Gen Urobuchi on Writing Kamen Rider Gaim After a Career in Anime

Kamen Rider Gaim head writer Gen Urobuchi, best known at the time for his anime writing work, discussed his move into tokusatsu in an interview with Hyper Hobby, and pushed back on a widely assumed influence behind the show’s central conceit.

Urobuchi said he got the job through a chance introduction: voice actor Tomokazu Sugita, who played Kivat Bat III in Kamen Rider Kiva, introduced him to producer Naomi Takebe over drinks, and the conversation turned into a job offer he accepted immediately, framing tokusatsu as a genre with its own storytelling grammar distinct from anime he wanted to try. He named the Space Sheriff series, particularly Gavan, and Shotaro Ishinomori’s Kamen Rider Black manga among his formative influences, calling the manga’s ending scene, aimed at an older readership than the show, one of the more striking things he’d read.

Much of the interview focused on correcting an assumption fans had made about Gaim’s Rider Battle concept, that it was inspired by Kamen Rider Ryuki, in which Riders fight for the right to grant a single wish. Urobuchi said the actual source was Kamen Rider Black, specifically the rivalry between Black and his adopted brother Shadow Moon, an emotional dynamic he wanted to recapture for a new audience. Takebe had specifically asked him to draw on the tone of early Heisei-era Kamen Rider (Kuuga, Agito, Ryuki, and Faiz), but the Rider Battle’s structural logic, he said, came from Black.

On the practical differences between writing anime and live-action tokusatsu, Urobuchi pointed to dialogue length: anime could sustain long lines in a way that live performance couldn’t carry as naturally, and he singled out actor Yutaka Kobayashi’s physical performance as Kamen Rider Baron’s civilian identity, Kumon Kaito, as an example of a character built through expression rather than lines. He also confirmed one structural rule Takebe had set for him directly: no two-part monster-of-the-week episodes, since letting a threat linger only to kill it off immediately afterward wasted the format.