Being a lifelong Power Rangers fan and having dabbled a number of times with Super Sentai, anything similar to those shows will naturally pique my curiosity. Go! Go! Loser Ranger also happens to based on the latest manga authored by Negi Haruba, who previously did The Quintessential Quintuplets. I wouldn’t call The Quintessential Quintuplets perfect but it is one of the few harem anime that I’ve greatly enjoyed so naturally, I’m curious to see what Haruba did after that.
Go! Go! Loser Ranger isn’t actually centered around its Super Sentai team. Rather, it focuses on one of the villainous henchmen whom the viewer would normally be used to seeing their butt whooped by the heroes. Thirteen years prior, the Nefarious Monster Army attempted to invade Earth. A Sentai team known as the Dragon Keepers defeated all of the army’s bosses, leaving the army with just its henchmen known as the Dusters. Since then, the Dusters have forced to fight the Dragon Keepers and come up with a monster of the week every Sunday in a sort of stage show for the public.
This is a pretty dark spin on the Super Sentai premise. The Dragon Keepers were probably the heroes when this conflict started out but in the present, they’re frankly taking advantage of the Dusters’ situation, making them do their bidding for the sake of publicity and profit. If anything, the Dragon Keepers are the real antagonists of the story and the Dusters do not deserve such a harsh punishment. That being said, there is some humor to be found here. The premiere demonstrates this with a flashback in which the Dusters are struggling to come up with the next monster of the week. They’ve been doing this gig for thirteen years; they ought to be creatively bankrupt at this point. That’s a fun nod to Super Sentai and other long-running tokusatsu franchises’ eternal struggle to pump out monsters after doing this for years (and Super Sentai has been doing this for almost 50 years now).
The main protagonist of this series is Fighter D (Yusuke Kobayashi), a Duster who has grown tired of being the Dragon Keepers’ punching bag. Despite being off duty, he attends the latest bout in a vain attempt at defeating the Dragon Keepers. Following his defeat, D assumes a human form and he decides to join the Ranger Force, a program where people can serve as auxiliary rangers for the Dragon Keepers, in the hopes of overthrowing the organization from within. This plot does run of the danger of filling itself with too many members of the Ranger Force and stretching out across dozens of episodes but on paper, this is an excellent direction for the show to take with its premise.
Oddly enough, the character that interests me the most is not D or any of the Dragon Keepers but rather this one auxiliary ranger whom D interacts with a couple of times in the premiere. In fact, she’s the one who encourages D to join the Ranger Force. Her eyes look a little empty, the premiere often does close ups of her face, and she somehow stumbles upon D’s human form after the fight (as if she knew where he would be). Seriously, what is the deal with this woman? Does she know D’s true identity? If so, she is in on his plot to overthrow the Dragon Keepers? But then, why would she do that if she’s part of the Ranger Force? As if I wasn’t already hooked on the show’s premise, I’m also dying to know what’s going on with this lady. Out of everyone in the cast, she’s definitely the most suspicious character.
Watch Go! Go! Loser Ranger on Hulu
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