And it is Blade.
The problems with Blade are twofold, though they relate to a single problem. The main Rider, Blade himself, is not just the least interesting of the characters, it's almost they worked at making him uninteresting. Part of the core concept was that this was a series where it was the characters job to be a Rider. We'd often hear the echo of, in regards to going off to be a hero, "it's your job, isn't it?", however when the power upgrade thing shows up by a new mentor that only really shows up for two or three episodes, he asks Blade to figure out his REAL motivation. "To protect people!" or something. Cut me some slack, that was a while ago.
The point is, there is no overarching theme to Blade the character. He isn't even a generic nice guy! One of the earliest episodes had him despondently decide not to do the Rider thing until he was talked back into it.
He apparently wants to save everyone because his parents died in a fire before his eyes, but this is never a major plot point, with the slight exception of when he has to prove that heroes exist to this one girl who similarly lost her family in a tragic accident.
In the first episode we're introduced to Blade as almost an apprentice Rider to Garren... but it's immediately established that Blade is totally stronger than Garren.
The second problem, which, as I said, ties into the first, is that the series can't decided on a storyline to pursue EITHER.
Fighting against a Rider turned rogue, Garren? Nope, he was good.
The Chief of the B.O.A.R.D. that created the Riders is evil, and that's why Garren kidnapped him.
Nope, more of a misunderstanding on both parts.
The Chief is in a coma with necessary info- we need to find him, heal him, and get this info! They immediately find him, he isn't in a coma.
A Category King monster (the series is based off of a card deck, with the heroes seal and use the powers of the monsters, Aces to transform, King-Jack for power ups, 6 card is an elemental attacks, and I suppose the other cards get proportionately stronger the higher number they are...) with crazy telekinetic powers wants to create the ultimate rider by sealing another Ace monster and doing... something with it. He gets Garren to serve him in exchange for stopping Garren's psychosomatic power meltdown. Things are looking up! This guy will totally be the bad guy of this series!
...Nope. The monster kills Garrens girlfriend, which removes the psychosomatic problem (I'm not afraid of anything now..) and Garren seals the guy, though not before sealing that Category Ace Spider Undead (the monsters are called Undead) and having a new Rider belt made. An EVIL belt!
Okay, so this new evil belt Rider, Leangle, is TOTALLY the bad guy of the series, right? You get where I'm going with this.
We go from there, to various suped up Undead that end up getting sealed easily enough, a cool guy with a desire to kill criminals for the slightest of crimes and who has a sweet machine arm that electrifies people (he's a reference to Riderman!) to the guy that originally released the Undead, except he turns out to be, essentially, a monster clone of himself, and taking orders from the ORIGINAL guy in charge of B.O.A.R.D. that we'd never heard of before, and this guy is looking promising, but we're already like, seven episodes from the end of the series, and it's too little too late... but even HE doesn't make it to the end, getting killed off by the last King level monster, who takes this special card to power up enough to be a threat... and then THAT guy doesn't last. The final two episodes revolve around the Joker Undead being the last one standing, which, based off the rules of the "Battle Fight" (ha ha, that's a great translation) means everyone gets destroyed.
So I think I've made my point. What were they doing? What were they trying to say? I don't think they even knew.
Let's get into the Riders a bit:
In order from left to right: Chalice, Blade, Leangle, and Garren, who represent Heart, Spade, Club, and Diamonds respectively. I kind of think Leangle suit is doofy with his helmet, but his character spends most of the time as an antagonist, so who cares I guess.
The most interesting Rider is Chalice, or Hajime-san in his human form. Because the dude is actually an Undead that is at first simply curious about humanity, so assumes their form, but gradually grows to love them and wants to remain with them, even while keeping up his rather gruff exterior with everyone but little Amane-chan... and to some extent Amane's mother. Seriously, the degree to which Amane loved Hajime should have REALLY freaked the mother out, but they glossed over that. Yet another thing they could have explored in this series but NEVER did.
At first it was assumed that Hajime wass really the Ace of Hearts Undead, but nnnnnope. In truth, he's the Joker Undead, the one monster that, if it wins the "Battle Fight" will result in the end of anything. And as Joker, Hajime is a beastly omnicidal maniac, however when he seals the Ace of Hearts he gets some consciousness of his own, which is expanded on when he seals the 2 of Hearts Undead, the Human Undead. all of this happened before the series starts, so we had no clue about what being the Joker Undead meant until well into the series.
Okay, I need to explain the purpose of the Battle Fight so that a "Human Undead" makes sense. The idea is that 10, 000 years ago all the Undead fought in the Battle Fight, and each Undead monster represented a potential dominant species for the planet. The last Undead standing would determine the dominant species of the planet. So, impossible though it seems, in that big time fight 10, 000 years ago, the lowly 2 OF HEARTS won. How exactly the human Undead won is NEVER explained, even though that surely would have been an awesome story.
When Blade (real name Kazuma Kenzaki) achieves his ultimate powered form, the presence of this power overides Ace of Hearts and 2 of Hearts ability to suppress the Joker, so it runs rampant again. Not wanting to seal Hajime who is usually a friend despite his surliness, Kenzaki goes about finding all the Heart cards, assuming that having all of the cards would provide a power boost similar to Kenzaki having all his Spade cards gave him, thereby suppressing Joker again. To do this Kenzaki had to barter away first his super form enabler thingy, and then he had to give up his actual henshin device with a promise that he'd surrender himself to the evil clone monster dude (though he didn't know he was evil at the time), and THEN he had to get the cards themselves to the rampaging Joker, all now without the ability to transform to Blade. In my mind this was far and away the most interesting thing Kenzaki did.
And now that I think about it, he also was blackmailed into losing the henshin device when his little buddy Kotarou was kidnapped, and again when that one girl who needed to see heroes exist, he was forced to ditch the henshin device then too, and ended up getting shot a bunch of times by the monster in question. Finally, there's how Blade saves the planet at the end, where he sacrifices his own humanity, becoming an Undead, so that he and Joker both exist and the world won't end, and Joker can continue living as Hajime with Amane-chan and what's her name. The mother.
So there was a perfectly serviceable method of giving Kenzaki/Blade a unique way as a Rider, making his one of self sacrifice. I'd have totally gotten behind that! However, without it's use as a deliberate, or at any rate, overt, them I can't give them the credit.
Also, it's said that Kenzaki being able to absorb the power of his 13 cards to power up his King Form was an anomaly. This WAS foreshadowed early on, when the three available Riders at the time had their "fusion ratings" measured- Tachibana/Garren's fusion rate went down (curse you psychosomatic fear ailment!), whereas Chalice and Blade's went up.
So Chalice's went up because he was an Undead/Joker. WHY did it happen to Kenzaki? This was ALSO NEVER EXPLORED. It was said that Kenzaki was recruited to be a Rider by B.O.A.R.D. because of his desire to save people after being unable to save his parents in that fire. To have this all tie in together, they should have said that that trauma specifically somehow made this turn-into-an-Undead thing possible, and that he was recruited specifically because of the power being an actual Undead would yield, or for some sinister purpose by the leader of B.O.A.R.D. that we'd never met before... or something. And that girl that similarly lost her family could have also shown some turn into an Undead fusion power thing (not that she ever transformed... though it'd have been easy enough to grab Kenzaki's device in the fight when he had specifically dropped it..).
To sum it all up and move on, even as I thought Ryuki wasted it's premise, Blade didn't even fully develop a premise to waste. And is therefore an exponentially bigger waste of potential.
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