High school graduation has finally arrived for Houtaro Ichinose and Rinne Kudo, and on their last day the pair pay one last visit to the Alchemist Academy. Houtaro continues to dream of becoming a great alchemist, with the goal of opening a restaurant where humans and Chemies can eat together. His seniors Renge Icho and Sabimaru Tsuruhara are also looking forward to their next step, but Rinne has remained mysteriously quiet about her future...
Also looking to the future is Spanner Kurogane - or at least he would be if he hadn't found himself trapped in a time loop! As events continue to repeat around him, Spanner enlists the help of his none-the-wiser friends to identify the Chemy responsible. However the true culprit proves to be a different force, one that isn't going to leave those wishes that "high school would never end" unheard.
Before delving into the main event it would be remiss not to mention that Kamen Rider Gotchard: Graduations first opens with the short Hopper1's Spring Break, in which Hopper1 and the rest of the Chemies continue to live peacefully on New Earth, the planet created just for them by Houtaro. After remembering their adventures together, Hopper1 decides he wants to go and see his best friend - enlisting several other Chemies to help open the (currently stuck) door to Houtaro's Earth. The parallels between the Chemies and Pokémon have never been particularly subtle, with this little prelude directly comparable to the various Pikachu shorts that have preceded Pokémon movies over the years. While its link to Graduations itself is tenuous at best, it is a fun little way to start the film - especially with how little involvement the Chemies have with the main story. It's also nice to have the various Chemies that appear in the short fully voiced by their respective voice actors - meaning there's a little more in terms of dialogue than just them saying their names over and over again.
High school remained important to Kamen Rider Gotchard's setting and characters throughout its run, so it's only fitting that for its epilogue movie that it also says goodbye to that as well. With the focus squarely on the characters all moving on into the next chapters in their lives, Gradudations is a film that rarely looks back - there's no unexpected resurrections or dredging up previously resolved elements, it simply remains an opportunity to tie up a few loose ends and give a proper send off to the characters that made it to the end of the series. It's a graduation in every sense of the word, and as such doesn't feel quite like your typical Kamen Rider V-Cinema release. Not quite to the extent that Saber's Trio of Deep Sin played with the format, but there's a similar level of character-focus over the usual Kamen Rider fare.
With all that in mind it might be a surprise to hear that it isn't actually Houtaro and his fellow students that get the focus in Graduations, but rather the one character that arguably had the least to do with the education system. Graduations instead focuses on Spanner, who despite his typically distant demeanour has his own anxieties about the old gang going their separate ways. Though in some ways it is a missed opportunity to focus on the student characters more given the film's title, in others it actually makes sense for such a film to focus on Spanner. Houtaro and Rinne might be the ones graduating, but the pair constantly moved forward over the course of Gotchard. That isn't to say Spanner didn't have character development, but his past repeatedly held him back from growing the same way the others did. Graduations is an opportunity for him to confront that and finally open his heart, though it does so with very little mention of the trauma that previously led him to take such a stance.
The story does take a little while to get going, if only because Graduations has to play with all the obligatory time loop tropes along the way as well. Repetition of scenes, characters mouthing along to others because they know exactly what they're going to say - it's all in there to help get the ball rolling. After that's all established though the story progression becomes a little more straightforward, and with the absence of all the elements that dominated Gotchard's second half it feels a lot more reminiscent of the earlier "Chemy of the week" episodes - albeit stretched out into an hour-long format. What it packs more of though is emotion, and at times it feels like just as much as the actors saying goodbye to these characters as it does the audience.
