Let's go Gavv! 2024's tasty Kamen Rider
September 9, 2024
As the people who know me can tell you, I love Kamen Rider. I love tokusatsu. I love guys smacking each other around in suits made of rubber and bad CG!️
Last year's Kamen Rider Gotchard was an enjoyable ride with some great appeals, but it also fell short in a lot of ways for me. The suits were gorgeous, the extended supporting cast was great, and the simpler, lighter monster-of-the-week stories were often fun; on the other end, the worldbuilding and concepts felt underbaked, the main characters' dynamics weren't as fleshed out as they could've been, and it feels like its most interesting elements are not given enough time in the oven. I could never bring myself to dislike it (a lot of my friends were far harsher than I and ended up dropping it less than a few episodes in), but it wasn't quite going to make my favorites list.
And the thing with Gotchard was it had already spelled out some of its issues for me through its first episode. A first episode is everything! I will give anything several chances even if I don't love the first episode, but not everyone is me. That first episode needs to hit. While Gotchard's isn't bad, I was hard pressed to find it great too, and that's in part because of its main character. The idea of a young boy who's looking for his purpose in life and stumbling into the role of a fledgeling alchemist is an exciting and charming premise for a new hero, but Houtaro Ichinose didn't quite hit the mark for me at first in a way that past protagonists have; though he stumbles into the role of a Kamen Rider, I felt like it happened too quickly and didn't connect organically with his motivation in execution, and my issue with this was amplified by a breakneck pace.
Comparatively, Kamen Rider Gavv seems to be hitting all the right marks. There's an immediately interesting situation out of the gate; our new hero, Shoma, is a half-alien hybrid from another world who escapes the human-eating members of his race and ends up receiving help from a boy on Earth. When this boy is under attack, Shoma, spurred by the desire to protect a life when he couldn't before, discovers that the snacks he eats give him the power to transform into Kamen Rider Gavv!
A snacks-themed superhero who literally has to eat potato chips and gummies with his belt to access similarly themed forms is a bit wackier than usual for the franchise (arguably the silliest theme since 2016's Kamen Rider Ex-Aid, which mixed elements of medical drama with bright pink video game-themed heroes!), though at this point if there's anything we can say it's that Kamen Rider has taken many different forms, and this is part of what makes a new season so exciting. And what's even more: in honest execution, Shoma actually plays far closer to the original conventions of a Kamen Rider established by the very first Takeshi Hongo! Similarly to Kamen Rider 1, Shoma escapes from an evil force and opposes them with a power that is a part of his body, and struggles with his humanity in comparison to those around him. It's almost a sugarier and sweeter (heehee!) take on the hero that started it all. Shoma's desire to protect a boy he just met to make up for the tragedy of losing his mother immediately earns your sympathy and respect, and the contrast of his being a clueless, silly half-alien man who gets excited over a bag of chips to a righteous hero who coldly offers foes a last choice before promising to beat them down is extremely striking and likable.
Shoma is a sweet and openhearted young man with a love for snacks, but demonstrates a cool conviction when faced when foes who rob others of their happiness.
For being a sweets-themed series, the aesthetics are already very on point too. Shouma has a great and memorable "design" for a Rider protagonist, wearing a distinctive pastel outfit consisting of blues and yellows. Kamen Rider Gavv itself is a design I was iffy about from stills, but looks great in motion; the beautiful cool gradients of Gavv's armor invoke gummy worms, and the overall shape and look of the material genuinely looks like you could nibble on it! An alien-sounding yet playful voice accompanies each time Gavv transforms, and orbs of sugar and splashes of juice sometimes pop out as he strikes his opponent. Composer Go Sakabe returns from Zero-One and Ghost, delivering a unique, energetic and bouncy OST that for lack of a better word sounds kind of like Splatoon music. Everything is nicely in service to this overall theme of sugars and sweets, and it's just a fun audiovisual treat.
Gavv already has extremely some promising elements for the future; two more main characters (one of which who we already know will become the second Kamen Rider of the series) will join our hero, and if the opening is any indication they seem to want to really put focus on the way this trio becomes close as a group. There's also the running mystery behind the aliens and Shoma's connection to them, as well as an element of Shoma trying to keep a secret identity. The sweets theme as a whole has a lot of narrative potential; I'm wondering if I should expect a message that will change the way I appreciate food in the same way Dungeon Meshi did... It's just an extremely likable start that already has me very hungry for more!