‘Tojima Wants to Be a Kamen Rider’ Season 1 Review

To start anything off, I wish to issue a fair warning that I’m an incredibly casual fan of Kamen Rider. My knowledge of the franchise extends from searching up Kamen Rider fights on YouTube when I was 13 and ending with watching Shin Kamen Rider a couple of years back. I am completely out of my element with the franchise. So imagine my luck when I see that a new anime has been released called Tojima Wants to Be a Kamen Rider, a show all about honoring the IP for fans. So of course I had to watch it with the hope it would be a good first stepping stone.

Tojima Wants to Be a Kamen Rider is exactly what the title says. We follow our protagonist, Tojima Tanzaburo, who loved the show Kamen Rider so much when he was a kid, he devoted his life to training to become this fictional character. After 30 long years of nothing happening, he sells all his merch and tries to live a normal life with his dreams crushed. Until one day, a group of yakuza thugs mug an old man’s stall dressed as Shocker. Donning a cheap plastic mask, Tojima firmly awakens his dream and believes he IS Kamen Rider. This attracts other people who are just as devoted as him to join in and pretend to be Kamen Rider, only for them all to find out Shocker is real and threatens to take over the world.

Right off the bat, this show is hilarious with its premise, as it’s an action cartoon where the power system is how delusional your love and passion for something is, allowing you to do crazy feats. We have the main cast hitting transformation poses, then doing sick wrestling moves and full-on Rider Kicks, screaming their special move’s name before fighting Shocker, all in their khakis and a cheap Halloween mask. Essentially, they are LARPing against real Shocker Monsters and Combatants. They never once falter from this gimmick, and seeing the rest of the cast’s level of commitment is hilarious.

My favorite of the main cast is Yuriko Okada, who loved Tackle so much that when she saw her die in the show, she vowed to continue her legacy as the female Kamen Rider who lived. She has a full cosplay that she brings with her on standby for when she sees Shocker, dons the helmet, and then does sick wrestling moves on them. The rest of the cast rounds out in the first main arc with the Shimamura brothers. There’s Mitsuba, who is Riderman, and Ichiyo, who is Kamen Rider V3. They are alright in my opinion. Ichiyo can be a lot more insufferable than the rest of the main cast, and Mitsuba is a bit too average for my tastes given the absurdity of everything and the lack of him being a straight man in a lot of punchlines. I enjoy the comedy of Tackle’s passion disrupting reality, and Tojima’s funny delusions, which bring him to tears of joy a lot more.

The story, in all honesty, is pretty bare bones and full of cliches if you strip the absurdity of the premise. So once the main cast determines Shocker is real thanks to Ichiyo’s girlfriend, Yukarisu, being a Shocker Combatant sent to spy on them, they confront her and are ambushed by multiple other real combatants. Ichiyo confesses his love to Yukarisu, and it breaks the Shocker’s mind control, which makes Spider Man jump in, wondering how this is possible. The group fails at fighting him off, but Tojima, full of glee as there’s a real Shocker Monster for him to fight, lands a powerful hit to knock Spider Man back. To avoid the sight of civilians, Spider Man retreats, which has our team of Kamen Riders start training, while Spider Man and Bat Man figure out their plan to take over the world. On paper, this is fine, but as we get deeper into the show, there’s never any big breaks from the usual action anime tropes or any deep character motives to want to sink your teeth into. It honestly leans too heavily on its comedy and production.

 
Speaking of production, one aspect of the show I thoroughly enjoyed was the music. The show was composed by TeddyLOID, who did the soundtrack to the Gainax cult classic, “Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt.” Just like that show, TeddyLOID delivers another score full of EDM and dubstep bangers, along with each rider getting their own infectious theme. Tackle’s always gets stuck in my head whenever it comes on, and I really do think in these action shows with multiple characters, giving them a theme really helps make the cast stand out on their own.

Honestly, the music is consistently the best part of the show, and I highly recommend you listen to it. They even go out of their way during the later part of the story when there are idols to have actual full-length pop songs. TeddyLOID also composed the songs for the opening and ending of the show. The opening is pretty hype and fun while still being a bit campy. The actual star is the ending track of every episode, “One More Time,” being a pump-up anthemic jam with this random mini plot of a Takoyaki training to be a Kamen Rider, and I adore it. The song is catchy and passionate, and I am a sucker for stop motion animation, so I never skipped this outro once in its 24-episode season.

