While in Zawame City's Free Performance Zone, Mai Takatsukasa and Mitsuzane Kureshima of the dance team Team Gaim are having a free-spirited dance when members of rival Team Baron scare them away when an Inves Game gets out of hand. When Mai goes to former teammate Kouta Kazuraba to reveal something strange has happened, he reveals that Team Gaim's leader Yuya gave him a strange Lockseed, and Mai reveals Yuuya informed her of it as well. The two eventually find a way into the Helheim Forest that has appeared in the Free Performance Zone.
- Establishing Character Moment: The kind-hearted Kouta helps a little boy find his mother and cheers him up by convincing him it's a game.
- Family-Unfriendly Violence: Kouta doesn't get out of his first encounter with a monster anywhere near as safely as other Riders. Before he transforms the Inves roughs him up something fierce, tossing him through a steel fence; you can see blood coming from his mouth afterward.
- Foreshadowing: The opening war scene is a HUGE foreshadowing of the events of the final arc.
- Freeze-Frame Bonus: During the first scene, you can briefly see Kamen Rider Gridon with Baron's faction.
- Half the Man He Used to Be: The Byakko Inves gets finished off this way.
- How Do I Shot Web?: Kouta, upon first transforming, has to figure out how to use his weapons.
- Mythology Gag:
- The sequence before the opening practically screams Decade.
- The scene after the opening of Kouta finding a lost child's mother is almost identical to Kuuga's counterpart of the same scene.
- Upon its defeat, one can see a green halo above the Inves's head (actually the stem of the orange), like the Lords in Agito.
- Mind Screw: The series' opening scene, showing Gaim and Baron lead armies against each other while Zangetsu, Ryugen, their army, and the mysterious girl look on. Is it a future event, or something that happened in the past with other people in the armor? Is it metaphorical or literal? It reappears in #44, where it's explained as something that could have happened but didn't.
- Sad Battle Music: Notice that during Kouta's first battle with an Inves the music is dark and grim rather than fast-passed and upbeat as the first fights in the previous Rider shows where. It gives you the sense that the fight should not be happening. Episode 14 shows us why.
- The War Sequence: The episode opens up with Baron and Gaim's forces charging at each other while Zangetsu and Ryugen watch on. It's topped by the actual war in #45, which shows Kouta and Kaito brawling all throughout the ruins of Zawame as their respective armies of Inves clash all across the city.
