This episode leaves me very conflicted. I even went back and watched it a second time on a different day just to make sure I wasn't being grouchy. Unfortunately, it hasn't changed my opinion on it.
On paper, this should be a great episode; it's checking all sorts of boxes. A team power-up? Hidden weapon functions? One of the unbeatable bosses finally gets defeated? A desperate reverse-heist? Betrayal among the ranks of the villains? In my head, I can picture exactly how to make a great Sentai episode out of it.
But that's not what we got.
Above everything else, this episode has two fundamental problems.
1) The reverse-heist gambit, which is what sets up the rest of the episode, is poorly explained. If the reverse-heist itself was a ruse, why did they need to storm the castle? Was it so that Yanma's lackey could get his mecha in a specific place? But couldn't they have done that without storming the castle?
This episode does not adequately establish (or explain after the fact) why the reverse-heist gambit is needed in the first place. If it is to serve as a distraction, that much needed to be better explained, as thus far we haven't seen the Space Bugs challenge the mecha in any way. If it isn't to serve as a distraction, then I have no idea what the heck is going on.
2) The big fight between the King-Ohgers and the Space Bugs is an ugly, noisy mess of CGI.
I could rail on and on about the at-times terrible green screening in this series (as I have done before), but I'll save that rant. Instead, I'll stick with this: because the team power-up is not a physical suit extension, it's all done with CGI. And coupled with the series' stunt choreography tending to shy away from shots lasting more than a couple of seconds, it's all incredibly frantic. It's a bunch of bright lights and explosions that are shifting position every few seconds, which is very hard to follow.
Complicating matters is that the use of CGI weapons means there's not a lot of physicality to the fight, presumably since it's harder to stage a fight with weapons that aren't physically there. Meanwhile, because of all the flashiness of the CGI, there seems to be multiple instances where the contrast of the image is artificially dulled, presumably to avoid triggering photosensitive epilepsy. All of which makes it even harder to follow what's going on, since there isn't clear and consistent contrast between the elements.
Finally, the actual broadcast quality of Super Sentai just isn't good enough for this kind of action. If this were on a Blu-ray disc, this is where the bitrate would be bursting to 35Mbps+ in order to keep a clean imagine. But broadcast TV isn't that high, nor are the TTFC rips that most sub encodes are sourced from. And if I'm being thorough, Anon's lower-bitrate re-encodes probably don't help, either. So a lot of detail gets blurred out to fit within those bitrates. All of which makes it that much harder to keep track of and clearly see what is going on.
Beyond that, based on this episode I'd assume there are some production issues that are leaking through into the final product. Super Sentai is fundamentally a 23 minute toy ad. When a new form or team power-up comes along, it's because they need to show off Bandai's new toys. But, in a major departure from the norm, this episode doesn't seem to be backed by any toys; that is, Bandai doesn't seem to be selling any kind of power-up related figure. Which is why, I assume, the power-up is all CGI; production isn't going to make physical props for things they don't intend to sell.
Normally getting the mandatory toys out of the show is a fantastic thing. More than once an episode has ground to a halt in order to showcase the new, shiny thing. But those are also the episodes where Toei often invests in more expansive and technical fight chreography - the kind of episodes where they break out Koichi Sakamoto and his team. This episode, on the other hand, seems to be a case of the inverse: because there aren't any toys, the crew went hog-wild with CGI. But they didn't bring the directing to match it. So what we end up with is a similarly high-budget, high-action episode, but without the expert directing needed to make good use of it.
In that respect it's all quite frustrating, because it's an unforced error. This episode underwhelming is Toei's own doing, when they are capable of doing better. Though I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, since this kind of sub-par action has been going on all season.
The highlight, at least, was Hirubiru's betrayal of Gouma. I can't say I expected that, and yet unlike the reverse-heist, it was very well explained after the fact.
Plot-wise, I am at least glad that the Ohgers finally have the tools to defeat the Space Bugs. Their being toyed with has made for some fun scenarios, but as we're coming up on episode 40, something needed to happen to break that status quo and let them start defeating their enemies.
Episodes without a mecha fight: 5 (It's just a series named after its titular robot. Who needs mecha fights, am I right?)
Next week:
more Kyouryuuger?!
takenoko wrote: ↑Sat Dec 02, 2023 11:37 pm
Man does it look like they're filming this against a video game
Given that they're using Unreal Engine for the backgrounds, in a sense they literally are. It's efficient, but somehow it remains looking out of place.
Wait, is Nkosopa destroyed or not destroyed. Because it looks normal here
That's another poor choice on the production's part. The only thing they showed us of Nkosopa after Yanma lost a few episodes ago was its ruins. So I, too, thought the entire thing had been reduced to rubble. But then that wouldn't let them re-use the Nkosopa virtual sets for this episode. It kind of ends up undermining that episode after the fact.
