Evidently, I’m not the only one who thought that despite their gacha adaptations landing squarely in the pile of mediocrity for one reason or another, Yostar Pictures seemed to have some decent talent attached to it. After all, said studio has branched out from their initial fare to adapt a manga called Sentai Daishikkaku – more or less literally “Ranger Reject”, but known in the West by its thrice-excited localized title Go! Go! Loser Ranger!.
Loser Ranger takes place in a world where most humans know that, thirteen years ago, a giant flying castle appeared and your standard Super Sentai plot started up. In fact, the monsters of the castle even face the Dragon Keepers that head up the Ranger corps in seemingly ritualized combat exactly once a week, televised to the masses as a spectator event called the “Sunday Showdown”.
However, that’s not exactly the truth of the world. Right from the outset, we’re told that something different is going on behind the scenes: shortly after the monsters arrived, the actual war ended with their bosses being wiped out by the Dragon Keepers, and all the Sunday Showdowns since then have been the result of beaten and humiliated but immortal and shapeshifting mook monsters playing their role so that the Ranger Corps can continue to manipulate the human world as its “indispensable” guardians.
This is the kind of work where it only gets more complicated from there and what we think we know about the setting changes almost constantly, but that’s where we start. Specifically, we start with one of those monsters – known simply as Fighter D – who is starting to get some funny ideas about this whole situation, or at least who hasn’t abandoned his pride as a monster and desire to win, however impossible.
We see that D, in his off-time, visits the surface – something that seems to be taboo for obvious reasons, even though he can disguise himself as human pretty well. He even runs into two members of the Ranger Corps. Yeah, there are a lot more than just the Dragon Keepers, with a hierarchy in every color and unpledged white ranger trainees. It’s an excited and cheerful trainee and a rather eerie Yellow Ranger lady who D meets, both before and in the latter case after making a minor scene at the Sunday Showdown.
This convinces D to continue infiltrating humanity, intending to join the Ranger Corps (or at least try out) to get close enough to take a swing at the Dragon Keepers. Through this he has to put up with the two from before – Hibiki Sakurama ever more excited about getting a new fellow trainee, and Yumeko Suzukiri who seems rather odd until it’s revealed (while D is using his shapeshift to impersonate a non-present Hibiki) that she’s realized what he is, but that she also wants to destroy the Ranger Corps herself.
Things get a little messier when a fellow fighter, who came to the surface to look for D (as the fighters in the castle are being put upon thanks to his acting out) is caught and permakilled by the Red Keeper. Hibiki, after that scene, reveals that he’s also caught on, but that he wants to create a just world where humans and Monsters can live in peace.
D blows Hibiki off and decides to (or is blackmailed to) work with Yumeko, resulting in a raid on the Red Keeper’s base where D manages to steal the real Divine Artifact of the Red Keeper. He doesn’t get out without a fight, though, and is seemingly killed by the Dragon Keepers, though the Artifact gets to Yumeko.
As the Rangers address their issue (Blue hunting for D while Red literally murders his second in command at the suggestion of succession. Admittedly, it seems that the second kind of had it coming), Hibiki finds D and despite D’s protests launches into his life story about how his parents were pacifist-to-the-point-of-insanity religious nuts who were eventually drawn into a suicide cult by one of the boss monsters.
He and D end up teaming up against Blue’s hunter, a nervous wreck of a minion. This ends up being one of the most important sequences, as D and Hibiki switch places.
Not just for the episode. Hibiki cuts off his own hand to sell the situation, and D takes his place in the Ranger Force, meaning to destroy it from the inside while Hibiki goes to ground hoping to reform the force from the outside instead. Thus, the rest of the show will feature D-as-Hibiki.
