Super Megaforce First Impressions

Given the Megaforce review, you no doubt know I didn't care much for it and now the first episode of Super Megaforce has come and gone. What did I think of it? Well just read on and see.

The episode opens with a recap of the finale of the first half when the Messenger is destroyed and Vrak goes into hiding. We then get introduced to Vrak's brother Prince Vekar as the Armada begins the assault on Earth. I like his voice, it has a sort of royal undertone to it though he and the other villains do sound a somewhat muffled but that will probably get fixed in later episodes. Another thing of note is that while the theme song is the same as the first half, the opening sequence strangely has more energy to it and it is a bit more exciting.

It was a good choice not to have them recalled to the Command Center to get the new mode immediately after the invasion begins. We get a nice scene or two of Emma and Noah actually fighting off the grunts to protect civilians. By doing it that way, they managed to provide some decent tension. Seeing everyone but Troy limping into the Command Center with suits scuffed and slightly burned from battle is a decent sight.

With that said, the acting and the voice acting on the rangers' part is about on par with the first half. Their voice acting sounds a bit dry and dull. Troy still sounded a bit bored while Emma still sounded a little too cheery considering they were watching the city get destroyed in beginning. I do like that they made the keys the same size as the ones in Gokaiger. I was actually expecting them to use the smaller and mis-proportioned Bandai of America keys instead. My biggest complaint with the episode is that they just went on and on about how great their new powers were.

The name legendary red ranger mode is redundant since its called legendary mode.

Its fine if they think that their Super Mega mode (geez that is a terrible name) is cool and they are excited to be able to use it but after a while it got annoying.  I almost shouted "Ok I get it! You love your new powers, just stop talking about it already!". Banter between the rangers is a normal part of  PR but this seemed a little much. The fight scenes would've been cooler if they had just toned down the talking. The color puns during the legendary red ranger change were annoying and really only helped push the point home that they rangers needed to shut up about their new powers. They made a really weird choice after the legendary red ranger fight. They did a blatantly obvious photo-shop/green screen effect to put Overdrive Red's suit in the scene where they were walking away from the explosion. I thought for sure that was something they would've re-shot. The difference is really noticeable because in the shot, Overdrive Red's suit is a lot brighter than the others.

Other than that, the action was just the standard Gokaiger stuff involving team swapping but using each team's morphing phrase was a nice touch. They even went so far as doing a roll call when they changed into Mystic Force. With that being said, the names of all their equipment and zords need work because adding the words "super mega" to everything is just lazy. You could call that knit-picking but it got annoying hearing "super mega" this and "super mega" that when ever they did something.

The episode does a nice call back to a question the teacher asked in first episode of Megaforce and Troy's answer that if humanity works together, they can overcome even the greatest odds. It was actually a very fitting call back given the start of the episode. It is also kind of nice to see that Roboknight might not be outright forgotten in this half. Those are my overall thoughts on the episode. Was the episode terrible? No. Was it spectacular? Not even close. Overall, it was just an ok episode. They really have a lot to make up for after the first half.