I seriously hate the Zen helmets. Ugly. Enough with the bug head already. Usually that's a Rider thing. The Rangers had to pull that at least once. Gross.

Well, I've finally hauled myself through the entirety of Gaoranger. My fine friends of Tokunation dot com, I did not like this one at all! It is kind of hard to articulate what exactly went wrong with this show, since it was one of those things where lots of small things added up. The heroes fell completely flat for me, like this is genuinely the first Sentai I've seen where I was completely uninvested in the entire team of Rangers. Personalities were flat, their interactions uninteresting, and it never felt like they were written consistently. Tetomu was pretty good? I was weirdly into Tsue Tsue and Yabaiba, to the point where I was cheering for them over the protagonists! I also think that tonally, the show was not working for me. I get that it was angling for a more humorous show, but it felt like the humor only landed for me about 10% of the time, and the show would sometimes whiplash hard into drama in a way that never really functioned. Heck, even on a more technical level, the story structure just never panned out. Individual episodes were often simply not that good and the story in general seemed to run on a whole lot of "things are happening for incomprehensible reasons". Ugh, I just wasn't a fan at all. At least the suits were cool. This is my first Sentai that I'll put in my D tier, it was bad, but not quite bad enough to offend me and get banished to F like Jetman. I think I've had enough Sentai for a bit, I'm considering trying out my first Metal Hero show next!

Order placed for Zen Kai Ranger today. The deal with the subbing is it's close to the subbing from Shout Factory.

Bouken

Episode 43

The Rangers had just defeated the Questers and recovered a relic.

Recently I asked this on the Rider thread, and I'm curious to know if there's any examples for Sentai? It seems like whenever I hear about different subgroup options and people debating which one is best it's always about Rider; I can't say I know of anything like that for Sentai other than the official releases being sub-par

Well, for the most part, people go with the same ones kissasian uses, though there are exceptions, which I’ll list.

Gorenger: Rampage subs

Battle Fever J: Bernadadelta (kissasian uses a group called Love and Care subs, which is a decidedly inaccurate name, given their quality)

Goggle V: Metallic Fansubs (kissasian uses a group called Quick and Dirty Subs, who admit that their work is a mix of a foreign dub, Google translate and just plain good storytelling)

Changeman: There isn’t really a group who’ve done every episode, so you may have to mix and match.

Liveman: GUIS (While kissasian uses them, it’s an older version using vhs rips)

Magiranger: tinyhenshin (kissasian uses TV-N)

Gekiranger: Earthly-GS or TV-N (kissasian uses an unknown group who translate literally everything. Even the name “Gekiranger” becomes “Wildranger”)

After that, it entirely depends on your preference between TV-N or OT (except for Zenkaiger, where, unless you were actively getting TV-N’s subs of the first few episodes off their site, your only option is OT)

I started Zen today.

I half expected them to pull a reverse Transformers on us and have the Rangers become Zords. I like it otherwise.

Ah, yes. Maskman. Confusing first episode but otherwise a decent 80s sentai show. Suits are nice, Kageyama sang the theme, and they have the honor of being the team to be the first to have a 5-piece robot.

Pretty sure that’s still Earthly. They have the option to switch between a sub track with untranslated names/attacks/martial arts styles and one where all of those are fully localized (i.e., Gekiranger vs Wildranger) on their releases.

I've been craving Sentai after having dropped Kiramager at some point Yodonna was introduced and I need some massive cheering up in my life so I just finished Akibaranger, very fun but I also decided to watch Zenkaiger as it looked pretty seeet and uhhhh holy shit? Zenkaiger lived up to the expectations I got from it on twitter, absolutely loved the first episode

I'm watching Kira and Zen to stay current. This year was the actual 45th so it was perfect timing to start Zen.