This starts with D having to meet all of Hibiki’s contacts. His fellow trainees are a mixed bag – many don’t think too highly of him, but others seem to be pleasant enough. Then there are two wild cards. The first is a Fighter that was hiding out in Hibiki’s room: the feminine/female Fighter XX, who has apparently been on the surface continuing to act as part of the Monster Resistance for the entire time that D has been part of the Sunday Showdowns, but that now believes herself to be the last. The other is Hibiki’s big sister… who despite being wheelchair-bound when not transformed, happens to also be the Pink Keeper and possibly inappropriately interested in her little brother.
The ranger exam begins shortly. The scenario seems simple: ten trainees are split into five teams of two, one for each ranger squad, while full-grade rangers play “monsters”, holding onto colored keys that the trainees need to claim over three days of half-hour fights in order to pass and have the right to be scouted by the proper ranger squads. However, it turns out to not be so easy: there’s only one key of each color, causing the ace trainees to team up while D has to pull together the lower bracket, most especially against his fellow “red” examinee, a very prickly dude called Shion who it’s rather satisfying to see get beat.
This happens on the second day, and goes poorly, leaving team D out of sorts with four of five keys in their rivals’ hands for day 3.
Also complicating matters is that a boss monster has infiltrated the underground base, and seems intent on raising hell. Yeah, it turns out that there’s at least one (probably more) still alive; this one is the one that killed Hibiki’s parents, still spouting pacifistic religious nonsense while slaughtering people. He recruits Fighter XX to his cause, coming off as rather manipulative towards her. In the process, one of D’s teammates gets caught up and seemingly killed, though XX takes his place for the third day.
This leads to Blue Keeper crashing the party for the keys (where D’s team had some good aces up their sleeves), hunting the Boss that nearly killed his second, ending up in a battle with D and XX before XX caves to spare the two of them, leading Blue to the boss, where the fight is something of a stalemate. The boss gives D the classic “Join me” speech, but D finds he can’t conscience slaughtering the trainees he’s been befriending, and ends up acting out against the boss.
Ultimately, the battle takes place in three locales due to the boss doing clone tricks: the trainee rangers (including D) against one manifestation (though not without losses), the high-ups of various colors against a crowd, and Blue Keeper against a few more. The boss loses all the fights, but D decides to go after Blue Keeper in the aftermath, before everyone else finds their footing.
Though we do get to see from flashbacks how Blue Keeper is more a jerk with a heart of gold than just a jerk, D fights him seriously. However, any real victory is stolen when one of the Boss’s last clones, just a little chicken-shaped mini-me, laser-snipes Blue to death. D finds, oddly enough, that this is quite distressing. Said last mini-clone escapes with XX.
After some simple breakdown of the situation going into a future Season 2, the show comes to an end. D is still infiltrating, the techie trainee who we thought the boss killed first and who XX impersonated is revealed to still be alive (suggesting XX may be turning in sympathy), one Dragon Keeper and two artifacts are down, and it looks like the real Hibiki might come back going forward.
So, on a technical level Loser Ranger is extremely good. Every fight, and there is a lot of action in this show, looks wonderful. The effects for D and the other fighters also really help sell them and their transformation abilities. This is not the sort of technical competence you expect out of “the studio that exists to do Gacha Games”. Is it strictly one of the best? Well, probably not in terms of all-time greats, but it’s certainly up there. It isn’t just the action either – the environments, and the subtle animations of the characters are also really good. Suzukiri feels dangerous, and you get real emotions out of the fighters despite them having extremely generic and non-expressive faces for the most part.
Moving beyond what Yostar brought to the table, as a completed season, I think Loser Ranger is fairly satisfying. They picked the perfect place in the material to cut, with the end of the exam (after which the trainees who took down a boss monster manifestation, at least the ones who lived through it, are liable to be promoted) and the death of the Blue Keeper. In the old days, you’d often get shows ending on even less of a climax of this with no real “to be continued” – you just had to read the manga if you wanted to know what happened next. So I’ll call that solid.
The plot, overall, is saved by its nuance and intelligence. Loser Ranger could have easily fallen into the trap of just reversing the roles. Evil is good and good is evil. It’s a basic and often edgy take and unless there is real care and attention given to the portrayals, it can often come off as childish. That’s not to say there aren’t other good versions of “Rooting for the stereotyped bad guy” but it is a dangerous choice.
