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So I've kinda been down on this show since day one. I thought the suits were awful, the mech was lame, and that Toq5 looked like the most insufferable character since BoukenYellow. And honestly, given most of the mixed response I've seen so far I pretty much went into this expecting it to suck and that I could keep ignoring Super Sentai for another year.

Now I'm not going to rush to judgement and I am going to give the show a few weeks to really settle into its groove, but so far?

I think I may have been wrong.

I'm liking a what I'm seeing so far. I'm liking it a lot.

The suits actually look really good in action and the villain designs are gorgeous. Even Toq-Oh looks much better in motion than I ever thought it would (I'm kinda loving the stretching limbs). The color swapping gimmick is weird and kind of confusing, but the show is looking to have fun with it - I actually liked how Right just kept grabbing the others' trains until Owner... er, Conductor pretty much told him to knock it the fuck off.

Actually, I'm liking the humor on this show in general... for the most part. Toq5 I'm still a little iffy on, but so far she's reminding me a lot of Doc from Gokaiger as much, if not more, than of Natsuki. Yeah, she's got that "look at me, I'm acting like a toddler so you'll think I'm cute!" thing going on, but it's less insufferable so far. The self-awareness gags, though - like the monster's multiple "what the hell is going on here?" reactions - did amuse me a lot.

And then there's Owner... er, Conductor. It's pretty obvious now why they got Kobayashi to write this show: there are a lot of obvious Den-O influences here. Trains flying in mid-air, weird old dude in charge of the train, very Denliner-y interior to the Rainbow Liner, the Naomi-esque robot chick we've seen pictures of... this cannot be coincidental. I actually got a lot of Den-O nostalgia while watching this.

The plot for this episode itself was pretty rushed and I don't feel like I have a good handle on all of the characters beyond the standard Sentai archetypes they fit into (aside from Toq4, who is pretty much a total cipher at this point). The pacing was really fast, too - the show is not introducing things slowly. It kinda works, but it's very different from the more determined pacing of its Superhero Time partner. I expect it will slow down after this, but the first episode really didn't give you any time to catch your breath.

But yeah, I really liked it. I have a lot of high hopes for this season now, although I do have to acknowledge that I thought the same about Kyoryuger at this point and we all know how that turned out. Fingers crossed, though, because this episode was a lot of fun.

tl;dr version: