Kamen Rider Ryuki

""One who does not fight will not survive.""

The 2002-2003 entry in the Kamen Rider franchise, and third in the Heisei Era.

Shinji Kido is a young, highly excitable Intrepid Reporter for the online news website ORE Journal. Whilst investigating a series of seemingly random disappearances, he stumbles across a mysterious card deck at the home of one of the victims. After picking it up, he finds that he is able to see hostile monsters living inside of reflective surfaces, and is soon sucked through into the Mirror World: a parallel universe that serves as the home for the monsters and battleground for the Kamen Riders.

He soon meets up with two people involved with this strange otherworld: Yui Kanzaki, a young girl looking for her missing brother, and her partner Ren Akiyama, a longcoat-wearing, Harley-riding stoic Badass who has a card deck of his own and can use it to transform into Kamen Rider Knight. Despite the warnings of Ren and Yui, Shinji decides to make a contract with one of the Mirror Monsters to gain its power and fight as Kamen Rider Ryuki to protect the innocent. However, he has unwittingly entered into something far greater...the Rider War.

Thirteen Advent Card decks have been created for thirteen Kamen Riders, and There Can Be Only One. The mastermind behind the Rider War is Shirou Kanzaki, Yui's missing brother, and he offers to grant a single wish to the last Rider standing. Shinji is determined to stop the in-fighting between the Riders and concentrate on eliminating the threat of the Mirror Monsters, but Ren is equally determined to have his wish granted, and he isn't the only one. Ideals and friendships clash on and off the battlefield as the pressure of the war grows and the Riders are eliminated one by one.

The series consists of the following installments:


 * A 50-episode TV series.
 * The Movie: Episode Final.
 * A TV special with Multiple Endings: 13 Riders Special.
 * An All Just a Dream Crossover: Ryuki vs. Agito.

The series was adapted for Western audiences in 2009 as Kamen Rider Dragon Knight.

Due to the large number of Kamen Riders, it has a Characters page.

This series contains examples of:

 * Actor Allusion: Keiichi Wada plays the original Ryuki in 13 Riders. Not the first time he had a red Chinese Dragon at his command.
 * All Just a Dream - The Hyper Battle Video.
 * Alternate Continuity - The TV series, the 13 Riders special and The Movie all exist in their own continuities..
 * Animal Motifs: The contracted Mirror Monsters, and by extension, the Riders they contract with.
 * Dragons Up the Yin-Yang: Dragreder/Ryuki (and his Evil Twin Dragblacker/Ryuga)
 * Bat Out of Hell: Darkwing/Knight
 * Giant Enemy Crab: Volcancer/Scissors
 * A Load of Bull: Magnugiga/Zolda (it's a minotaur)
 * Rhino Rampage: Metalgelas/Gai
 * Snakes Are Evil: Venosnaker/Ouja
 * Mix-and-Match Critters: Genocider
 * Panthera Awesome: Destwilder/Tiger
 * Hollywood Chameleon: Biogreeza/Verde
 * The Phoenix: Guldphoenix/Odin
 * Seldom-Seen Species: Evildiver/Raia (a ray), Blancwing/Femme (a swan), Gigazelle/Imperer (gazelles).
 * Antagonist in Mourning: When Asakura discovers that.
 * Anyone Can Die.
 * Awesome but Impractical: Zolda and Tiger's Final Vents. For the former, it's Game Breaker status is mitigated by a long build-up time that leaves him wide open to attack, and the fact that despite being able to wipe out large numbers in one go, he never manages to kill anyone with it. For the latter, despite being affectionately named the "Ultimate Punking Vent'' by this troper, it's demonstrated that the gap between when Destwilder attacks and Tiger finishes the enemy off is a wide enough period of time for an aware rider to escape and survive (as both Asakura and Kitaoka managed to do).
 * Some of the Visors used by the Riders. While some are dual purpose weapons and card scanners or are easily accessed, Ouja and Odin have large staffs that look cool but they don't use at all in combat and must we pulled out of Hammerspace just to be used. By contrast, Ryuki just slides a card into a gauntlet on his arm and done.
 * Some, however, are Awesome and Practical: when your card reader is also a weapon, you don't have to fumble with cards while being attacked in order to do battle.
 * Back From the Dead -, and this is the driving force behind the entire story.
 * Big Damn Heroes - Shinji gets a few, including one in the first few episodes where he saves Ren from Volcancer after it turns on and consumes Scissors.
 * BFG - Zolda loves these, as he has two: two shoulder-mounted rocket launchers and an artillery cannon that's three times as long as he is high.
 * BFS - Kamen Rider Knight's Dark Lancer is almost six feet long.
 * Alternative's sword also qualifies.
 * Bittersweet Ending -
 * Blessed With Suck - Becoming a Kamen Rider means you gain cool powers, but you're also bound to fighting the other Riders and monsters, and if you stop fighting, your contract monster eventually eats you.
 * Also, Kagawa is not always happy with his Photographic Memory.
 * Blind Idiot Translation: See Reverse Funny Aneurysm below. A full list about halfway down this page.
 * Bolivian Army Ending -.
 * Bond Creatures - The Mirror Monsters that are neither monsters of the week nor under Kanzaki's direct control.
 * Brainwashed -.
 * Breakable Weapons - Shinji's weapon in his "Blank" form (before he becomes Ryuki) is a pathetic thing that breaks after one hit.
 * Captain Ersatz - Ren Akiyama/Kamen Rider Knight bears more than a few thematic resemblances to a certain other Dark Knight. Not that we're complaining.
 * More than that, compare Kamen Rider Knight with... Knight, Batman's British counterpart. (It's got to be unintentional; as Knight has been stuck in Comic Book Limbo for fifty years and only got out recently.)
 * Cameo - Several members of Kamen Rider Agito's cast, including three of the Riders, appear in Episode Final.
 * Canon Foreigner - Kamen Rider Abyss, who is exclusive to Kamen Rider Decade.
 * Card Battle Game - Each Rider uses Advent Cards to activate his/her powers.
 * Cardboard Prison - Asakura breaks out of jail multiple times.
 * Cassandra Truth - Episode 28 has Shinji reappearing in past episodes, and all his attempts to warn everybody of the future are promptly ignored.
 * Chronic Backstabbing Disorder - Toujou, Sano.
 * Cool Sword - Ryuki, Knight, Ohja, Odin, Femme, Ryuga and Alternative each have one of these.
