King-Ohger Series Discussion and Poll

[Kouryu]

I'll only say a few words about this.

IT WAS THE BEST! Quite possibly the strongest Super Sentai season in the current Reiwa era, and, in my own opinion, one of the stronger Super Sentai entries of all time.

It's kind of similar to "Avataro Sentai Donbrothers" in that it's drastically different from the other Super Sentai series. But unlike Donbrothers, this one is executed extremely well!
The overarching storyline, the plot twists, all the way to the grand finale. It's all AWESOME!

If there are some faults that I can find here, it's that the individual character development is kind of weak compared to other series (except for one here), and that, for someone who is a fan of Super Sentai giant robot battles, this one's kind of lacking.

But overall, for me, this is one of those Super Sentai series that I would highly recommend to my friends to watch, especially if they're new to the franchise.

[Dark Ren]

Well... I've been trying to get my wife into Sentai/Rider for quite a while now. Nothing worked, but King-Ohger does. So it's an easy 5 from me

[Kurow]

Its being years since I liked a super sentai series to be honest. Gokaiger left such impression on me that is not until now that I liked another one.

I will add this series to my top sentai series (even when I have not watched them all).

This is now in my top favorites with Gokaiger, Gekiranger, Kyoryuger, Magiranger and Go Buster.

I will put this as a 4.5/5 but I gave it a 5 anyway.

The good

- The characters: Loved the 2 girls. They will be among my favorite characters of all time. Racles was such a good character and the actor looked like he really enjoyed the role and took it very seriously. Himeno my beautiful queen <3. Sebastian was such a classic and good character too.

- The kingdoms and the different cultures and styles on the same planet just like the real world.

- The villain: This was without a doubt the most powerful enemy ever. The final battle went full Guren Lagann mode and it was amazing.

- The fights were cool.

The not so good

- The story: Way too many loops and mini arcs

- Racles not part of the group: After all he never joined the group in an official way and was treated like a side character. He deserved a better redemption arc.

The bad

- The opening song: Oh god... I really hate it... I just like the "king of kings" part but the rest is just a bunch of horrible screaming that I had to turn down on the final episodes every single time that guy started singing it.

- The lack of upgraded/super forms: Only Gira got one and the rest of the kings got none... this have been a trend since 5 or 10 years ago and I don't like it. They need to bring individual super forms back.

- The CGI effects: I have to admit that they were a lot better in this show but they still need to improve a lot. Specially the mech fights...

[takenoko]

- Racles not part of the group: After all he never joined the group in an official way and was treated like a side character. He deserved a better redemption arc.

To be fair, a lot of what happens at the end was him still whispering ideas into the ruler's ear. Gotta love a shadow king, directing others while remaining in the background himself

- The lack of upgraded/super forms: Only Gira got one and the rest of the kings got none... this have been a trend since 5 or 10 years ago and I don't like it. They need to bring individual super forms back.

I mean, do the weird cgi limbs count? Or the king's symbol powers? It's weird that they got double power ups, but no actual suit change to represent it

- The opening song: Oh god... I really hate it... I just like the "king of kings" part but the rest is just a bunch of horrible screaming that I had to turn down on the final episodes every single time that guy started singing it.

I actually like the song. I wouldn't put it on my spotify or anything... The thing I do hate is the choreography for the song, which is the worst sentai dance I've seen in a while

[TokuGeek1999]

Should probably remove this from active shows now.

[ViRGE]

I've been spending a lot of time mulling over what to write about these series. It's super easy (and super fun!) to write about something you hate. And writing about something you loved from star to finish is also pretty simple. But writing about something in the middle takes a lot of nuance.

Overall, I liked this series quite a bit. It was ambitious. It had what was for a Sentai a rather deep plot that, even in one-off focus episodes, the series never strayed too far from. And it put the giant robots front and center at the start, which always gets a thumbs-up from me.

Despite that, I've been wavering on whether to give King-Ohger a 4 or a 3, and after some contemplation, I'm going with a 3. I liked it and I had a lot of reasons to like it, but Toei has done better.

