Airing the week after Lupinranger vs. Patranger ended, Super Sentai Strongest Battle was a four-episode miniseries that was not just a sendoff to Japan’s Heisei era, but also an excuse to just have Super Sentai teams square off against one another while some sort of plot happened.

All the past Super Sentai squads are invited to the planet Nemesis for a contest to determine the strongest warrior. Everyone there is shuffled and then put back into 32 random teams of five, with the winning team able to have any wishes they desire. So says a lady sorceress named Rita (no relation, don’t think too hard) who has organized the tournament.

There are catches to this, of course. One is the lack of outside communication and inability to leave. Another is our cross-series nemesis of the show, Gaisorg, a demonic/possessed suit of armor looking for the strongest to fight. He has been targeting Super Sentai teams from past and present looking for fights, in fact at the beginning of the first episode he is mopping up on the Gokaiger. Gokai Red, aka Captain Marvelous, isn’t particularly happy about getting wrecked, so he’s chasing after Gaisorg.

…and how convenient, Marvelous is one of the five members of the team featured in the miniseries. Also joining him are…

— Yamato or Zyuoh Eagle, from Animal Sentai Zyuohger. Considered the leader here.
— Stinger or Scorpius Orange, from Space Sentai Kyuranger.
— Takaharu or Aka Ninger, from Shuriken Sentai Ninninger. Shockingly tolerable here.
— …and finally, Kagura or ToQ #5 (Pink) from Express Sentai ToQger.

Tagged as Team Weirdo, the five advance through the tournament, discover dark secrets and eventually team up to murder Ultimate Great Satan at the end. Because, you might not believe this, but Rita was using all the power generated from the battles to summon a giant devil!

As said above, the four-episode miniseries is meant just as a display to have as much fanservice as humanly possible. Actors from previous shows return, and there are lots of callbacks and references with both the returning actors (and suit actors) showing spark. This feels like a project where everyone involved showed up wanting to have a blast, and it feels that way on screen.

As for Gaisorg? Rita eventually absorbs the armor’s power, but is defeated and the armor destroyed thanks to two members of this year’s Super Sentai, the Dinoknight Sentai Ryusoulger. But then a mysterious person afterward picks up Gaisorg’s helmet…

Super Sentai Strongest Battle is only four episodes, features a lot of fun cameos, fights and general good feelings. It’s easily recommended.

…and now, the 43rd Super Sentai series. Ryusoulger is…to be entirely honest, when I teased this series in last year’s thread, I had not actually finished watching the series. I gave myself a year to finish it. And I did finish it, way before 2025 in fact.

Ultimately, it’s a frustrating series in both its blandness and what it ultimately does right. Perhaps Ryusoul was the placeholder the Super Sentai franchise needed before going on its current creative hot streak. But the first half of the series is simply dire most paint-by-numbers content. And while the final arc finally flashes the series’ potential, it’s frankly too little, too late.

Premise is as simple as one gets. 65 million years ago, the dinosaur knights of the Ryusoul tribe were set to fight the evil Druidon tribe, when suddenly that meteor that killed all the dinosaurs caused the Druidon to flee into space before the meteor’s impact.

Our first three heroes are apprentices to the current generation of knights of the Ryusoul tribe, and have to assume their masters’ roles as Ryusoulgers when those masters sacrifice themselves defending against a surprise attack from a returning Druidon force set to conquer Earth.

I can’t tell you the names of the first three members without looking them up. That’s how bland they are. The leader is hot-blooded and kind of weird and lets his anger sometimes overtake him. Another one has…blue hair? And then the one lady of the group which…nope, don’t remember very much without looking it up. There’s also the two brothers we previously saw walking around during Super Sentai Strongest Battle. One is young, cocky and overconfident in his abilities. And the other one is stoic and serious in his duty.

The five members quickly befriend a young lady named Ui, someone who is either in high school or just graduated high school? It’s not necessarily clear. In the show’s one big grasp at being modern, she’s trying to become a social media superstar as she films adventures across the “world” or pretends to anyway. She lives with her father, an archaeologist of apparently some merit. Their weird home of dinosaur bones and other oddities is where the Ryusoulgers call home.

It goes without saying that the non-human characters are way more interesting than anyone else. There’s Tyramigo, Ryusoul Red’s robot partner who is capable of speech, walks around town and is friends with all children. There’s also DimeVolcano, a hot-headed (pun intended) dinosaur who speaks in riddles and sets anyone who gets his riddles wrong on fire. All the little dinosaur buddies that appear as upgrades throughout the show? Way more interesting than the humans.

