Ohsama Sentai King-Ohger Episode 1: "I AM THE KING!" Discussion
 

An ancient prophecy foretold the return of the mighty Bugnarok Empire, powerful enough to bring about the downfall of humanity.

To stop this evil, the monarchs of five countries must unite!

That was a good robot fight! Honestly very Ultraman in my opinion.

This series looks very epic in scale.

Whoa. Like WHOA.

The strongest start in a long, long time. In every sense, production values, sets, action and a story that seems to be very ambitious. I hope the series can keep the level displayed in the first episode.

That was indeed one of the best 1st ep in a while. Gira FTW. :rock:
Two possibilities I can think of as to why Gira was chosen for now is he's either a bastard child or lineage never was a factor and the shugod just liked Gira for being a hero unlike Racles who feels entitled to be Kuwagata Ohger. I hope they go with the latter when it's time to explain.

Gira's quickly shaping up to be one of my favourite Red Senshi out there.

Are subs out yet? I know it just came out but I feel like first episodes usually turn around subs super quickly.

A few, but none from the big two (and both are currently unsure if they’ll do more)

Zombieweek and Chou Eiyuu have subs out though I can't speak for their quality. As for the episode, only seen and heard snippets from twitter but I am loving what I've seen, hope OT does this as they haven't skipped a Sentai yet from what I understand

I decided to watch the first episode even though it was raw and I don't speak Japanese.

Speaking from the visuals alone, this felt different from the Sentai of the past. This is appropriate cause Sentai is constantly experimenting and trying something new these days, even when they riff on their own past.

The color palette is sublime, even if the CGI fails to hit the mark at times. Something to be said about location filming mixed with CGI. The look of snow here didn't give me the same vibe as the snow-covered Wall of the Night's Watch in Game of Thrones or even the snow-covered Outpost in The Thing!

I feel as though making an Attack on Titan reference would be both appropriate and redundant cause I think that's already been done. That said, you can see the Attack on Titan inspiration from the word GO!

The gist that I got is that this is a series which will challenge the logic of Rulers and Royalty as well as the very concept of "Justice". I think this is the reason why the first episode focused more on our "heroes" rather than the obligatory villain faction. The monsters are scenery and add some sense of framing and definition for the protagonists, which could be said of more than one Sentai, but it feels particularly on the nose here.

The Mecha Battle is a straight-up "First Battles in a New Sentai are usually Epic and Grand" cliche! It's definitely well-done and visually beautiful, but it's not the first time this has happened either! I get Go-Busters Ep. 1 vibes from this battle, with slow-motion glamour shots of the Hero Mecha in front of an explosion!

I do think I'd understand more of this when I have the potential to watch a subbed version, and that'll add some meat to all these potatoes.

Yep, Over-Time's sub is out. I also watched the raw without knowing enough Japanese to follow the dialog. Seemed pretty easy to follow, and the production values are wowzer.

I can't imagine them trying to actually keep it up, though. I'm guessing that a lot of the typical Sentai filming locations will be in the techno kingdom.

After seeing the episode for myself, Gira has the potential to be a top tier Red with him giving serious Ishinomori vibes to me. I'm curious if Racles will become a full fledged villain or be put in a scenario where he has to give up but will pretend he's the one doing the fighting. I do expect the sets to be less of a spectacle later on as I feel this is clearly episode 1 budget at work. Shame we didn't get to see much of the other rangers in terms of personality but hey, this is a tv show, not a one and done flick. All in all, a very promising series after a fun ride like Donbrothers

For me this was a show with A+ ideas and B execution. This episode was rushed, and probably would have been better off with a sole focus on Gira, or maybe even the evil Red king.

There simply was not enough time to introduce all the characters and set up the pretty complicated plot for the red. I would have liked to see Gira maybe be a bit more defiant before he made the big stand against the king. Also, I know they lampshaded it in the show, but how the heck did he get into the king’s throne room anyway? This could be easily explained (the bug god helped him out) but they did not have time to, I guess.

Overall, just a small nitpick, and I ‘m sure the show will eventually get to slow the pace down and give enough time to the characters and plot.

I wonder if this show would have been better served with a Kiramager style episode 0, and then an episode 1 that focused on the Red.

I agree with the sentiment that Gira is looking to be a good red.

Looking forward to the rest of this show. It’s looking really promising! Also I really liked the writer’s other project - the live action Kakegurui, so I know we could be in store for some wild stuff!

Watched it three times now, I think it's really good.

Yes, it remains to be seen how the scale will hold up over the entire runtime, but even the first episode in a vacuum is spectacular.

I like the world they're building, the design work is excellent, Gira is a fantastic lead character, and I love the beetle mecha, and of course the combined King Ohger itself.

Lots of great stuff, but what stood out to me the most was using half a minute of the runtime, which is insane if you think about, to simply focus on Gira's face and let the actor play the hell out of him being on the point of breaking apart, only to double down and assume the role of evil king. No words spoken, only facial expression. So good.