The big thing with these series, as I mentioned earlier, is its ambition. It's a big story, and it occurs in a place that isn't modern Tokyo, which required the staff to go all-out in creating a fantasy world for the characters to inhabit. Not to mention the characters themselves, both the leads and the supporting characters. And we sure had a lot of supporting characters in this series, as evidenced by the massive number of cameos/reprises in the penultimate episode. I can't even begin to fathom the costuming required; all of those extras, with five different kingdoms all with incredibly distinct styles. I don't doubt for a second the crew worked their asses off here.

And for that matter, giving us the five kingdoms was a very interesting take on matters. Sentai doesn't have a lot of standing sets (neither does KR, for that matter), so everything tends to be modern out of necessity. Which makes the kingdoms stand out both in regards to how different they are from each other, and how even Nkosopa isn't really a modern Tokyo analogue. The crew made the most out of what they could do with their virtual production system.

The main characters also did a good job reflecting the differences in those locales, though on the whole I'd only rate them as "okay." The actors playing the mains (typically) did a good job of it, and as they're a bit older on average than the typical Sentai actor, they clearly came in with some extra experience and put it to good use. Still, in making such distinct characters, they were often not much more than stereotypes early-on in the series. And being rigidly locked into those archetypes never fully went away throughout the series. A big part of that, I feel, is because only Gira and Jeremie had distinct and deep character arcs. Himeno had half of an arc (revenge), and the other three were just kind of going through the motions.

Speaking of arcs, this is about as close to a fully serialized Sentai as I expect we'll see for quite some time to come. So if you like serialization, this is a good series for you. Not that it was on the same level as a hyper-serialized western show, but it's distinctly more serialized than a typical Sentai. And personally speaking, it's probably about as serialized as Sentai should get, given how difficult it can be to keep those threads together in a 22 minute program that needs to include copious amounts of toy ads.

Like the setting itself, the plotting for this series is ambitious. Someone clearly had Game of Thrones running through at least the back of their brains when writing this, and while there's a lot less death and incest (thankfully), there's a clear effort to do a lite version of that. Especially with everything building up to the reveal of the Space Bug King, this series tried to do a lot. And by sticking to one main writer, it was far more cohesive than most Sentai series. And I appreciate that all of the episodes mattered and were connected to the bigger picture (gives DonBros the stink-eye), even if it wasn't obvious at the time.

And coming off of DonBros, I personally liked that giant robots were once again an important part of the series. The mecha fights generally avoided being merely obligatory, and the presence of the mecha was a deep part of the series lore rather than something that was tacked on. The fact that the main robo and the series name are one in the same - King-Ohger - says a lot right there.

The series also ended up undermining itself here by making the mecha stuff so front-loaded. We went from a new King-Ohger formation every 4 episodes or so, to the point where the entire lineup had been rolled out by episode 25. Which left nothing for the giant robots to do in the second half of the series, and as a result we went from a giant robo fight a week to a giant robo fight a month. My read on the situation is that the writers just wanted to get the robo stuff done and out of the way so that they could get on to the Space Bug plot and not have to sacrifice precious episode time to the bots. But regardless of the reason, there's an incredibly noticeable absence of robo fights in the latter half of the series.

And while we're on the subject, I liked the hero suits for this series. The plastic (I'm not sure what else to call that material?) suits with their solid chest pieces definitely borrowed a bit from Kamen Rider, but it still used the style well. Even the solid coloring of the suits worked well in practice, more so than I was expecting based on the preview pictures and clips. It's not something I'd want in every Sentai series going forward, but like the Go-Busters leather suits, it's nice to do something different now and then.

In the end, however, there were two things in particular that King-Ohger did that significantly hindered the series, and which I can't ignore or look past in the post-series discussion.

The first problem is the virtual production environment. While I applaud the ambitious nature of the series, when you're going to take huge production risks such as filming 90% of the series in front of a virtual set, you need to make sure that gamble is going to pay off. And King-Ohger came up with snake-eyes here. King-Ohger was too reliant on virtual sets, to the point where there was often a distinct lack of props for the actors to work with in the foreground. The actors did not come off like they were part of their environment, and it was distracting as a result. To Toei's credit, shots done in front of the AR wall when it's actually projecting a background tends to look decent (okay, everyone looked like they were standing in a circular room, but their spatial positioning relative to the background elements was good). However, entirely too many shots were done in front of traditional green screens or the AR wall in green screen mode, and this stuff looked far worse. The chroma key composited floors always looked fake and terrible terrible, there was frustratingly recurrent background jitter, and Toei seemed to be especially bad at addressing the smearing that was occurring with fights in front of the green screens. Those monochromatic ranger suits really exacerbated the problem, and at the risk of giving Luna a PTSD attack, Shougeki Gouraigan of all things did the fighting in front of a green screen thing better.

