Kikai Sentai Zenkaiger Episode 3- "A Serious Witch!" Discussion
 

The hunt is on for new members of the Zenkaiger team, when a new monster with strange freezing powers is set loose.

>the previous two episodes had juran and gaon shoot a poor mook in the face before transforming
>this episode had magine almost shoot herself in the face

i can't wait for vroon to accidentally shoot one of the others before transforming

I'm starting to really hope we get a green character. Maybe one who is proficient with the Geartlinger.

So, I think the episode was good, buuuuuuut....

I was not a fan of the visuals they decided to go for in regards to showing the world freezing around them, it felt like a really bad green screen most of the time.

Was fun. Nothing too special, standard believe in yourself stuff. Curious use of ToQger's power, though.

Yeah, I didn't really get what was up with them trying to use the ToQger power.

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So Kikainoids eat and age? What is up with these guys? I was gonna compare them to Bionicles (biomechanical) but even they didn't actually eat or age, they just had equivalent phenomena.

Slippy slidey ice world provides some good slapstick.

It's neat how the Kikanoid rangers low-key represent their themes. Magine is magic themed, but is just a fortune teller (and not much of one at that). Gaon is animal themed but just likes animals. Juran is dinosaur themed and... is old.

Magine's a fun character. I do like magic, so maybe I'm biased.

Swapping between the different mecha forms is fun. Wonder if they'll still do that once they have all four...

I was willing to tolerate the use of the ToQGer power, since it seemed quite helpful for the slippery situation, but I was disappointed that it was the only Gear used in this episode. :(

Fortunately, just like that show I loathe to think about, this episode also has a redeeming factor in the form of a pink robot. :) In this case, Magine. Not that Zenkaiger needed any redeeming factors, of course. Zenkaiger was already good before Magine, but now it's better. Each new character joining the team makes the dynamic more interesting. This paragraph is subjective BTW.

Of particular intrigue is Magine's relationship to her Uncle Juran and the fact that they haven't seen each other in quite some time. Could this mean that Juran is estranged from his older sibling for some reason? Or perhaps Juran is just a free spirit who moves around a lot? This is the first time having an uncle and niece dynamic in the core team, so I'm interested to see how that will affect their character arcs. Juran being an uncle is also similar to his fellow red dino motif ranger, Ryouga. Although Ryouga functioned as a substitute father while Magine is older and more independent than Mai.

My favorite Zenkai Oh configuration appears in this episode, JuraMagine! I like how the tyrannosaurus and dragon motifs complement each other and the aesthetic reason that Fairy King mentioned before about how it hits that sweet spot between not enough detail and too much detail. The ice world was cool (haha) to look at and introduced a unique element to the fight scenes. The instrumental theme plays for the first time here as well.

I don't think it was said that Juran was Magine's uncle, it was just said she was a kid that he knew around his neighbourhood.

This episode may have been a little too energetic for me. There were so many cuts and so much motion everywhere and all the time! Or perhaps I am forgetting just how much energy an 8 year old has.

Okay Magine is adorable, and honestly I related to her a lot in this episode. I especially like her duality of being shy most of the time but her passion for her hobby giving her courage (and yeah Gaon, you're really in no position to judge when it comes to having weird interests). The "believe in yourself" message was pretty typical, but I liked how instead of believing in herself suddenly making her fortune telling actually work, the point was that it was a way to give people a push forward. I do hope she doesn't rely on CGI magic for all her fights and gets to actually hit baddies with her staff eventually.

I continue to really enjoy how much personality the Tojitendo have, especially Barashitara and Ijirude arguing. I just noticed there's a "clank" sound effect every time Barashitara walks, I know that kind of thing is fairly standard for toku villains but it's still a really good detail that helps sell the sense of him being heavily armored.

It's also kinda funny how the other Zenkaigers asked Juran, whose theme is extinct animals, to explain what an ice age was.

Well naturally; both you and Magipink have the butterfly eyes going on!

If I’m honest, Juran and Magine having a bond makes a bit too much sense, given some of the similarities between Zyuranger and Magiranger (eg. SaintKaiser being a heroic version of Dora Talos in design)

I did like the idea of Zyuran being the cool big brother to all the kids in the neighborhood.

So much green screen, damn, this episode was more hilarious than intended because i laughed at the bad CGI and effects, but it was a fine episode by itself, really like Magine.

Anyways, i guess Kikanoids age and eat, this makes me wonder how old Zyuran is, i think he's complained about his back so he seems to be an adult character, he seemed to be already an adult in Magine's flashback after all, but maybe he was just a teen.

MagiShine had a train mecha

https://i.imgur.com/OQYKC5n.png

Okay, yeah, that interview with Koumura was right on the mark – this is very much a show about good-for-nothings. And a seriously entertaining one, at that!

It's hard to even know where to start breaking these things down with how dense they are, so I'm just going to begin by mentioning two minor things that aren't even particular to this episode, before I keep forgetting to. One, it's really cool that Ishinomori gets that special thanks credit in the opening; and two, I really love how the Geartlinger is used to pilot the robots. We were all wondering what those little extra flaps were for, and I think it's brilliant to have it be a stand to prop the gun up with. Integrating the transformation device with the mecha is nothing new, but I really appreciate how simple and easily replicated this setup is for the kids role-playing at home – just find a table at the right height and there ya' go! No fancy chairs or elaborate holsters required!

Alright, so, look, that stuff is fun and all, but I can only pretend this post is going to be about anything other than how much I love Magine for so long, so let's just get to that.

