This review may contain spoilers
Mild spoilers ahead
Everything the show did well:
>Excellent acting, easily some of the franchise's best
>Really great visual direction, atmosphere setpieces and shot composition
>The ability to warp the scenery of dreams remains a constant throughout the show making fights and scenes feel unique
>Great soundtrack aside from the insert songs
>Most monsters of the week are pretty entertaining, the detective work the cast does in the first half of the show too
>Baku is a really great protagonist, he's both endearing and stylish while not feeling absurdly overpowered despite his dream abilities, his gadgets and use of capsems outside of fights also make him feel resourceful
>All of the main villains feel menacing
>Most individual stories of the 2-parters are fun on their own even though the second half is fully serialized
Everything the show did poorly:
>The show's main rival Nox is a really frustrating character throughout the whole show
>The big plot-twist in the middle makes the female lead Nem considerably less useful in the second half in spite of her massive relevance to the story
>Another thing that doesn't help these two and the other characters that aren't Baku is the pacing on the second half, despite every 2-parter case in the second half being intrinsically tied to the plot they are placed in a way that works against the story/cast, it makes so that some characters don't have enough downtime to deal with tragedies, similar plot-twists happen back to back and most of the progress the show's cop duo Fujimi and Nasuka do in the second half be continously erased making them feel useless despite being likeable characters, this also leads to certain scenes with Sieg to feel awkwardly placed
>Most CODE agents are too underexplored
>The world-building behind the Nightmares feel really wonky
>The action direction feels weaker than other Reiwa Rider shows, but this is just a nitpick since the strong visual direction compensates for it allowing for most fights in the show still be really entertaining
Reasons for the show's strengths:
The show's lead director Kamihoriuchi is one of the best in the tokusatsu industry, the team of episode directors for the show were also really solid, despite most dreams taking place in urban areas this team managed to do a lot with the dream setting.
The chief producer Yanaka dividing his responsibilities among the other two vice producers and Kamihoriuchi allowed for certain aspects of the show like direction, bike scenes, fashion and casting to be enhanced.
Yanaka wanting to have more bike scenes and both him and VP Minato being hardcore fans of early Heisei Rider allowed for the show to have more bike scenes than usual.
VP Sota already has a lot of experience with casting due to having already handle multiple dramas so him being asked to handle it helped the acting being solid throughout.
Head writer Takahashi is good at creating stories with an exciting fast pacing, despite the story progressing kinda slowly in the first quarter of the show most cases retain this sort of pace allowing for the 2-parter stories to be exciting.
Reasons for the show's problems:
Takahashi likes to lots of villains acting simultaneously which results in them not getting the development they needed.
Yanaka's style of the 2-parter structure being more focused on creating an exciting story on the short term rather than a continuous story doesn't mesh well Takahashi's fast paced storytelling style making the pacing of the show's second half to feel off, this also leads to big twist in the middle being done for the sake of it rather than for an actual story reason.
Due to being assigned to make the first show with an international release Yanaka wanted to make this show as distinct from Power Rangers as possible, so he decided that every hero of the show should be continously against Baku throughout most of the story with to make him feel lonely. This feels as a conflict of interests with Takahashi who usually opts for the villains to be extremely evil, this leads to multiple characters feeling inconsistent since their moral conflict usually aren't enough of a justification for their nefarious actions, with the most egregious case of this being Nox.
The staff decided to not tell Nox' actor about his character so some scenes early on feel off once information later gets revealed.
For the enemies known as Lords the staff only made 2 suits, 1 male and 1 female. This seriously limited what they could do with these characters since it meant they couldn't transform together or that one character would suddenly stop transforming because the suit had already been cannibalized.
Overall:
Zeztz is a continuously entertaining ride but it's a show that feels bumpy the more you look back to. The small cases and certain plot beats work on a vacuum but the story as a whole isn't up to par. While most of the characters of the show are not only likable but well acted they feel severely underutilized aside from the protagonist Baku. Overall the show ends up being pretty good but not so standout, I at least feel that the staff succeeded in their goal of making a season that's good for beginners to toku to start with, I'd definitely recommend it as starting point for anyone interested in Rider or toku in general.