 * Darker and Edgier - Even within the Kamen Rider franchise as a whole, Ryuki is one of the darker entries, holding the highest body count of major characters in the whole franchise.
 * And though fairly passe now, it was the first series that used officially recognized 'evil' Kamen Riders (as opposed to the Shocker Riders/Shadowmoon/Another Agito who weren't officially considered Kamen Riders).
 * Deadly Game - Jun Shibaura/Kamen Rider Gai, who creates a video game based on the Rider War that soon spills over into real life.
 * Then, the fighting game for Playstation is...
 * Deconstruction - of the ensemble Henshin Hero genre. See Five-Man Band below for one example.
 * The series also deconstructs Beat'Em Up games.
 * It also deconstructs the Mons. Let's say you form a contract with one of them. Great! Now you can use their body parts as weapons to fight people who also use their monster's body parts to fight. You also have to fight other monsters to give your monster something to eat, unless you come to the conclusion that you can simply feed people to your monster (as Scissors and Ohja prove). If you don't fight the monsters? Then your monster gets hungry and decides to eat you. It also happens if you don't even want to fight or you're forced not to. Or even if your Advent Card (the one you use to sic your monster on other people) or Deck (the thing you use to transform) get broken. And it's not like there's a good chance your monster will even be loyal to you anyways. Especially if you have two other monsters working for you that you snagged off their dead masters, or you just happened to luck out and contract a monster that comes in herds. Wow.
 * There's also a deconstruction of the Let's You and Him Fight and Conflict Ball tropes. Whereas in other Kamen Rider shows, they fight each other for different reasons or misunderstandings, here they have no choice but to fight each other. The entire point of the show is to stop the fighting.
 * Phlebotinum Rebel, one of the central tropes of the Kamen Rider franchise, is also deconstructed, as attempting to use the Advent Decks against Shirou and his aims is doomed from the outset due to the fact that he reserved the most powerful Advent Deck for his own use by perfectly brainwashed drones..
 * Thirteen Riders took this trope to hell. Not everyone supports Shinji's attempts to stop the fighting and it resulted in all the remaining riders (about 9 of them) teaming up to kill him and Ren..
 * Deflector Shields - The Seal Advent Card, which protects the wielder from the attacks of a Mirror Monster in the real world.
 * Diving Save - meets his end in this way to save a father and son.
 * Doppelganger Spin - Knight's Trick Vent. Jumps between this and Doppelganger Attack; sometimes the clones physically existed and would attack, but other times they were just distractions that would vanish when hit.
 * Elemental Powers - Some of the Riders have one.
 * An Ice Person: Tiger. Decidedly a lot less punny than the usual examples.
 * Blow You Away: Knight
 * Casting a Shadow: Ryuga
 * Playing With Fire - Ryuki
 * The End of the World As We Know It - What happens if.
 * Eureka Moment: Megumi unknowingly gives Reiko one  Comically enough, while doing so, Megumi actually missed the opportunity to learn the truth much sooner.
 * Everything Fades - Riders' corpses evaporate after a short while.
 * Or, in a slightly more horrifying example, a Rider who reverts to human form in the Mirror World is stuck. For about five minutes until their body dissolves.
 * Evil Twin -
 * Extreme Omnivore - Asakura claims to have developed this trait to survive on the streets. Later on we see him take Kitaoka's seafood spaghetti and finish it, oyster shells and all.
 * Eyepatch of Power - Reiko gains one out of nowhere in episode 5; a possible case of Written in Infirmity, as she mentions in-show that she contracted pinkeye.
 * Fan Service - Megumi. That is all.
 * Five-Man Band - A very rare case of the supporting characters (ORE Journal) instead of the actual 'heroes' (Kamen Riders) fitting this trope:
 * The Hero - Ookubo certainly thinks of himself as this, but exhibits The Big Guy behavior at times.
 * The Lancer - Reiko
 * The Smart Guy - Shimada
 * The Chick - Shinji, the real Hero
 * Team Pet - Megumi