Loser Ranger, on that score, comes into its own with the fact that we’re following D, specifically. He isn’t, and we aren’t, on board with the boss monster we see here, and the slaughter it’s able to inflict, nor any of the other bosses. Honestly, while D talks about World Domination, when we see his dream of it, it’s very childish, basically amounting to being a celebrity, so you get the feeling that D is a very simple creature who doesn’t really understand what “World Domination” is; he just knows to fight enemies and is working out the rest as he goes along. What’s more, D rather quickly comes to the realization that his side isn’t the Boss monster’s side any more.
This is good, because the Rangers also get a more nuanced look. Most of the trainees are fairly likable, even the ones that end up as antagonists for a couple of episodes. Of the Dragon Keepers we don’t get a good look at Yellow or Green, but Red, Pink, and Blue are… not without their redeeming features. Pink is pretty much only messed up in being overly protective of (and perhaps overly interested in) her little brother – when, to be fair, they were orphaned because of both monster action and their crazy parents, the latter of which Hibiki was pretty close to. They make her sound nuts, but looking out for the only family she’s got left, who she has reason to believe isn’t on a great path? That’s not really something to knock too hard. Blue talks like a thug, and in fact was a criminal in the past, but he also gave his ill-gotten gains to the orphanage that raised him, and is recognized by his underlings who know him as having his heart in the right place.
Red… Red is the most abjectly villainous of the Dragon Keepers, but he’s still an interesting study. He’s not puppy-kicking evil, like lesser writers are often tempted to make their villain-with-good-PR characters. He’s a delusional narcissist. He seems to honestly believe his speeches about justice – like he might be the only one of the Dragon Keepers who isn’t even really acting – even as he only ever cares about how things hurt or benefit him personally. When he offs his second, he was sorely provoked (if not to a degree sane people would think deserved a lethal response). When he finds out Blue is dead, he is devastated… even if one of his major concerns seems to be how cool the team can look without its tall silent type. Even if he is all bad, he’s more interesting than if they’d gone the route of appealing to shock content to sell his negativity.
Because we can see good in the Ranger Force, even the Dragon Keepers, the stakes are kept more personal. D wants freedom for his people and revenge for the humiliation he’s suffered for the vast majority of his life. Okay, fair. Suzukiri wants revenge on the rangers, and it’s strongly implied that she’s an existence who should have a compelling reason to hate them. I guess we’ll see more of her later. Hibiki isn’t in this a ton, but with D and XX we get the idea that he’s not totally misguided and following in the footsteps of his dead parents when he talks about cooperation and peace between monsters and humans. And many of the Rangers, from trainee to Dragon Keeper, are given compelling reasons to hate the Monsters, even if those reasons are ultimately able to be laid at the feet of the Bosses rather than the common fighters.
This in turn means it’s easier to connect with Loser Ranger, and to really feel what’s going on. Because as epic as saving, destroying, and/or dominating the world may be, it’s not something we viewers really have context for, and thus it’s often hard to sell as an emotional experience.
In the end, I feel like Go! Go! Loser Ranger! has earned itself an A. It’s genuinely difficult to ask for more out of an action show. More pathos? You’d risk things becoming more melodramatic. More darkness? We’ve got holes shot in likable characters, I don’t think we need Spec Ops Asuka style exploitation. More fighting? You’d lose some of the intelligence in the show and drag it down. More fun? Maybe. But on the other hand there’s enough goof in here that I wonder how far you could go before risking the drama landing.
That said, I do feel like Loser Ranger is missing an X-factor. Everything is good, very solid, well mixed… but nothing tells me, oh yeah, I’m going to be coming back to this. Nothing says “years later, you will still recommend this on the short list”. And maybe I’m just getting old and grumpy and stingy with top marks, but an A is a really good grade on its own and so with an A Loser Ranger will stand. With more on the way, do yourself a favor and check it out.