Taking a look at the newly announced Kamen Rider Gotchard special, which confirms a rumoured Rider addition: Kamen Rider Legend!
Early Friday morning (UK time), Toei announced a new Gotchard two part spinoff with part one set to release on November 5th (in time for my birthday, how kind of Toei) and the second part to release November 26th. Each release is to be directed by Robin Furuya, who you might remember from Kamen Rider Saber as they played Storius. The announcement that was made on X:
Kamen Rider Legend is Real!
A number of weeks ago, we posted the rumour of a new Rider, Kamen Rider Legend. Now that he has been confirmed, let’s look at exactly what we know, what was right and what was wrong in our speculation, now that Legend is, in fact, real.
What Was Wrong / Can’t Really Confirm at the Moment
The predictions on how the Driver will work: Working with just the concept art for the Driver, the leaker revealing it opened up like the Beast Driver. There were some other predictions by the community on how exactly that would work but, as we have not seen Legend transform, we can’t say for sure how right or wrong the community was on that quite yet.
What Was Definitely Right
This picture of Legend:
That’s right. This picture that popped up at the start of the year and was seemingly debunked as being part of some unknown persons fanfiction is that saw Daiki Kaito (Kimito Totani), Kamen Rider DiEnd taking over the mantle of Decade. Looking at it side by side with the real Legend suit, it’s very clearly the same suit with a few minor changes. For example, the colour of the undersuit being used, the driver not being clear and the fact the words written around it say ‘Gorgeous Decade’.
All three can be explained away by it being concept art early in production.
- Gorgeous Decade: Early project name before the characters name was finalised,
- The Driver not being clear: The toy designers probably had not finished the concept yet
- The undersuit colour being different: Someone in production just thought the different undersuit looked better against the gold.
It’s also worth noting that the text of the spinoff poster is a callback to the text on the original Decade poster:
“Reiwa Rider? 100 years early!”
“Heisei Rider? 10 years early!”
Could this be a cute reference to Decade’s original series? Could Legend be someone from the future using the powers of figures that to him and his future perspective, are beings of Legend? Could I also right in my speculation that this is another Twokaiser situation? Could the ‘Gorgeous Decade’ fanfiction story of Daiki Kaito (Kimito Totani), Kamen Rider DiEnd taking over the mantle of Decade be true as well? These are all things we will have to wait and see if they are answered on November 5th when the first part is released.
What do you think about this? Let me know in the comments! This has been Ethan, writer, reviewer and master of the rumour mill and I’ll see you next time!
Correction: In this article I said: “Each release is to be directed by Robin Furuya, who you might remember from Kamen Rider Saber as they played Storius.” This is wrong. Robin did direct the announcement video and is playing a role in the two parts but the Two parts themselves will be directed by Takayuki Shibasaki who directed Kamen Rider: Beyond Generations.