So yeah, I loved this episode. I really hope they can hold that level of quality.

This is a great observation! That was something I noticed while watching, but did not really think about afterwards. It definitely shows that they have confidence in their actors to give them nice standout moments like that.

I was so nervous watching this first episode for some reason. I got to give it another watch. I feel like I was too nitpicky.

Gira's looking to potentially be a very interesting Red Ranger. I'm not necessarily surprised that the Red of this royalty-themed season is the only one who was born an average commoner, but I am surprised that the way he got his powers is by rising up and seizing the Kuwagata-Ohger powers from his homeland's corrupt king. Lots of potential for interesting stories in the future when our lead character is a wanted rebel.

If Gira were in P5, he’d probably have awakened to his Persona when he decided to take the KuwagataOhger powers.

Between this and the concurrent episode of Geats, it's a bad day for festivals!

While King-Ohger has moved away from having gears in their equipment, now we have Shugoddam, a whole kingdom that has gears as their main aesthetic. Even Racles' throne has a gear on it.

Sad that's there no ED theme for the third time in the last decade, but I guess Toei had to make some cuts to maintain the budget for a year-long fantasy show set in a partially CGI fantasy world, at the soundtrack's expense. We do have an OP theme though, Zenryoku King, which kind of has a victorious "evil" feeling going for it, like it's the theme to Gira's rise to the King of Evil. Unfortunately, I seriously doubt I'm going to be able to memorize the lyrics for this one!

I think it's the latter. Yanma is the first of a new lineage of kings who worked his way to the top from the slums, similar to what Gira is doing here. Seems like Racles is the only one using his birthright as justification like a self-entitled nepotist, which would explain why Yanma rejects his leadership in the war against Bugnarok, believing a king should do more than sitting on a throne and ordering people around. The Shugods probably place more value on the individual merits of their chosen heroes, or "villain" in Gira's case.

I can already see a lot of similarity between Gira and Takano's previous protagonist, Yumeko. They both appear sweet and innocent until you trigger their dark side, then they'll make you regret ever challenging them!

This was by far the strongest first episode we've gotten for a Sentai in ages.

A positive about DonBrothers not following franchise tradition and conformity is that seeing the massive invasion, including what I assume is the series' main boss and general, goes from being typical and expected to being exciting and engaging. That whole invasion sequence was fantastic in and of itself.

Not to mention this is also the most visually stunning a Sentai's been. The CG's toku movie level so far and some bts stuff shows they use massive screens for unorthodox locations, so I'm assuming things are gonna look a lot more consistent and will mix traditional locales we see in Toei's stuff with original kingdom locations using that new tech.

I've really been enjoying this sort of rebirth Sentai's been going through. From Kiramager embracing its characters to drive the story and connecting to the viewers via humor to Zenkaiger embracing the fun that Sentai can bring to DonBrothers being bold enough to completely ignore most if not all tropes and expectations to now King-Ohger immediately being visually distinct from everything before it.

Over-Time has published a V2 of their release with a full HD source.

Excuse me while I rewatch this episode some more :lol

The map for Chikyuu looks nothing like Earth’s landmasses, even if one took continental drift and erosion into account, so I doubt it.

It's probably on another planet

Never been a huge fan of super sentai, I'm almost never watching it. i'm more of a Kamen Rider and GARO fan. But I always give the season a chance with at least the first ep.

And I must say I like what I see. The production value is different than previous seasons imo. Even if people are now used to watch better than this (Marvel movies era and all) I feel like this is a step up for Super Sentai.

I will probably continue to watch this in a while.

The general feeling I have is as if Super Sentai had a baby with GARO medieval feeling and with Chinese Wuxia genre (in the way of filming, and obviously because of the black ranger for the latter)
and Im a fan of these 2

EDIT : oh yeah and the music, especially the one when the King-ohger gives the final blow, reminds me a lot of what Rei Kondoh composed for Danball Senki/LBX series which is insanely good.

Eh I must've missed that. Never mind. :lolol

Counter-twist is that while it does take place in the future, it's not on Earth per se, but a colony world established by an ancient precursor culture. That culture being; our Earth.

Okay. I wasn't expecting Attack on Titan.

Now this. THIS! Is quite a way to start a new Sentai Season, this was fantastic! I strangely really love how the Protagonist is just Oda Nobunaga at this point, but the whole twist from "I'm gonna be a hero!" to "I'm gonna be the villain!" schtick is already something I'm loving. Or how we're going to assemble, or in this case, reassemble the team with the new Red.

There's so much aesthetics here that I'm enjoying, from the styles of the five kingdoms, to that insane cockpit, and the sounds for the new toys, I'm already on board with this show. Also, my GOSH! Did they ramp up the action, seeing how brutally the Kings slay the Bugnarok (love how their name sounds like Ragnarok) or the absolute destruction of the kingdom.

Yep. I'm going to enjoy this. Nice scene with Geats in the Super Hero Time promo.

Next Episode: Welcome to the Future! Wait. Wrong show.