I don't mind Toei experimenting with virtual production, and I'm sure we're going to see more of it over the coming years. But they went too big too quickly here, and quality suffered as a result. This is something where I believe they needed to do smaller-scale experimentation before relying on it as the the primary means of set creation on King-Ohger, so that they could identify and resolve some of these quality issues before they became big issues. And to give credit where it's due, I guess DonBros kind of did that with its giant robo fights? Still, the tech isn't there yet for Super Sentai to so heavily rely on virtual sets, and it may never be. Even shows making heavy use of virtual production, like Star Wars and Star Trek are nowhere near the 90% mark like King-Ohger was, and there are good reasons for that. Not everything can be done well on a virtual set; physical sets are still needed.

The other bone I have to pick with this series is its plotting, especially (but not exclusively) in the first-half of the series. While I appreciate the desire to innovate outside of the traditionally rigid confines of Super Sentai, the fact that the series started off with the heroes in conflict with each other - and then kept them in conflict for the first 18 episodes or so - left a sour taste in my mouth. Super Sentai is normally a light competence porn; the heroes don't always win, but they at least do what they can to work together. Having them at odds with each other is so off-brand that it's off-putting. And if you look at the episode ratings for the first half of the series, while there are some definite bangers in there, on the whole those episodes are rated lower than the back-half of the series. And that's because of the boring, time-wasting in-fighting among the King-Ohgers, plus the series struggling to make the fight with the Bugnarok matter when it was really just a build-up to revealing the Space Bug King. (And don't get me started on rainbow jururira)

The back-half of the series, by contrast, is better. Dagdedo, the bored and child-like god, is an amusing take on the neigh-invincible big bad. Which is not easy to do when that archetype is used about 50% of the time as it is for the big bad. But the flip-side to moving past the Bugnarok was that there was suddenly a lack of MOTDs to contend with. I don't know if they ran out of budget for monster suits or what, but instead we got the 5 Jesters on repeat over most of the next 20 episodes. And since they couldn't be defeated until near the end of the season for the usual plot reasons, it kind of undermined the stakes of the fighting in those episodes. We still got some good action scenes (even despite the virtual sets, at times), but fights having reason, purpose, and meaningful outcomes is what makes them worth watching. Otherwise they're just fancy filler.

Ultimately, I don't want to come off as dunking on King-Ohger. I did enjoy the series. It was often entertaining and about equally as often absurd, which are good qualities to have in a Super Sentai series. And I appreciate the sheer ambition of the series, as that kind of ambition is needed to help reinvent and refresh Super Sentai to keep it relevant over the coming years (especially now that Toei can't sell the footage for Power Rangers). Still, the crew's ambition exceeded their ability to execute on their vision at times, and the resulting disarray made the show worse in the process. Still, even if it isn't remembered for being a great show, King-Ohger will be remembered for being an ambitious show that few other Sentai series can match.

Should probably remove this from active shows now.

That doesn't usually happen until after the Returns/VS movies are released.

[takenoko]

>Sentai doesn't have a lot of standing sets (neither does KR, for that matter), so everything tends to be modern out of necessity.

lol. /me thinks of the sisters random ass hangouts before they took the school for the bad guy hq and moved the good guys into the restaurant, which in hindsight is always the kamen rider hangout

>And being rigidly locked into those archetypes never fully went away throughout the series. A big part of that, I feel, is because only Gira and Jeremie had distinct and deep character arcs. Himeno had half of an arc (revenge), and the other three were just kind of going through the motions.

