Kamen Rider Decade – DX DecaDriver and DX Ride Booker

This year’s Kamen Rider series is a big what if story. Specifically, it’s like “What if there was a giant Marty Stu crossover fanfic, but it was done by the show’s actual studio, and it didn’t suck?” That essentially describes Kamen Rider Decade, a celebration of the past 10 years of “Heisei” era Kamen Rider shows.

In the series, a man named Kadoya Tsukasa is Kamen Rider Decade. In order to save his world from collapsing, he must travel to the worlds of the past 9 Riders to completely restore his powers. Decade’s powers are unique in that aside from a few specific attacks of his own, his powers are… everyone else’s powers. Decade can transform into any of the past 9 main Riders and access their weapons, powers, forms and final attacks. If he’s with that Rider, he can also transform them into a weapon for a special combo attack.

Decade’s powers are accessed through Kamen Rider Cards. With the DecaDriver belt in its open position as in the above photo, cards are inserted through the top. The logo of the Rider the card draws from will be visible in the circle at the center of the buckle. At this point, the DecaDriver will speak the class of the card, which is one of the following:

Kamen Ride — Transforms Decade into another Rider. Also used for his initial henshin into Decade.
Attack Ride — Accesses weapons, powers and even vehicles
Form Ride — Switch to one of the Rider’s power up forms. Note, “ultimate” forms are accessed separately with a device to come later.
Final Form Ride — Transforms another Rider into a weapon to perform a combo attack
Final Attack Ride — Use a Rider’s own finishing move, or initiate the combo attack with Final Form Ride

When closed, the DecaDriver will light up in the center, speak the name of the card, and play a sound effect. Unlike in the show, where the specific name of Attack Ride and Form Ride cards is spoken, the toy will only say the name of the Rider to whom the card belongs. “Faiz”, “Agito”, etc. There are specific henshin sound effects that play in conjunction with each main Heisei-era Rider’s Kamen Ride card. Other Kamen Ride cards just get a generic effect.

As with the Faiz Driver, the DecaDriver needs modification to fit an adult. Since the DecaDriver closes at the side of the buckle, and the back separation is just for adjustment, I could do things a little differrently. Most importantly, there’s no need to incorporate a buckle at the back. On one side, I just stitched the strap into place the same way I did on the Faiz Driver. On the other side, I passed it through the adjustment slot, and put the adjustment piece from the backpack back on. The adjustment piece keeps the strap from sliding back through, and also does its intended job of allowing you to adjust the belt’s size.

Decade’s other main piece of equipment is the Ride Booker. Normally hanging at his left side, its primary purpose is as a card holder.

Within, there are two areas to hold cards. The area at the left has space for 3 cards comfortably. You could maybe jam more in, but I’m worried about messing them up. When you pull a card up from this area, it will bump a little switch causing a “vrooom” card drawing sound directly out of the show. The area on the right is much deeper, holding most of your cards, but has no special function.

The Ride Booker also serves as Decade’s personal weapon. The first mode is a pistol. This looks very nice, and very accurate to the show. When the trigger his held down, you get a machine gun sound effect. The Ride Booker’s gun mode can be powered up with the Decade Blast card, though for the toy this has no effect.

The Ride Booker’s second form is a sword. Unfortunately, and likely due to toy safety regulations, the blade is embarassingly short. This comes of worse than most toy swords, since the card holder section is taking up a lot of the sword’s overall length, leaving just a pathetic tip of a blade. I can’t say this looks remotely as good as the gun. Tapping the trigger will make a sword slashing sound effect. The Ride Booker’s sword mode is powered up by the Decade Slash card (though, as with the gun, this does not affect the toy).

Here’s a quick look at the Kamen Rider cards I have at the moment. The 10 Kamen Ride cards all come with the DecaDriver. The Decade Slash card comes with the Ride Booker (but not the Decade Blast, frustratingly). Decade’s Final Attack Ride comes with the Final Form Ride series Kamen Rider Decade action figure. These cards, in addition to being usable in the DecaDriver, are also used for the Kamen Rider Battle: Ganbaride arcade game. In fact, other than the ones that come with toys, those machines are the only way to get the cards. There is a function in them to buy cards from Kivat the 3rd. Unfortunately, there are no boosters, so it’s fairly impossible to get them outside Japan. There is hope for gaijin looking to get the most out of their DecaDriver. Somebody in Japan figured out the encoding on the barcodes and made a PDF with barcode cards you can cut out. There’s also some promo card effects as well as unintended and Easter Egg effects. Pretty nice!

DecaDriver cards complete set — PDF

I love the DecaDriver. It only really has one thing that it does, read barcodes, however that one function is really fun. It’s also very solidly made, and makes a very satisfying sound when opened and shut. Details are abound, even in places you can’t normally see. Since this allows you to role play as every main Rider from the past 10 years, how could any Kamen Rider fan not want this?