nightjaeger

I have no idea why, but for some reason, since getting to the point in the main story were Enter joins in as the villain du jour, the game will only let me play one stage at a time - it just loads indefinitely. I can't even return to the main screen. A "system" message pops up, but it disappears too quickly for me to read it.

I play at around the same time every day and I wonder if that's when the game does a daily reset or maintenance or something and I'm just running into that. I'll have to experiment.

Anyway, this should have been a much longer video, but in the meantime, enjoy the defeat of Enter.

(You know what? When I wrote "du jour" above, I wasn't even thinking about Enter's quirky, random use of French!)

"Super Sentai Legend Wars ( ｽｰﾊﾟｰ戦隊) - VS Enter" (Watch on YouTube)

The main team we follow in this series is the kawarimono team. I'm seeing this translated all over the web as "weird" team or "oddball" team, but that isn't what that means. (It's close, but not quite right.) Kawarimono is for things which don't fit into other categories. It doesn't imply strangeness or weirdness any more than it implies being special.

Think about the members:

GoukaiRed - a pirate. What other group might he belong to? The vehicle group? No. The swordsman group? Maybe, but he's equally proficient with a gun. The strong group? That's for the rhino/bull/bulldozer characters.

AkaNinger - he could go in a "ninja" group, but there isn't one. The Kakurangers and Hurricangers are split onto different teams, which makes sense, otherwise the theoretical ninja team would all be from those few shows.

SasoriOrange - an orange scorpion alien. Could go with the Dairangers and Changemen but again, they're split.

JyuohEagle - can't be on an animal team, because his whole schtick is that he's human (as opposed to his Jyuman teammates).

ToQ-5 - her whole thing is being uncategorisable!

So it isn't that they're weird or oddball, just that they don't fit into the other 31 teams. Which is of course quite arbitrary - Rita could have based the teams on other things, where they may well have fit.

During the opening battle against the Goukaigers, I immediately thought that Gaisorg was a possessed Luka, but when we see Gaisorg unmasked in the preview for the second episode, even though we only see him from behind, it clearly isn't Luka. It actually looks a lot like AkaNinger to me, but that wouldn't make a great deal of sense at this point.

I was really happy to see BoukenSilver in action. It made me wonder how actors remember their characters don't know each other, even though they've acted together before. BoukenSilver's actor, playing the character Roy, met SasoriOrange in Kyuuranger VS Space Squad. But there they are, fighting like strangers.

I noticed something that I think will be important with the music: during each battle, it plays the henshin/roll call music of the eventual winner (if there are multiple characters on the winning team, it will play all of their music at some point). I thought I may be wrong during AkaNinger's battle with Go-OnRed, as he looked set to lose, but he ultimately won...

JyuohEagle and AkaNinger have both aged really well. I wish they'd get a team-up movie.

I loved Kagura's reaction to Captain Marvelous, and Yamato smirking in the background. He knows Marvelous is a big softy, but poor Kagura...! I also really liked how Kagura and Takaharu are immediately friends. It fits their characters perfectly, and also reminds me of the smart alec PE teachers sitting up the back during every school curriculum day I've ever attended...

Planet Nemesis reminds me of the Golden Saucer from Final Fantasy VII. I was waiting for Cait Sith to come out.

Rita's name cannot be a coincidence. She's a sorceress with a staff. Or is she? SasoriOrange and ToQ-5 both described what they saw as "appearing like magic", not necessarily actual magic. I don't think she's what she seems. Also, Sakamoto Koichi is the director, and he has a strong connection to another sorceress named Rita.

This is so well directed. It's essentially flawless. I know Arakawa Naruhisa has a tendency to stick his nose in and push for things to be consistent. I vaguely remember an article during the airing of Goukaiger where he said they suggested updating the 1970s and 1980s special effects and he strongly resisted. Why would their guns sound different now? They're the same guns.

I like how they've added the voices for the non-returning actors. Some were wrong, sadly - BoukenYellow, the blue Jetman - but many seem lifted from the characters' own shows. I'm pretty confident the grunts of the Goukaigers in their battle with Gaisorg come from the episode of Goukaiger where they battled Basco in a forest after he defeated Marvelous. Which just goes to show how many times I've watched Goukaiger over the years...

The only real concern I have is why they'd all so willingly fight one another. JyuohEagle explained it in his battle with Patran-1, I guess, when he said they should pit their techniques and skill against each other, not try to hurt each other. But I still can't imagine characters who are friends fighting one another. The only time we really saw that, though, was the fight between the yellow OhRanger and the yellow Carranger, but I don't know if they were actually friends after their versus movie, since I've never seen it.

There's also no mention of teammates trying to contact one another. BoukenSilver mentions he can't contact SGS, but did he try contacting BoukenYellow?

I think the show did address those issues. I'm just inclined to think there'd be more characters who are suspicious of what's going on than there seem to be.

All in all, though, this was basically perfect. Can't wait for the next episode.