 * Flash Step - One of Odin's abilities. Also, Femme gains this with her Guard Vent.
 * Giant Enemy Crab - Scissors' contract monster, Volcancer.
 * Gratuitous English: Okubo spouts this on occasion, but not as much as the Riders' Visors do.
 * Heroic Sacrifice:
 * Heroic BSOD - Both Shinji and Ren go through these at various points in the story. Asakura has a Villainous BSOD of sorts at the end.
 * Hey, It's That Guy! - Does anybody remember that Takashi Hagino (a.k.a. Takeshi Asakura) was the hero in Changerion? Doubt it.
 * A blink-and-you'll-miss-it variant in ep 36 - Shinji channel-surfs on Kitaoka's TV, and one of the channels shows Tsugami Shouichi's actor in one of his pre-Agito roles.
 * both Tsugami Shouichi AND the G3 team make a cameo in the movie as well, where he meets Shinji in a restaurant and gives his famous smile from the show, while the G3 team are having their usual yakiniku gathering when Shinji drops a cup of seaweed on top of them.
 * Hassei Takano (Raia) was in the Live Action Adaptation of Uzumaki.
 * Keiichi Wada/Ryuuranger appears in the 13 Riders special as the original Ryuki.
 * I Call It Vera - Shimada names her iMac 'Amaryllis' and her laptop 'White Milky'.
 * Megumi tries to rename the laptop "Gosaku". Shimada does not approve.
 * Neither did the laptop.
 * I Coulda Been a Contender - The original holder of the Raia Advent Deck was Yuichi Saito, a pianist who had suffered a career-ending injury; his wish would have been to repair the damage to his hands, but he refused the call.
 * I Surrender, Suckers: Asakura does this frequently. Whenever he is caught by police, he always finds a way to get his deck back and/or get Venosnaker to help him out. Highlight to his escape from a heavily escorted police wagon.
 * Identity Impersonator - Two fake decks were made for Kamen Rider Tiger so no-one would know who was behind the mask. In a later example,.
 * Improbable Weapon User - Most notably Raia, Imperer and Verde.
 * Irony - Despite the fact that Raia's Contract Monster, card visor and weapon all contain the word "Evil", he is not actually evil himself.
 * Ironic Echo: In the very first episode, Yui walks right up to Shinji and asks: "Are you a Kamen Rider?" (He wasn't one yet, but he had found the deck) Flashforward 48 episodes later, and  asking him the exact same question.
 * Jigsaw Puzzle Plot
 * Kick the Dog - Kitaoka faking his own death (well, Zolda's death) at the hands of Technical Pacifist Shinji (which sends him straight into a Heroic BSOD) was the moment that really established him as a total dick.
 * Even Asakura feels the need to hammer this one home, about halfway into the series; he asks Reiko to help him meet with and reconcile with his brother Akira, his only surviving family after a fire claimed the lives of their parents -
 * Kagawa's personal policy, which he tries to teach Shinji - to be a hero, kick one dog if it means saving ten. Shinji believes otherwise.
 * Non-human example:
 * Laser-Guided Amnesia - undergoes a spot of this, which serves as helpful exposition into his backstory.
 * Meaningful Name: The Survive cards are handed out to riders so they can survive most of the fights.
 * Morality Pet - Goro acts as the foil to Shuichi's Jerkass behavior, never attempting to hide it once. Yui is this to Ren.
 * Multiform Balance
 * Joke Character: Blank Form, when a Rider does not posses a Contract Monster. The only Riders to have assumed this form is Ryuki and Ouja.
 * Jack of All Stats: All of the Rider's default form, as well as the only only one to most of them.
 * Super Mode: Ryuki and Knight's Survive Forms.
 * Multiple Endings - The 13 Riders TV special that allowed viewers to phone in and choose one of two endings.
 * Mythology Gag - Most Kamen Rider series feature a spider monster in the first episode; Ryuki raises the bar with a Giant Spider that comes back to life once.
 * Also, the second encounter is often a bat. Guess which Rider Shinjy meets first.
 * Goro sometimes does Rider 1's and Agito's henshin poses as part of his Red Herring routine.
 * The Double Rider Kick appears a few times - once at the end of the Hyper Battle Video (Ryuki and Agito), and once when Shinji and Ren have to fend off a Mirror Monster unmorphed.
 * A minor design gag - Ryuki's eyes, Knight's mouthpiece, and Zolda's antennae all evoke the original Rider.
