans of drama too (although in Blade's case that was around since the beginning)... while 00 had little character focus for almost half of the series.

 

[Reito-sama]

Any writers have flaws in limited ability. Aikawa Shou went do well writing Kamen Rider Blade story especially Joker Arc talking about Hajime's past and atone his sins. Unlike Decade if only pull it off through the end or maybe he had uneasy feeling comes to Den-O, which is Kobayashi's writing for the series of Den-O's World and Momotaros the only Kamen Rider Den-O and not chibi Ryoutaro. Inoue was good at Agito story which is best of all story plotline overall than Kuuga's. If we know Aikawa put an idea the introduction about Apollo Geist and X Rider appeared in X Rider's World. Not can be sure unless Toei find a very well-talented writer with potential.