[Sh Ranger]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Fish Sandwich

Similarly, even though I'm honestly not particularly a fan of the visual of the Powered Custom suits... I also struggle to imagine any kind of powerup for the Go-Buster suits I would like more, which is maybe a crucial distinction to draw?

That's vaguely how I feel about Powered Morphin' as well. Like, Beetbuster and Stagbuster already have this Gattai gimmick by default and J can actually replicate his parts when he doesn't need to morph. The core 3 copying their gimmick isn't particularly original. On the other hand, the Buddyroids are such an important part of the show, so expressing that symbolically, what else can you even do? Turn them in to weapons like New Den-O's Imagins, perhaps?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kamen Rider Die

It's a thing I sort of never liked from the periphery of the fandom, seeing just the Red get some awesome new power-up while the rest of the team grinds it out with Day 1 movesets and power levels. I think I'd feel viscerally mad if Hiromu got to have a Messianic Metaroid-demolishing upgrade, while Ryuji and Yoko are demoted to mopping up Bugglars. (I mean, uh... that's actually what ends up happening in this episode, but in a good way?) The only way this power-up works for me is giving Hiromu the debut version, and then giving it to Ryuji and Yoko a beat later.

In principle, yeah, I think it's better when a Sentai grow stronger equally to reinforce the concept of teamwork. Sometimes though, the Red-exclusive power-up is cool as hell! I mean, check out what Hiromu's PR counterpart got:

[Kamen Rider Die]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sh Ranger

Neat! He looks like the Beet Buster version of Red Buster!

[Kamen Rider Die]

TOKUMEI SENTAI GO-BUSTERS MISSION 34 - “BEET BUSTER IS THE ENEMY?!”



An entire episode about providing a tragic context to Jin’s pathological inability to have a genuine human moment with anyone, ever, that starts with him at his most annoying and distracting? That’s… a choice!

I don’t really dislike the idea of doing a Tears Of A Clown thing for Jin, in theory, but this is an episode that I don’t think earns its big emotional fight scene. (It came close for me, without exactly making the previous scenes feel worthwhile.) Jin’s just relentlessly annoying in this one, at a completely different level than his normal smirking jackass thing. He’s a manic ball of Getting In The Way, which is saying something when J still exists. Jin’s extra amount of annoyance is eventually revealed to be a coping mechanism for the deaths of all of his coworkers/friends/maybe-girlfriends back when Messiah was detonated, and I just didn’t care a whole lot?

I don’t mind that all of this info was given to us by J, because Jin would never say any of this out loud. I don’t mind that Hiromu’s the one to confront Jin instead of Ryuji or Commander, because the guy you want to knock some sense into a relentlessly annoying clown who is taking too much guilt onto his shoulders is Hiromu, a tactless martyr who could not care less about protecting someone’s feelings. All of that… it’s good. It’s good story decisions. But it’s all in service of something that the show sort of hadn’t built to in any consistent way, beyond flipping a switch on Jin at the beginning of the episode. (Like, deflecting through gaslighting? Yes! 100%! But not bouncing around like a cocaine-fueled improv student!) Jin’s attitude in the beginning of this one feels at about the same level of characterization as when the Puppetroid is making him dance around or run an obstacle course, and that made it incredibly difficult for me to connect with the third act reveal that Jin’s secretly in a lot of pain since he trained Hiromu to kill Messiah.

The problem here is the same one in the Morishita episode: If you have to ramp up a negative attribute of a character into a cartoonish place just to work them back to normal, I am probably not going to feel like this was a story worth telling. If Jin was comedically shrugging off the ramifications of destroying Messiah in an earlier episode and then it was revealed that he was covering with humor, I’d be a lot more into this one. But instead we got a rampagingly buffoonish Jin suddenly having tremendous guilt, and I don’t feel like the show did the work to get there. Too fast, too extreme. Much like Jin in this episode!



IT’S TIME FOR Getting Into Knives!

As much as I wasn’t crazy about the feelings behind the Red/Beet sword fight, I can’t deny that it was exceptionally fun to watch. The stunt performers were tremendous throughout the episode – specifically in Beet’s many Puppetroid-influenced fighting styles – but the duel between Red and Beet was worth a contrived setup to see onscreen. Wish it hit harder emotionally, but it was still a blast to watch.

[Sunred]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kamen Rider Die

TOKUMEI SENTAI GO-BUSTERS MISSION 34 - ?BEET BUSTER IS THE ENEMY?!?

I find this funny knowing that Jin's actor would've likely said this line as his character Tsubasa/Magi Yellow in Magiranger circa 2005, but here we are seven years later he's playing a character who is told this.

[Kamen Rider Die]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sunred

I find this funny knowing that Jin's actor would've likely said this line as his character Taubasa/Magi Yellow in Magiranger circa 2005, but here we are seven years later he's playing a character who is told this.

I hope the actor was having fun!

[Androzani84]

This episode made me come around on Jin, who beforehand I saw as a cut rate Yuto Sakurai, with none of the things that made him work. Devoting an episode to the guilt he feels as a result of being the sole survivor of an accident over people who had more to live for definitely did a lot of character heavy lifting, and made him and J less of a dividual.

Also, we introduce a new robot, based off a lion to deal with both the Megazord we forgot last episode and a new one that shows up to accompany Puppetloid’s mission of “what can the human body withstand before it gives out”. But is it friend or foe (on one hand, it attacked the Go-Busters with the same ferocity as the two Megazords, on the other, Bandai put up listings for “LT-06 Tategami Lioh” on their website.)