One thing I do actually enjoy about this show is the love and passion for the Kamen Rider series. Everyone’s backstories show how much the Kamen Rider series means to each character and how they formed their own unique connection to whatever character they are currently fixated with. I think honestly, the show did a great job with this, as even an outsider entering this show can feel the love of the IP put into this show. There are so many references to multiple Kamen Rider shows and actors, even using some stock footage to show them as children watching and growing up with the franchise, to the point where Kamen Rider feels larger than life itself from their perspective.

They even mix this with their comedy, as there’s sometimes a pep talk where they devolve into nerd talk by stating this problem is “just like episode X of Kamen Rider,” then give a full episode description to prove a point, which had me dying of laughter while also wanting to watch whatever episodes they were talking about. There are full-on Kamen Rider history lore dumps in some episodes, like episode 2 gives a full history on Tackle. That’s awesome. It’s just nice to feel the love seeping out from this show from the author, artists, and everyone else who touched this show down to the core for what is a show that is so incredibly silly.

Before I do move off to stronger critiques, there was one plot and character I did enjoy, and that was of the yakuza member, Hachiro Nakao, who idolizes Shocker due to justice failing in his life. So in episode 1, he dresses up as a Combatant to do odd jobs instead of moving up in the family due to how well he is at street brawling and not much else. He later gets pierced by Spider Man, becoming a combatant, but due to his love for his underlings and his love of being Shocker, his mind control is broken instantly. With this newfound power, he just kind of bums around. I love that. He is legit the funniest character in the show due to him being probably the most grounded-to-reality character of the cast while still cracking jokes. He is voiced by Jason Douglas in the dub, who is a slept-on voice actor in my opinion, voicing characters like Beerus from Dragon Ball Super, Kishibe from Chainsaw Man, and Kreig from Borderlands, to name a few. Along with the character being a mess in general, his gruff voice helps his goofy line delivery so much that every time this character is on screen, it is a treasure. Even when we get to a bunch of boring training episodes, like when there’s an episode where Nakao has to fight a chicken, his reaction and jokes make what would be a generic episode a wonderful time. He makes the season worth it alone if you didn’t like the other main cast.

I was all ready to sing this show’s praises and recommend this to everyone, but the more episodes I kept watching, the honeymoon period faded away, and I realized this show has a lot of problems that soured the experience for me.

As stated before, the narrative is nothing new, and usually I can forgive this, but the pacing here makes no sense half the time. The middle act is an absolute mess until we get to Bat Man. The narrative after Spider Man’s retreat sets up Bat Man as the major villain of the season at around episode 7. Which is fine, and he sends the next minor villain, Thunder Raiko, a Shocker Combatant who is hunting and killing all the Shocker Members who broke out of their mind control. So one would think the next story arc is about her, but it’s not, and she’s cast aside for a dozen things to just kind of happen. A lot of it never really flows correctly with each other, or in the worst case scenario, it feels like a trope. I wasn’t a fan of this random tournament arc. Where all the Riders go to Ichiyo’s house for a tournament arc to prove who TRULY loves Kamen Rider the most. Not only is this tournament a forced trope, but it’s also really boring until Tackle fights Tanjiro.

There’s an episode introducing the Shimamura sister, Futaba, who loathes the brothers’ Kamen Rider antics and vows to kill them if their delusions get too much. Which is over the top, but then you realize Ichiyo is a jobless bum who is incredibly hostile to everyone, so the joke reverses to make me side with her. There’s also a plot where there’s this idol girl who gets fired from her group for being overweight and bumps into Spider Man, who is going to kill her but realizes she has passion like Tojima and studies her. Then after all that, hyping her up during these plots, we finally get Thunder Raiko interacting with the cast almost half the show later, and she instantly loses, so we can focus on the main Bat Man plot. While this may seem like I’m just rambling off, this is a genuine recap of the plot. Things just abruptly happen as there are arguably 7 main characters, and we constantly get sidetracked with a random idea that pops into the writer’s head. Some of them don’t even get resolved this season or they just stop abruptly, like the idol plot with Spider Man. It feels like a shotgun spread of plot points in the middle act to shove as many ideas to set up future parts, but it feels pretty clunky in its execution until we get to Bat Man.