 * Though the whole routine isn't the same, Shinji and Ren's henshin poses incorporate those of Rider 1 and Rider 2, respectively.
 * Name's the Same: There is a Rider War in Decade.
 * Names to Run Away From Really Fast - Ouja's fusion monster is called Genocider.
 * Subverted with Evildiver, who belongs to one of the good guys.
 * When you deal with a final attack called End of World, you know that it's in your best interest to keep out of the area.
 * No Body Left Behind - Those who die in the Mirror World disintegrate into nothing.
 * No Plans, No Prototype, No Backup - Used straight and averted; Kanzaki keeps the blueprints of the Advent Decks to himself but before he could do so, Kagawa read his work and used his Photographic Memory to reproduce it.
 * Not Quite Dead -.
 * Also a case of Third Time's the Charm.
 * Note to Self:: After  Shinji uses this tropes. Hundred of Postit notes in both his room and his office (to the frustration of Yui and Ookubo) all with the same words: Punch where there's Golden Feathers. It lets him score the first hit on Odin at that point...... And has no effect.
 * The punch may not have caused damage, but it proved to Shinji that.
 * On the Next Episode of Catchphrase: The quote atop the page (or in Japanese, tatakawanakereba, ikinokorenai!).
 * Ontological Inertia - Shinji discovers this the hard way, and later comes to realise it too.
 * Out of Character - Played for comedy in the Ryuki VS Agito special. Ryuki, Knight, Zolda and Ouja team up against an evil Agito. The latter 3 act like stereotypical heroes of justice, despite the fact they act very selfish in the real series. Lampshaded by Shinji when even Ouja, an axe crazy murderer, proclaims he is a fighter of justice. In the end, the whole sequence is revealed to have been a dream, much to Shinji's dismay.
 * Pet the Dog - Even Asakura of all people gets a chance, when he saves a small girl from 3 bug-like Mirror Monsters. Admittedly it was just so he could destroy them himself, but still. It's worth noting that the initial rumors only mentioned 'three monsters', making Asakura a prime suspect of sorts (because he had contracted Jun's and Tezuka's monsters as well after killing them), but Shinji and Ren gave him the benefit of the doubt.
 * An offscreen version takes place earlier in the series, when Kitaoka helps out another little girl by paying for her mother's surgery. There's some kind of pattern here...
 * Sort of a pattern. See Diving Save above for an example with a little boy.
 * Phantom Zone - Mirror World.
 * Power Copying - Ryuki Survive's Strange Vent card always transforms into a copy of the next card his opponent will use.
 * Power Levels: Each Advent Card has a listed Attack rating in multiples of 1000.
 * Prop Recycling: The story arc where Gai debuts involves students killing each other while wearing masks that belonged to the Mooks from Jikuu Senshi Spielban. Western viewers will recognize them as the Skugs from VR Troopers.
 * Real Men Wear Pink: Raia.
 * Recap Episode: Episode 28, sort of.
 * Red Oni, Blue Oni: Shinji and Ren.
 * Redemption Equals Death:
 * Reset Button:
 * Reset Button Ending:.
 * Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory: Because, Shinji is the only one who can resist the memory-erasing effects of Odin's Time Vent.
 * Running Gag: In the second episode, Shinji racks up a 50,000 yen debt to Ren after Yui smashes a store window to save his life, and Ren volunteers to pay for it. This debt is constantly increasing throughout the series: Ren's itemised bill includes charges such as "Keeping Me Awake Fee" and "General Annoyance Fee".
 * Say My Name: "Yui."
 * Miho/Femme's "ASAKURA!!!" in Episode Final.
 * A hilarious example by Shinji: "RON!!"
 * Set Right What Once Went Wrong: attempts to do this multiple times to . While he is successful in altering inconsequential details,.
 * Shout-Out: Ren's first memory on recovering from his Laser-Guided Amnesia (see above) is an image on a woman in a white dress on a beach, just like Shoichi (they were actually Ren's girlfriend and Shoichi's sister respectively).
 * Shiro Kanzaki went by the name Shiro Takami when he studied overseas - both names allude to Shiro Kazami, better known as Kamen Rider V 3.