[Fish Sandwich]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kamen Rider Die

TOKUMEI SENTAI GO-BUSTERS MISSION 34 - “BEET BUSTER IS THE ENEMY?!”

The drama with Jin here definitely landed a lot better with me than it did with Die, but honestly, if I was going to pick one thing I liked from this episode to mention right now, it's gotta just be that I really like Puppetroid as a design concept? It's such a wonderfully silly bit of visual variety to have a monster that doesn't even have a normal face and instead speaks and emotes through closeups of two goofy hand puppets the entire episode.

[Kamen Rider Die]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Androzani84

But is it friend or foe (on one hand, it attacked the Go-Busters with the same ferocity as the two Megazords, on the other, Bandai put up listings for ?LT-06 Tategami Lioh? on their website.)

I'm gonna say Friend, based on that additional information!

Quote:

Originally Posted by Fish Sandwich

The drama with Jin here definitely landed a lot better with me than it did with Die, but honestly, if I was going to pick one thing I liked from this episode to mention right now, it's gotta just be that I really like Puppetroid as a design concept? It's such a wonderfully silly bit of visual variety to have a monster that doesn't even have a normal face and instead speaks and emotes through closeups of two goofy hand puppets the entire episode.

Puppetroid was a lot of fun. The episode somehow gave each of the hand puppets their own personalities and objectives, which is sort of insane to type out?

[Kamen Rider Die]

TOKUMEI SENTAI GO-BUSTERS MISSION 35 - “LET MANE LI-OH ROAR!”



Weird episode, mostly for how that late line from Mika kind of perfectly articulated what about this episode was its fatal flaw.

On one level, this is a super straightforward episode about showing off a new toy that manages to craft a thematic framework that serves its characters well. Hiromu has to prove himself to Li-Oh in order to win his help, and the Go-Busters have to prove themselves to Mika in order to earn her forgiveness and respect. The actors make it all work, and the action throughout is solid. (I didn’t love all the CG Zord stuff, but that’s a Me problem, not a show problem.) It leverages established character relationships both dramatic – Jin and Ryuji – and hilarious – Yellow Buster and Stag Buster – to notch a good episode of superhero action with a little bit of heart to it.

But all of the Professor Hazuki stuff makes virtually no sense. The whole point of Mika’s story is that she was told by some random researcher that her dad quit because of a fight with the higher-ups at the EMC (why?), and so she resented the EMC forever because of it. But then we find out at the end that he quit the EMC because he wanted to follow his principles (according to Jin) and that he never really hated the EMC, as evidenced by the fact that he designed a toy add-on for Ace. I just… why? Why any of this? Why was he forced out, when he’s just building the same giant robot that the EMC was already producing? What principles was he adhering to, when nothing he’s doing is beyond the boundaries of the EMC’s mission and policies? (It’s not like Li-Oh was some affront to God and Man or anything.) The reveal in this episode was that a wacky guy quit his office job to work at home, and his daughter carried a grudge about it for no apparent reason. This is all weird and dumb!

Other than that, though, I thought this one worked pretty well. (Again, aside from the ridiculous motivation that hamstrung the emotional climax of the episode.) Hiromu having to tame a robot lion in order to win its power in battle is some big time hero junk, and it works on basic tokusatsu level. It’s a plot you can’t screw up, which is why it’s sort of amazing that the other plot was such a failure – it’s a secondary plot! You didn’t have to do anything to explain why Hiromu battles a lion robot, and the explanation ended up being irritating!



IT’S TIME FOR Yellow Buster!

Really great episode for Yoko: She’s a fun foil to an aggressively dismissive Mika; she gets completely ratted out by Usada after she pretends that she understood Hiromu’s strategy; she’s the only Buster to go Super Mode this time out; and she gets to team up with J for yet another ridiculous sequence of her brattiness bouncing off of his obliviousness. She’s the most fun Buster in this episode, even though it’s nowhere near what I’d consider a Yoko spotlight. She’s just that fun!

[Fish Sandwich]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kamen Rider Die

TOKUMEI SENTAI GO-BUSTERS MISSION 35 - “LET MANE LI-OH ROAR!”

I always recall this one as feeling like truly standard Sentai storytelling in a lot of ways it seemed to me Go-Busters used to consciously avoid? It's sort of difficult to really qualify that, and there are plenty of episodes of this show you could also argue fit the same bill (including earlier ones, I'm sure!), so I think the reason this one gets singled out by my mind is mostly... I might mean it as a criticism, in this case?

I feel like that might be connected to why the attempts the episode makes to ground the narrative in the show's established world ended up falling so flat for Die? It's not like I'm saying an episode where the heroes have to tame some awesome new animalistic robot and earn its trust is ever gonna be *not* exciting, but when you try and do that in a show like Go-Busters instead of Gaoranger or even Shinkenger or something, you need to explain why someone would build some weird lion robot that doesn't work the way all the other robots in the show do, and I kinda feel for Shimoyama's dilemma there. The episode makes the effort to give Tategami Li-Oh's existence a suitably dramatic context that you can get some story out of, but for slightly different reasons, I've also always been a little mixed on the execution.

All that being said, *as* a standard Sentai plot, it's got all sorts of fundamental qualities built into it, and being a Go-Busters episode, it's not like it's without its redeeming qualities. I just spent all those words dunking on it, but it's also hard to care too much about the potential nuanced differences in the writing style when all the characters still feel like the characters I love, and I get to see that red robot I adore riding a sick giant lion robot that turns into a tricycle.