ADACHI WHY HAVEN'T YOU STARTED YOUR ENGINE

[Akurei Nagisa]

...Oh yeah, like that one police villain who killed Shinnosuke's dad. Yeah. X_X The whole attempt at "police procedural" was a promise of Drive that never materialized. (Part of this was that the Special Crimes Unit was also the Wacky Supporting Cast, so you had all these police officers who just looked like total idiots bumbling around until the show desperately tried to convince you they were real cops who did good.)

Wait, Mach was supposed to be a reporter? 9___9 You could've fooled me.

I guess the one thing I can say about Drive that's positive is Surprise-Drive was a damn good theme song.

[MasterDJ]

I can agree on that, yeah. Surprise-Drive and the tagline "All You Need is Drive" were definite good points.

EDIT: Also, if you haven't listened to Spinning Wheel I also feel that one is strong.

[Crescent]

My expectations going into Drive were super tempered. I knew that it wasn't going to be as good as Gaim. But reuniting W's creative team gave me some hope, and at first it felt like the police drama theme was going to be cool. The initial setup (i.e. ADACHI WHY HAVEN'T YOU STARTED YOUR ENGINE), cliche as it was, really fit to the genre... until, y'know. It never materialized.

It was important not to try and ape Gaim, I just didn't think they'd they would pull a complete u-turn right back to the now-stale W through Wizard formula.*

Though to be fair, this isn't entirely on the creative team. They can only work with the Riders/gimmicks supplied by merchandising (unless you're Urobuchi and you use the intended Enemy Rider in a completely different way and make the Second Fiddle the bigger focal point and final villain). But the same point stands here - you don't want to repeat a ton of Riders again, but that doesn't mean you just fall right back to "one main Rider and one secondary Rider, with a similar yet not directly related powerset"**


*The two episode arc is technically an invention of Den-O. Kiva didn't strictly hold to it, but it then fit super well into Decade. And hell, the "Two Riders - Main Rider and Mysterious Second That Uses a Similar But Different System Gimmick" archetype was rooted with Den-O, as well (Kiva didn't adhere to it, but Decade did). But after Decade, W cemented the template that OOO, Fourze, and Wizard all followed (and then Drive).

**Sidenote, Chaser falls into the category of a "No Budget Rider" aka something devised more because of creative direction or unplanned popularity and not in the original merchandising plan - aka Mage, LeBaron, Hell Grape, etc (At least Chase got his own unique weapon to show for his horrible costume - though the LeBaron and Hell Grape costumes definitely benefited from Gaim's modular costumes and both at least looked good, despite just being existing props)