>He came to work on King-Ohger through his connection to Yuya Takahashi. Takahashi, who is his senpai at his agency, was the main writer of Kamen Rider Ex-Aid and Kamen Rider Zero-One, and Takano was invited to contribute to those shows as well.
>When Takahito Omori (who produced both of the aforementioned Kamen Rider shows) was assigned to produce the 2023 Super Sentai, he asked for Takano by name from his agency.
>Omori had been really impressed with Takano’s work on episodes 23 and 24 of Kamen Rider Zero-One. He was ecstatic and jumped at the chance.
>Regarding what it’s like for him to be the main writer for a Super Sentai series for the first time, “I feel that I have no choice but to do what I find interesting. That’s the point, but I think there is a difference between ‘for adults’ and ‘enjoyable for both adults and children’. It should be something that children and their parents can enjoy watching together at home and find interesting. My main goal was to create a work that would allow them to go shopping for toys and other goods together, as well as having fun talking about how they should go to the hero show at ‘G-Rosso’ next time they go to the theater. That's what I had in mind when I created ‘King-Ohger’.”
>For tokusatsu series, he says the amount of dialogue that can be written is extremely short and limited.
>”Because it is so short, I can't explain the story in a rambling way. Moreover, the amount of dialogue that can be allocated to each person is limited, so you have to think a lot about how much you can convey the characters with just one word of dialogue. I learned a lot from this show, and I am still learning.”
>He drew on his past experiences as a manga fan when writing King-Ohger. He’s a big fan of One Piece and Hunter X Hunter and had wanted to be a mangaka at one point, so he analyzed Weekly Shonen Jump series and other manga to see how he could keep things interesting. King-Ohger is inspired by the Jump series he loved rather than past tokusatsu shows.
>When he started working on Kamen Rider and asked a staff member about the production process, he was told “Tokusatsu shows are serialized, so they’re just like shonen manga,” which was a eureka moment for him.
>He likes the sense of improvisation that comes from this format. He loves puzzles, but he also loves foreshadowing. “Sometimes I decide in advance that I'm going to collect the foreshadowing and scatter it around, and other times I'll put in a few ideas and use them later. It's this mix of things that makes it fun for me to write, and I think that's the best part of it.”
>The idea of "collecting gears" in episode 23 was an idea he got from the art designer.
“Shugoddom is an industrial country. A part of the design that encompasses the country is the cogwheel. There are gears spinning around inside the castle, and the throne also has gears on the back. So, ‘Let's say we don't have enough gears to move the castle. This is the land of cogs!’. I think we were able to do that because everyone worked so hard to create that worldview.”
>The interviewer notes, “ While the show often features rapid developments, the main characters team doesn’t come together until episode 19. The sense of composition of short and large cycles is very pleasant.”
>Takano responds “I am a person who gets bored to death. It is because I get bored easily that I love things that I can watch all the way through without getting bored. I watch such things over and over again and ask myself, "Why am I never bored? I pay a lot of attention to that. If the development is just fast, people will get tired of it. If the development is slow, but the characters are well drawn, people who like the characters will continue to watch. Be careful with the characters, but the main story should be well-paced. I try to keep a good balance between the two.”
>The first character proposal he submitted was that the rangers will be such that “no one will be left out when children play games”.
> “This time, everyone is cool. Everyone has a different coolness, everyone has a different fan base, and we wanted to make sure that when five kids got together to play Sentai, we could divide the group exactly among the five of them.”
>He liked having off-kilter characters like the retainers.
>“This time, there is no base where everyone gathers. Since there is no base, everyone is basically in their own country. That meant that the main characters, the kings, needed someone to talk to. That is one of the reasons why the retainers were inevitably created. As I mentioned before, I used to do theater, so I thought I needed to develop the characters of the retainers, so I created characters for each of them. I like supporting characters, so I put a lot of effort into them.”
>”They play their roles with a lot of gusto on the set. That's why I decided to make episodes 9 and 10 mainly about the entourage. The cast was very enthusiastic, and in episode 9 they were having a lot of fun ad-libbing. I could see from the video that they were all working with passion, and that is why I wanted to respond to them. I felt as if we grew together with this show. As a result, I am glad that many people told me they liked Episode 10.”
>Takano used an insect dictionary to create names for the characters and tried to incorporate lots of elements.
>Going into the second half of King-Ohger, Takano says “pay attention to the foreshadowing!”