But while Spanner's story may take centre stage, there's arguably something far more important Gotchard needed to clear up before it takes its leave. The relationship between Houtaro and Rinne has been a key aspect to the series from its very beginning, evolving from simply classmates to close allies and friends, as well as potentially more if the alternate future of The Future Daybreak is to be considered as well. But Gotchard has never been truly explicit about the nature of their relationship, and if its opening scene has anything to suggest it's that Graduations is where that finally may be revealed. The film rather brilliantly leans to into all of the high school drama tropes, with the pair facing each other in a breeze of cherry blossoms (complete with camera aspect ratio change) as Rinne prepares to confess something to Houtaro. While the answer still might not make the answer as concrete as some might hope, Graduations welcomes you to draw your own conclusions. You can choose to be as oblivious as Houtaro is, or you can choose to take what you want away from Rinne's expression and reactions in that moment. Whatever your conclusion, the pair remain a great couple in either capacity - so much that it's a shame the film doesn't have time to lean into them more as well.
Also appearing in the film are of course Renge and Sabimaru, both of whom fill their usual role of not really having anything specific to do but are nice to see nonetheless. What's nicer to see however is the film bring Kajiki into the fold properly as well, as he's now able to participate in Chemy hunts without the need for a memory wipe at the end of it. His inclusion does serve a bit more of a purpose than that, but nevertheless it's always great to see him getting a little more involved. A bigger surprise however is Minato and Kyoka, who at the beginning of the film are about to get married. Though hardly a focal point of the series there were moments to suggest more than just friendship between the two, so even if it does feel like somewhat of a surprise turn it admittedly doesn't feel completely out of the blue. It does however, much like the other subplots running through Graduations, feel more in the background than it perhaps should.
The story does precipitate the need for a villain (of sorts anyway) though, and it finds that in Ouroboros - a Chemy-adjacent entity tangentially featured across Gotchard via the Ouroboros Realm. Although the film's attempt at setting up the character via a flashback sequence not actually from the series doesn't quite work, Ouroboros itself makes for an interesting character - a entity with no real malice towards humanity but a single-minded drive towards achieving "eternity". Not wanting the days often referred to as "the best of your life" is a sentiment most will be able to relate to, as is suddenly being separated from those closest to you. It isn't a story that needed to end with an explosive fight scene in that all-too-familiar warehouse, but since it did at least it was against a "monster" and not another Kamen Rider as it is so often these days. Despite being kit-bashed from previous Gotchard suits Ouroboros also positively demonic in humanoid form, proving that recycling parts is not always inherently a bad thing.
With the action itself almost a footnote in the story it might seem strange for there to be another new form to add to Valvarad's arsenal, but no matter the theme or occasion a V-Cinema's gotta do what a V-Cinema's gotta do. For Graduations it's the debut of Valvarad GT - a race car and train fusion which sees Valvarad gain sleek white, red and blue attachments as well as giant vehicle arm parts. The obvious reuse of Iron Gotchard suit parts aside, Valvarad GT feels like possibly the strangest element of the film. In series where nearly of the key suit upgrades were accompanied by character-defining moments, Valvarad GT just feels completely unearned as Kyoka simply waltzes in with a new upgrade. The GT theming doesn't really gel with Valvarad's patchy mechanic aesthetic, and together with the colours make for an odd clash of styles. As nice as the moment of seeing Spanner properly treat the Chemies as partners and not just tools is, it's a scene that didn't require a whole new form to do. Though it's understandable that these elements are usually mandated by Toei/Bandai, how well they're incorporated into the story is what makes or breaks them. And in Valvarad's case, it feels like one form too many and a regression back to the numerous (and often forgettable) forms that populated Gotchard's first half.
Kamen Rider Gotchard: Graduations acts as a serviceable end to the series - providing a somewhat satisfying conclusion for its cast, but at the same time one that doesn't really have anything new to say about them either. Focusing on Spanner in a setting that arguably involves him the least was certainly a gamble, and although it works to mixed effect the level of emotion throughout the film reflects such a significant transitionary period in young peoples' lives - and as such it's still the relationship between Houtaro and Rinne that feels like the main event. Their high school days may be over, but this is unlikely to be the last we ever hear from Kamen Rider Gotchard.
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