The actual character development of the cast is incredibly one-note and okay at best, but the main issue is that Tojima never really evolves as a character. After his glee from being Kamen Rider in episode 1, he has one main development arc, and it’s almost 18 episodes into the season, which we can probably blame on having so many characters to focus on, backed by the slow pace of the show. So you’d expect it to be this big deal in the narrative, which at first it is. At the start of the Bat Man plot, Yuriko gets beaten badly by him, so the team has to retreat. However, Kamen Rider never runs from a fight against a Shocker Monster, but Tojima just did. This ruins him and makes him question if he really is Kamen Rider, which should lead to a really interesting inner conflict with him. Shame he straight up just goes away so we focus on a different character. Does it get resolved? It’s kind of just forgotten; until an episode later, he just gets yelled at by V3 and trains to punch a tree for a few episodes until he’s back to normal. The character doesn’t seem to learn anything; he just reverts from moody to fine.

I was gob-smacked when they dropped this plot point, especially since this meant Naoko actually is the only person in the whole show who got satisfying character development throughout this whole season. Again, maybe it’s the pacing, maybe it’s too many characters, maybe it’s the fact that most development is just believing in Kamen Rider every episode; it ends up feeling like not much has happened personally to our cast within these 24 episodes internally other than Tanjiro’s happiness when he finally gets to fight a Shocker Monster.

However, the glaring issue is that this show can be, at times, completely immature and tasteless with its comedy. Every woman is drawn perversely, and that’s not my real issue; it’s the fact they are written horribly and are the butt of so many bad jokes. Not to say I am dismissive of fanservice, but the show goes out of its way to do this and falls flat. For example, Yukarisu literally only screams and gets punched in the face in slow motion every other episode when she’s not dumping exposition or being eye candy. Another example: the previously mentioned arc about Spider Man learning from the overweight idol starts with an episode setting up this idol character, and it’s all fat jokes and fat shaming for a full episode.

Is there an underlying narrative with her about body positivity, as she’s fine at the end of the day? You could argue there might be one; it’s just buried under constant fat jokes that never evolve past calling her an insult. Especially since she’s a very kind and energetic character, she doesn’t deserve the last scene of her in the season being called a pig by Bat Man, for no reason. And it’s stuff like this that’s a real turn-off; I can handle every Tackle fight having an upskirt, which, in her words, is a cliché she is fulfilling by being Tackle. That’s at least a reason. Not with Futaba’s character arc starting with her hating her brothers for thinking Shocker is real to it ending with her running down the streets in her underwear, now being more submissive to her brother’s alleged delusions as a real threat. Like nothing in that last sentence is funny. Where’s the funny? I’m not laughing that the one modest character tried to fight Spider Man to save her loved one’s life and somehow ended up half-naked and humiliated. It feels like we are just trying to pander to teenagers in the least interesting and fun-crushing way possible.

To quickly go over the ending, it’s honestly nothing out of the ordinary. Bat Man stages a massive concert with his idols he brainwashed to enact a plan to have the girls convert the male droves to be Shocker in the promise of getting a hot girlfriend. We pause this idea for about 4 episodes so the main cast can train up for a siege, along with Naoko joining our heroes. There’s also Thunder Raiko getting beaten like 4 times, and her backstory mixed it. Then the day comes when Tojima and friends crash Bat Man’s party.

There are some fun fights, like with Naoko seeing his underlings in the Yakuza now controlled by Shocker, and he tries to free them and Tackle and Thunder Raiko in a borderline wrestling match. However, they all go to fight Bat Man together and realize he’s too strong. Tojima then locks in and does a duel against him, and after some blood, sweat, and tears, Tojima defeats Bat Man in a pretty fun and enjoyable fight. Bat Man’s plan of Idol mind control has failed as Spider Man watches. The gang all end up in the hospital and recover so they can continue the fight in the future. It’s a pretty solid final arc for the season, with I guess my only gripe being that Bat Man has borderline no personality other than being as evil as a Saturday morning cartoon villain. I don’t know if he’s regularly portrayed as that, but seeing Spider Man transformed into this bored hitman-to-watcher in the shadows feels like we could have done a bit more with him.

Overall, I came out pretty disappointed in this. Critiquing comedy is hard, so it’s tough to explain, but if I took the comedy out of this, it’s a pretty by-the-numbers action cartoon with some good production. It’s a fun tongue-in-cheek romp where, if you are looking into this for something a little deep, I don’t know if you will come out too satisfied. But if you go into this like a “brain shut off, silly adventure” type of experience (and to have some fun after winding down after a stressful day), then I can really recommend it for that. It is on the level of a popcorn flick for a lot of people, but to me it leans more to a mixed bag of potential that did keep my interest.

I’m thinking of giving this a 5 out of 10. For a newbie into the Kamen Rider franchise, I was still able to find plenty to enjoy with my negatives, so I believe at bare minimum, fans will have a fun time with this.