But hey, the sixth member of each Super Sentai team usually livens up a show, right? Right?

Let the following few paragraphs be a request to anyone possibly reading this who may or may not write a story of some form in the future. I am begging you.

PLEASE DO NOT WRITE CHARACTERS WHOSE SOLE TRAIT IS TRYING TO SEEK LOVE. ESPECIALLY WHEN THESE CHARACTERS MAKE FOOLS OF THEMSELVES WHEN WOMEN TELL THEM THEY JUST WANT TO BE FRIENDS OR THEY ARE SORRY THEY GAVE THEM THE WRONG IDEA.

…just stop this character trope. Forever. It is a horrible message to present to society, especially the very young children meant to be watching this. Leave women the hell alone, they are not there to just become your wife.

Anyway, Canelo is the sixth Ryusoulger, coming from the tribe’s water nation. He’s come up to the surface to…find a wife to help the fading water tribe preserve their lineage. Yep. The water and land tribes apparently don’t trust one another because of conflicts from hundreds of years ago. So there’s some conflict. For a few episodes.

Canelo does has the cool ability to communicate to his giant underwater dinosaur master by simply touching any stream of water. Though that does give one the sudden wanting for viewers to pee as well.

Multiple episodes feature wacky sitcom concepts where Canelo falls in love with a random lady and helps them and oops, they’re married! Or dating! Or just not that into him! And he’s crushed at the end! Oh, so hilarious! It doesn’t help the actor portraying Canelo is less interesting than a block of wood. Canelo’s younger sister also occasionally shows up? (She’s not young, she’s 123 years old supposedly!) And she may or may not have a crush on Ryusoul Blue, so Canelo gets upset and wants to fight him?

Just a dreadful character. Please do not write characters like him ever again. Thank you.

After 25-30 episodes of actively doing little to nothing, Ryusoulger begins doing something. And that something includes the previously mentioned Gaisorg, who appeared in previous episodes as an occasional villain wanting to seek the strongest, just like before. It’s revealed that the Gaisorg armor has taken over Nada, a member of the Ryusoul tribe who was originally slated to become a Ryusoulger but was rejected. It’s established that Nada was that mysterious person at the end of Super Sentai Strongest Battle picking up Gaisorg’s helmet, and he has assumed his powers.

And with that, the show starts to get interesting. Things are explained! There’s significant backstory! The villains begin to actually do things that affect the heroes! But then, whoa boy. I’m going to spoiler this because it truly is a deeply terrible way to do a character dirty.

After that, the show reaches its final arc, in which the final villains actively threaten the world. And the show becomes legitimately good here. Exciting action, great narrative and the ending does tie everything together. But sigh, it took so long to get there.

Ultimately, the show does feel cursed in a way. It’s the final Heisei-era Super Sentai show, starting then but ending in the Reiwa era. Ai’s actress also had to be written out due to her real-life medical issues, eventually passing away in 2020 from an undisclosed illness. The final scene of the series features everyone and her character having a heartwarming family moment – and I wonder if the producers filmed that ahead of time for….reasons.

It’s also the final Super Sentai, as of this writing, to be localized for Power Rangers, becoming dubbed as Power Rangers Dino Soul in South Korea and then released in North America as Power Rangers Dino Fury in 2021. (Cosmic Fury, the series afterward, used Kyuranger footage.)

I will admit that while writing this, I’ve looked up plot summaries of the show, and there does appear to be quite a bit there. So to claim the show is empty and without substance isn’t true. But all the same, if the characters are so boring and the narrative is uninteresting that it’s difficult to pick up on the story – is that a good thing? Inbetween all that worldbuilding is monster of the week plots, multiple terrible Canelo-led plots as he tries to find love, etc. I think my original watch of the show just beat my brain into submission, which made me stop watching until I told myself I would finish it in order to write this thread.

Within all of what I said is some good action, nice suit/robot design and an appreciation for practical effects. (Which is something to especially appreciate as later shows go more and more toward full CG for the robot fights.) Maybe you’ll enjoy this if you just want a sleepy, standard show with tropes-a-plenty. Otherwise, I personally didn’t enjoy Ryusoulger, but was glad I finished it.