[Androzani84]

So here we come to another reason why I honk there was so,e shaking up behind the scenes. Or rather, two reasons.

1. The introduction of a stronger monster type, with the Messianic Metaloids. While somehing of a tradition in Toku shows, it’s not one Kobayashi is prone to playing straight. She’ll introduce something that seems like it’ll be a stronger threat (the Hells Gate prisoners in Timeranger, the double-animal motif Yummies in OOO, even the Deltas in this series), only for them to start going down no harder than the regular monsters by their second appearance.

2. Our new upgrade item. Not only is it not directly compatible with the Morphin’ Brace (it requires a whole gauntlet that the Brace is clipped into), but it has a notably different voice to the older equipment, performed by the late music legend Ichiro Mizuki. (While shows having multiple VAs for different toys within the same series is common, it tends to be by hero rather than a sudden change to the main VA)

As for the episode? I liked it, especially with the fact we’re moving past abandoned Transformers stock plots in favour of doing the unique move of Enter wanting to analyse the human factor to create the ultimate AI. And they cut out the middle man and made him the big bad, which he basically was already in all but name. But I’m not keen on the new power up, due to my bias against team power ups. Not only do they tend to debut in my least favourite kind of power up stories (which I went into detail about back in, appropriately enough, the Den-O thread), but also rather than having unique designs that emphasise everyone’s strengths, they tend towards a rather bland uniform look.