Gen Urobuchi

Gen Urobuchi arrived at Kamen Rider Gaim from an anime career, and he got there almost by accident. In an interview with Hyper Hobby, he described the hire as a matter of 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 said he accepted immediately. Tokusatsu, he explained, worked on its own storytelling grammar, distinct from anime, and that difference was part of the draw.

Urobuchi named two formative touchstones for his approach to the show: the Space Sheriff series, particularly Gavan, and Shotaro Ishinomori’s Kamen Rider Black manga. He singled out the manga’s ending, aimed at an older readership than the television series ever reached, as one of the more striking things he had read. That admiration mattered directly to Gaim’s design. Much of the September 2013 interview was spent correcting an assumption fans had already settled on: that Gaim’s Rider Battle, a multi-Rider free-for-all, drew on Kamen Rider Ryuki, in which Riders fight for the right to grant a single wish. Urobuchi said the real source was Black, specifically the rivalry between Black and his adopted brother Shadow Moon. Recapturing that emotional dynamic for a new audience, not the Ryuki tournament structure, was the actual model. Takebe had asked him to draw on the tone of early Heisei-era Kamen Rider, Kuuga, Agito, Ryuki, and Faiz, but he was clear that the Rider Battle’s underlying logic came from Black alone.

A later interview with the quarterly magazine The Kamen Rider, published that October, filled in how much of Gaim’s design he inherited rather than invented. The belt gimmick, the fruit-themed Lock Seeds, and the Sengoku-era framing were already locked in place before he took the job, along with an early production plan to make every Rider a samurai distinguished only by a kanji character on the helmet; that plan later expanded into western and Chinese armor styles for visual variety. Asked whether the show depicted an ordinary Sengoku-style war, Urobuchi described the Rider Battle as following a lord-and-retainer structure, and said he had briefly considered writing the Riders as allies before choosing conflict instead. He traced that choice back further than Ryuki, to the original Kamen Rider, whose hero fought other altered-human agents of the Shocker organization, and framed the Riders themselves in blunt terms: fundamentally monsters, engaged in what amounted to a monster battle, its outcome shaped by how each user wielded their power.

Pacing was a constant pressure. Urobuchi said he was directed to keep the show moving quickly given its children’s audience and its role in selling toys, and cited that pressure as part of why he wrote Kamen Rider Gridon as a likable character. He praised the cast at length in the same interview, calling out Kobayashi’s performance as Kumon Kaito, Kamen Rider Baron, as an example of a character built almost entirely through physical expression rather than dialogue, something he had already flagged in the September interview when comparing tokusatsu’s compressed dialogue style to anime’s looser one. He also credited Gaku Sano with an improvised scene involving the character Kota playing with his transformation belt, saying both performances landed stronger than he had imagined while writing them, and that visiting the set to watch filming had been genuinely useful to him as a writer.

One production rule came directly from Takebe rather than from Urobuchi’s own instincts: no two-part monster-of-the-week episodes, on the reasoning that letting a threat linger across two installments only to kill it off immediately afterward wasted the format. Urobuchi described the series’ opening scene as a light preview of heavier material still to come, framed deliberately as a possible future rather than a guaranteed one, and pointed out that the scene immediately following it, between Kota and a child, was a direct reference to Kamen Rider Kuuga. Asked what he hoped the finished series would do for its audience, he said he wanted it to work as a kind of guideline for children growing up, something he traced to his own childhood spent with tokusatsu heroes, and that he hoped young viewers facing a real dilemma might ask themselves what their hero would do.