There are lots of good ideas here, and the serious moments really land well, but something is very off, particularly in the comedy sections. Some of the action scenes were a bit more ambitious than the studio really seemed capable of, to the point where a friend I watched the episode with complained about feeling motion sick. I’ll give the manga a try, because I really am interested in the story they’re going for, but I’m giving up on the anime.

Overall, a very mixed 3/5

This is great!

As a long time fan of the decades-long running Sunday morning super hero hour, i.e. the Kamen Rider and Super Sentai/Ranger shows, there’s plenty of tropes around these shows and their descendants to play around with.

Unlike the recent similarly themed shows like Miss Kuroitsu Of The Monster Development Department, Love After World Domination, and Mr Villain’s Day Off, this one actually has an art and animation budget!

The shaking rage of the nameless grunts, and the hopelessness of their situation, their finding small joy in rare encouragements from the audience, are shown with great heart.

The hilarious bit where the grunts whip up a poorly conceived monster-of-the-week in a couple of minutes sounds about right for some of the monsters I see on these shows.

I think the Rangers as bad guys is done a little too obviously, but that’s comic book villains for you.

Anyway, one of the best first episodes this season!

@rikka@ani.social

The 3d wasn’t integrated well into the style and it felt off. I am not really nostalgic for power rangers or super sentai so I will probably drop this.

I really enjoyed this episode. I had heard good things about this manga in the past (I had usually seen the title as Ranger Reject). I do think that the animation was overall pretty good, but some of the ambitious camera movements made it feel a little GoHands-y.

I am hoping that the studio can keep the quality and production up on this series as it goes. The first episode was overall pretty good, but it is a newer, unproven studio, only having done one series before this (that was just 8 episodes long), and a bunch of 1-2 episode OVAs. Now suddenly, they are leading two shows concurrently. I am hoping this doesn’t turn into another Zom 100 or Nier.

The blonde girl at the end that was trying to recruit our MC seemed somewhat familiar to me, but looking her up I see she was only the villainess in Raeliana. But, I think that is definitely where I recognize her from, maybe not that role specifically, but this character definitely gives off underhanded villainess vibes for sure and her voice reflects that 100%.

I hope as we go that we continue to see the hijinks that the Dusters get up to. The way they slapped together that monster was fun. During the initial fight sequence, I was confused why this tiger boss had tires on his back and could transform into a truck, but the slapdash conception makes it make more sense.

Finally, I really liked the ED visuals, showing behind the scenes storyboards and steps of the animation process. I hope that this continues as the show goes with scenes from each episode. It is surely one way to get me to watch the ED every time.