>Excellent acting, easily some of the franchise's best
>Really great visual direction, atmosphere setpieces and shot composition
>The ability to warp the scenery of dreams remains a constant throughout the show making fights and scenes feel unique
>Great soundtrack aside from the insert songs
>Most monsters of the week are pretty entertaining, the detective work the cast does in the first half of the show too
>Baku is a really great protagonist, he's both endearing and stylish while not feeling absurdly overpowered despite his dream abilities, his gadgets and use of capsems outside of fights also make him feel resourceful
>All of the main villains feel menacing
>Most individual stories of the 2-parters are fun on their own even though the second half is fully serialized
Everything the show did poorly:
>The show's main rival Nox is a really frustrating character throughout the whole show
>The big plot-twist in the middle makes the female lead Nem considerably less useful in the second half in spite of her massive relevance to the story
>Another thing that doesn't help these two and the other characters that aren't Baku is the pacing on the second half, despite every 2-parter case in the second half being intrinsically tied to the plot they are placed in a way that works against the story/cast, it makes so that some characters don't have enough downtime to deal with tragedies, similar plot-twists happen back to back and most of the progress the show's cop duo Fujimi and Nasuka do in the second half be continously erased making them feel useless despite being likeable characters, this also leads to certain scenes with Sieg to feel awkwardly placed
>Most CODE agents are too underexplored
>The world-building behind the Nightmares feel really wonky
>The action direction feels weaker than other Reiwa Rider shows, but this is just a nitpick since the strong visual direction compensates for it allowing for most fights in the show still be really entertaining
Reasons for the show's strengths:
The show's lead director Kamihoriuchi is one of the best in the tokusatsu industry, the team of episode directors for the show were also really solid, despite most dreams taking place in urban areas this team managed to do a lot with the dream setting.
The chief producer Yanaka dividing his responsibilities among the other two vice producers and Kamihoriuchi allowed for certain aspects of the show like direction, bike scenes, fashion and casting to be enhanced.
Yanaka wanting to have more bike scenes and both him and VP Minato being hardcore fans of early Heisei Rider allowed for the show to have more bike scenes than usual.
VP Sota already has a lot of experience with casting due to having already handle multiple dramas so him being asked to handle it helped the acting being solid throughout.
Head writer Takahashi is good at creating stories with an exciting fast pacing, despite the story progressing kinda slowly in the first quarter of the show most cases retain this sort of pace allowing for the 2-parter stories to be exciting.
Reasons for the show's problems:
Takahashi likes to lots of villains acting simultaneously which results in them not getting the development they needed.
Yanaka's style of the 2-parter structure being more focused on creating an exciting story on the short term rather than a continuous story doesn't mesh well Takahashi's fast paced storytelling style making the pacing of the show's second half to feel off, this also leads to big twist in the middle being done for the sake of it rather than for an actual story reason.
Due to being assigned to make the first show with an international release Yanaka wanted to make this show as distinct from Power Rangers as possible, so he decided that every hero of the show should be continously against Baku throughout most of the story with to make him feel lonely. This feels as a conflict of interests with Takahashi who usually opts for the villains to be extremely evil, this leads to multiple characters feeling inconsistent since their moral conflict usually aren't enough of a justification for their nefarious actions, with the most egregious case of this being Nox.
The staff decided to not tell Nox' actor about his character so some scenes early on feel off once information later gets revealed.
For the enemies known as Lords the staff only made 2 suits, 1 male and 1 female. This seriously limited what they could do with these characters since it meant they couldn't transform together or that one character would suddenly stop transforming because the suit had already been cannibalized.
Overall:
Zeztz is a continuously entertaining ride but it's a show that feels bumpy the more you look back to. The small cases and certain plot beats work on a vacuum but the story as a whole isn't up to par. While most of the characters of the show are not only likable but well acted they feel severely underutilized aside from the protagonist Baku. Overall the show ends up being pretty good but not so standout, I at least feel that the staff succeeded in their goal of making a season that's good for beginners to toku to start with, I'd definitely recommend it as starting point for anyone interested in Rider or toku in general.
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