Yeah, that's too bad. Although, Sentai does seem a little better about the one-episode character growth arcs than series long ones. I loved Kiramager, but damned if I can remember if they had any big character stories. But I sure remember the episode with the multiple KirameiGreens

>Speaking of arcs, this is about as close to a fully serialized Sentai as I expect we'll see for quite some time to come.

Speaking of which, maybe it's time for a change with the year long series? Game of Thrones is a tight story of hour long episodes of 10 per season. Trying to tell one story over half hour chunks over a year was so frustrating. How many times do we reach the saggy 30-40 span of episodes, because it's A) Full of padding B) Nothing can happen of note because they're saving all the story resolutions for the last arc

>This is something where I believe they needed to do smaller-scale experimentation before relying on it as the the primary means of set creation on King-Ohger,

Like hte pirates' ship in Zenkaiger? I just feel like it's so obvious when the set is a CGI set on a circle

>I don't know if they ran out of budget for monster suits or what, but instead we got the 5 Jesters on repeat over most of the next 20 episodes.

Yeah, the commander level enemy that sticks around forever is so frustrating

[Lunagel]

and at the risk of giving Luna a PTSD attack, Shougeki Gouraigan of all things did the fighting in front of a green screen thing better.

First of all, how dare you

[ViRGE]

>Speaking of arcs, this is about as close to a fully serialized Sentai as I expect we'll see for quite some time to come.

Speaking of which, maybe it's time for a change with the year long series? Game of Thrones is a tight story of hour long episodes of 10 per season. Trying to tell one story over half hour chunks over a year was so frustrating. How many times do we reach the saggy 30-40 span of episodes, because it's A) Full of padding B) Nothing can happen of note because they're saving all the story resolutions for the last arc

In some respects, they tried to do that here with such distinct stories for the front-half and back-half of the series. Especially with the time skip in the middle, King-Ohger it was practically a two-season show. The time skip itself wasn't handled very well, but I didn't mind the split conceptually.

I'm not sure I want Sentai seasons to be shorter, because then we may just get our wish. The skid in the 30s is very pronounced, though, so you aren't wrong there. On that matter, I'm of the opinion that the writers could do better; with the toys out of the way, they should have the artistic (and time) freedom to do something more engaging.

>This is something where I believe they needed to do smaller-scale experimentation before relying on it as the the primary means of set creation on King-Ohger,

Like hte pirates' ship in Zenkaiger? I just feel like it's so obvious when the set is a CGI set on a circle

Ah, I had forgotten about that one. Though to be fair, I try to forget about Zenkaiger on most days.

More than anything else, they needed to test fighting in front of an AR wall before they went whole-hog with King-Ohger. That's really where things start coming apart at the seams. The dialog in front of a green screen could be hit and miss, but that's more a function of writing than it is technical issues.

>I don't know if they ran out of budget for monster suits or what, but instead we got the 5 Jesters on repeat over most of the next 20 episodes.

Yeah, the commander level enemy that sticks around forever is so frustrating

I don't even mind the commanders sticking around. It's the lack of anyone else to fight that was an issue. MOTD is a tried and true formula because it gives the heroes someone to defeat, but keeping the stakes small since MOTDs are a dime a dozen. The alternative is doing the "evil team" concept like the Nejirangers (Psycho Rangers), where the monsters are around for several episodes, but you get to whittle them down over time. Either way, fights need to end with someone blowing up (and since this is Sentai, promptly growing up).

and at the risk of giving Luna a PTSD attack, Shougeki Gouraigan of all things did the fighting in front of a green screen thing better.

First of all, how dare you

And second?

Seriously though, Gouraigan (of all things) did it better. And that's bloody terrifying.

[takenoko]

I had a second thought that I forgot to write down. The other option (and why I generally like Sentai better) is to just make everything super episodic like Deka. I keep saying this, but some of the best Sentai episodes is just a random thing happens to a ranger and he or she has to deal with it and it's done by the end

[kangchan]

Compare King-Oh to Ninninger, Zyoohger, Ryusoulger, Zenkai. This series is better. But compare with Don-Brothers, I can't feel anything interesting about this series. Especially the acting of Gira / Red, it's very bad acting until the end. So don't surprise his IG is still low followers. After episode 26, this series come to new arc with many plot twist, but I still feel like they ended in episode 26.
2 / 5 for me.