Going in, she was already the designated member of the team I actively wanted to be my favorite before the show premiered, and, as great as everyone else is, there's basically no chance of anyone pulling a Tametomo on me this year. It's practically fate. Magine is the only one of the five drawing a motif from a Sentai I've actually seen, and one I'm quite fond of at that, and as if that weren't enough, she's also specifically patterned after my favorite member of said team. And then it turned out Magine's character concept was like, adorably bashful nerdy robot girl who is also a wizard and sometimes an awesome dragon? I joked at the start of Kiramager that a fire truck mecha voiced by Kenichi Suzumura was something Toei stole straight out of my wildest dreams, but this is starting to get genuinely suspicious!

So essentially what I'm saying is that Zenkaiger only truly starts here in my eyes, and it was more than worth the wait. This is a very straightforward spotlight episode delivered rather impeccably, and through its focus on Magine, it starts to build up what's clearly going to be a central theme for the show. I guess I'd word it as "being yourself" until further notice? Again, this whole team is assembled from dysfunctional losers, and that's why it's probably pretty significant that Kaito tells Magine her fortunes can still be helpful in their own way regardless of whether or not they're correct. Because if things need to be correct to get the job done, you know, the multiverse is kinda done for with only the Zenkaigers looking out for it! It's a very charming little narrative with a well-meaning message that does a great job introducing a new member of the team, and as always, it's all grounded in unbelievably fine-tuned character interactions. Gaon may not stand a chance of becoming my favorite while Magine is around, but I also don't think I'm ever going to get tired of him completely ghosting Zyuran at every opportunity.

What's also of note is the direction, which is possibly going even harder on challenging itself to experiment than the first two episodes, even though things would ordinarily start to normalize at this point. The constant use of green screen backgrounds to make the world look appropriately iced over is more than a little glaring, and the movements don't always match up very naturally, but I honestly found it weirdly charming for reasons I can't describe very well. I guess it just seems like the kind of thing Toei will get wrong a few times now to do it right later? Like, I can feel the show learning, and I think that's what I liked about it. Considering the director in question this time is Ryuuta Tasaki, the wonky special effects are also balanced out by his usual penchant for snappy, communicative cinematography, so overall, the episode still looks quite nice. He even uses that exact low-angle looking-up establishing shot of a building with the sign in the foreground for Kaito's house at the start that I swear I've seen in like every Kamen Rider show he's worked on? Like, I'm not going back to check for particular examples from episodes by him right now, but that gave me some serious déjÃ* vu for some reason, and I think that's it.

I'm maybe getting off-track now, so I'll wrap this up. Really good episode! Kind of sad they apparently didn't build the robot suits to actually mix-and-match though! Magine is best Zenkaiger and if you say otherwise, you're obviously wrong! :p

No, I think you're onto something here Fish. Especially with Shinakura on the project and with what I personally see as ZI-O's theme: Not lying to yourself who you are and using that to do the best for the world in your way.

It would certainly track with his type of morals.

And if it turns out to be true, I'm all up for it.

This was definitely a Ryuta Tasaki episode all right. Tons of shots of characters getting in your face and pretty heavy handed slapstick.

Probably the most "boring" episode so far but that's only because the first two episodes were so great. This one still had plenty of highlights, including Magine's accidental discharge with the GearTlinger and the random cutaway to the newscaster cheering on the Zenkaigers (between this and her Saber cameo, so much for Mayu Hasegawa being retired).

I am sad she predicted the next guy to join the team, they were going for her fortune telling being fake or not that good, but it being okay because it's an enjoyable hobby to her, and yet at the end she can actually see stuff in her crystal ball and it's related to the blue guy?

Yes, i know magic exists in the setting, it just felt through most of the episode that she couldn't actually predict the future or actually make anything appear in her crystal ball that she didn't imagine or assume was there, and i actually prefer that to her having actual powers and showing glasses on her crystal ball.

This episode was solid. Not as good as last week's but still good.

One of the things I'm loving most about this series so far is how they're pushing the settings of the mech fights. The world-fusion idea is being handled so well in these giant sized battles, last week with the mushrooms, and this week with the ice mounds. They're just having a lot of fun with these, and I'm pleased that the mech fights, typically my least favorite parts of most Sentai, are among my favorite parts this year.

Thinking about this, nearly every Rider show Shirakura produced (if it wasn't Amazons, basically) either starred some kind of dysfunctional protagonist who didn't fit the traditional idea of a hero, or gave the traditional hero a sidekick whose dysfunctional nature was a critical part of the show's narrative arc, so, yeah, I can definitely imagine his influence playing a big part here!

Yep, this is certainly going to be an entertaining show. I really liked this episode, probably not as much as last week's episode, but still fun. It's interesting they decided to have the Zenkaigers basically have all of the Sentai Gears, or I'm just overlooking it and the Tojitendo have the rest, whilst the Heroes have some of them.

I'm actually really liking the W-esque Mechs this season, and the Kikainoids themselves. They're just so darn likable, it's hard for me to dislike any of them, even the Villains with their goofy life lessons they spout out when they're beaten. And having this Sentai start from the ground up is a lot of fun to watch. And I just gotta say, I love the Tojitendo Goons little march.

Of course, I can see they're really going at it with the green screens, but Saber's been doing about the same with it's early episodes, so I'm not really complaining.

So next week, the gang's all here... In the Boxing Ring!!! *Ding, ding*

It also guest stars the leading lady from Tasaki’s independent martial arts film from a few years back, “Salvage Mice” (who also made a cameo in Akibaranger as the character) as a bride

I quite like this tanky guy, you know, this Barashitara. As a support main, I always value a good tank. :p

ああ~ I don't really have anything against this show being on the background, I think it's quite lovingly realised, but I'm also feeling that maybe this isn't my cup of tea. I know I bring up Girls x Heroine whenever I get the chance, but I feel Phantomirage had a similar tone as a children's show and was kind of more my speed.