 * The transporting of Asakura in ep 36 reminded this troper an awful lot of Silence of the Lambs - only they didn't put a muzzle on him till ep 40. And just to hammer it home,
 * And the effect of Freeze Vent on CGI monsters like Genocider looked an awful lot like Duke Org Loki's freezing-and-capturing of the Power Animals in Hyakujuu Sentai Gaoranger.
 * One way to distinguish between the two Alternative Riders is the silver stripes on Alternative Zero, a reference to the primary difference between the first two Kamen Riders (Hayato Ichimonji's suit had the silver stripes).
 * Shinji and Ren have Rider #1 and Rider #2's poses, respectively.
 * Stepford Smiler - Mitsuru Sano (Kamen Rider Imperer).
 * Summon Magic - The Advent Advent Card summons that Rider's Contract monster.
 * Superpower Lottery - You've got Zolda with the Game Breaker Final Vent, you've got Ouja who gets three monsters, you've got Imperer who has a herd of monsters, you've got Odin who  and then you've got Ryuki, who needs to use up one card to summon a serviceable hand weapon. Lampshaded when Raia chooses to use Copy Vent to 'borrow' one of Ryuki's weapons rather than use his own.
 * Swiss Army Weapon - Ryuki Survive's Drag Visor-Zwei and Knight Survive's Dark Visor-Zwei.
 * There Is No Kill Like Overkill - Zolda's Final Vent, aptly named "End of World"
 * It's like the unholy manbaby of a threesome between a More Dakka, a Macross Missile Massacre and a Beam Spam, to be specific (insofar as tropes can be "specific").
 * These Hands Have Killed - Ren does this after he kills in self-defense.
 * Shinji, after he thinks he's killed Zolda.
 * This Is a Drill - Knight's Final Vent.
 * Time Travel - Scads of it. The metaplot is impossible to understand until you unravel all the twisted continuities created by all the time travelling.
 * Transforming Mecha - Dragreder and Darkwing evolve into Dragranzer and Darkraider, which transform into Cool Bikes.
 * Upgrade Artifact - Played straight and subverted. When Shinji becomes Ryuki he suddenly gains the knowledge of how to hold a sword properly, how all his new abilities work and how to perform one hell of a flying side kick. However, as far as his general combat technique goes he's useless when he first becomes a Rider and only marginally improves when he upgrades to Ryuki. He slowly gets better as the series progresses; by the end his fighting skills are up there with the best of them.
 * Played even straighter with the other Riders. Kitaoka is a, golf-playing lawyer. Shibaura is a computer nerd. Kagawa is a mild-mannered middle-aged academic. Only Ren (bar room brawler), Sudou (hardened cop) and Asakura (psycho outlaw) have plausible fighting skills.
 * Then again, those Riders are never shown to have good hand-to-hand skills. Kitaoka sticks to ranged combat and is woeful at hand-to-hand. Shibaura and Kagawa's deficiencies are made up by the sheer power of their armour.
 * What Could Have Been - Miyuki/Kamen Rider Raia was the original owner of the Survive Shippu card, but willingly gave it to Ren. Since then, Toei has released art and figures of what Raia Survive and Exodiver, the Survive version of Evildiver, would have looked like.
 * Not just Raia: Zolda Survive, Scissors Survive, Gai Survive, Ouja Survive (and with Survive-Venosnaker), Tiger Survive, Odin Survive, and Ryuuga Survive. Plus concept art of what would have happened had Yuuichi Saitou contracted with Guld Thunder. Or something.
 * Then there is Genosurviver, which is Genocider with nearly every Contract Monster combined onto it.
 * ~What Do You Mean, It's Not Awesome?~ - Watch as Shimada sets up her laptop in the cafe like an assassin assembling a sniper rifle. "Click...on...Send!"
 * Also, Megumi and Gorou's "standoff" in Episode 30.
 * The Worf Effect - Played straight with most of the Riders' debuts, such as when Zolda breaks out his Final Vent for the first time against both Ryuki and Knight. Subverted when the maggot monsters' first battle after evolving into a more powerful form is with Ohja - and he tears through a whole mob of them to start with.
 * Zerg Rush - Imperer's Final Vent. Also the swarms of maggot monsters towards the series finale.
 * Zerg Rush - Imperer's Final Vent. Also the swarms of maggot monsters towards the series finale.