Kamen Rider Kabuto/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Abandon Shipping - Tendou regards Hiyori so flirtatiously until it's revealed that she's the girl that would have been his sister.
    • To be "fair", this isn't the first time Toei has teased that kind of thing in its shows, at times not even stopping the flirting after the bombshell.
      • However, it doesn't help the fact that all but one of the series above came AFTER Kabuto aired...
    • And the fact that she was the child of the Worms who had replaced the Kusakabe parents pretty much throws out the 'sister' thing.
  • Alas, Poor Scrappy - The Hopper Brothers were both kind of annoying for awhile, either in their original iterations or, once they were teamed up as a goofy emo duo, they were a pair of butt monkeys who were a bigger butt together than apart. The resolution of their storyline is enough to make you sob.
  • Alas, Poor Villain - Kamishiro Tsurugi.
  • The Chris Carter Effect - Kicks into gear around episode 30; not so coincidentally around the time Ending Fatigue sets in.
  • Crazy Awesome - any fight using Clock Up. The Cast Off ability was what did it for this troper's father.
  • Ending Fatigue - It's generally agreed that the plot haemorrhages coherence around episode 30.
  • Ensemble Darkhorse - Kagami spends most of the series being a complete Butt Monkey. But once he proves himself worthy of the Gatack Zecter, he becomes far more heroic in almost every way than Tendo, even as Tendo continues to be the series darling. The series does, however, lampshade that in some ways Kabuto and Gatack are equals and that Tendo respects Kagami, and perhaps only Kagami, because the Gatack Zecter is the only one the Hyper Sword doesn't steal, leaving it to belong only to Kagami.
    • Tsurugi Kamishiro is one of the more popular comic relief character in the series.
    • Two words: Kick. Hopper.
  • Game Breaker: Kabuto and Gatack's Hyper Forms.
  • Gateway Series - This series has introduced many Western viewers to the Heisei Kamen Rider series with its balance of humor, drama, and action. The Clock Up feature really seems to help as well.
  • God Mode Sue - Two words: Tendou Souji.
    • At times bordering on Parody Sue, especially in the series' more comical moments. The final episode has him walk to France to pick up some tofu on a lark.
  • Harsher in Hindsight: Tendou's remark at the rider anniversary segment at the end of one ep "If he's Stronger, than I'm strongest!" is no longer funny now that Araki Shigeru, Stronger's actor, has passed away.
  • Hell Is That Noise: The Worm's beetle-like clicking. At times it is tolerable, but it can reach extremely unbearable pitches.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight: Hidenori Tokuyama/Yaguruma will be the lead star in a movie based on the boxing manga Thanatos: Mushikera no Kobushi, which will also star Yūki Satō/Kagami possibly as the antagonist.
    • Yusuke Yamamoto/Kamishiro Tsurugi will play another eccentric "prince" AKA Tamaki Suoh in the Ouran High School Host Club live-action adaptation.
  • Ho Yay - Subtle with Tendou and Kagami, but more blatant in Yaguruma and Kageyama, especially after they become the Hopper Riders.
  • Marty Stu: Tendou Souji. Specifically, he's a God Mode Sue and Jerk Stu in one.
  • Memetic Mutation - Start the ZECT-Van!
  • Narm - Depending on who you ask, the Dark Kitchen arc.
  • Nightmare Fuel - No one expected the Masked Rider System to be developed from brutal experimentation on poor Souji Kusakabe as shown in Episode 48.
    • Being experimented and caged up when you're just a young boy is bad enough, but to have Natives performing the experiments?!? That just makes this already disturbing scene EVEN WORSE.
    • Speaking of which, Dark Kabuto's blood-curdlingly child-like smile upon entering Earth in Episode 42 is enough to keep anyone up all night. The creepy music doesn't help either.
    • In a case of serious Paranoia Fuel, a Worm can become an almost perfect copy of anyone, including you. They are also stronger than you, can spit goo on you to kill you, and can slow down time to prevent you from escaping their clutches. The only way you can sense a worm is by their smell, which would be too late by then (unless you're a Kamen Rider, of course.)
  • Paranoia Fuel: The Worm. The fact that a race of over-6"-tall, hyper-advanced aliens with retractable tentacles for hands have successfully managed to infiltrate Japanese, and, by a larger extent, world society, perfectly imitate the humans they encounter right down to their memories, and kill those they replicate, can be severely unnerving.
  • Special Effects Failure - Gattack's battle damage in 44 is very obviously just extra bits stuck to the suit, with obvious edges.
    • There's various instances of transformations not melding very well (actor and suit actor standing in obviously different poses), sometimes bluescreen effects are sort of obvious, and some Worm are designed and fabricated better than others. Let's just say, some episodes obviously had higher budgets than others.
  • Shocking Swerve - Everything involving the Native Worm.
  • Tear Jerker - And loads of it... sniff.
  • They Just Didn't Care - The designs for the various Kamen Rider suits display a sort of increasing amount of this. The Kabuto suit is possibly one of the best-looking Kamen Rider suits of the modern era, with Masked Form turning into Rider Form in a way that really displays the nature of how the Masked Rider System works. The amount of elaborate moving parts and clear effort on the part of the fabrication team declines from there, bottoming out at Sasword, whose Masked Form is just some halfhearted kibble velcroed to his Rider Form. It takes an upswing back up for Gatack, who's almost as good as Kabuto, but this is likely because that suit was designed and fabricated at the same time as Kabuto's. Theoretically there could be an in-universe explanation for this, but since it's never stated outright, it just looks like the design team got progressively more lazy.
  • Villain Decay - Kamen Rider TheBee, Nogi Reiji, Yaguruma Sou after his return as Kick Hopper, and Dark Kabuto.
    • As far as Nogi Reiji/Cassisworm Dimidius is concerned, this may have been a literal consequence of his ability to reincarnate after being destroyed. His powers became explicitly weaker each time he returned to fight the Riders. He went from being superior to Hyper Kabuto to losing against the Hoppers.
  • Visual Effects of Awesome: The special effects are extremely impressive for a Tokusatsu series. From the cast-off and clock-up sequences to the choreography of the fight scenes, Kabuto, even after 5 years since it originally aired, is still considered to be one of the best-looking series in the Kamen Rider franchise.