Like millions of kids growing up, I watched the Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers. Well, mostly because I made fun of it. The franchise became so big that they made two featured films about them, without all of the Japanese stock battle footage. With the success also came video game adaptations. Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers: The Movie game for the Sega Genesis, shares a lot more with the series than with the movie, namely the the over use of enemies and severe repetition of the show in general.
This game defines repetition. The first two stages contain a grand total of three enemy models, two of which don’t appear until the end of the second stage. Stage three has nothing but Putty creatures, with three enemies that pop in and serve as the end of bosses for the end of the stage. If you thought Maximum Carnage suffered from some severe enemy repetition, Power Rangers the Movie is even worse. Considering the abundant use of stock footage for the series, and the near zero evolution of the Putty creatures, I guess they nailed that look.
Get used to seeing the same looking enemies over and over.
How many waves of enemies do I have to defeat before I can progress to the next part of the stage? Why don’t any of the rangers have any definitive and deliberate differences in their strength and speed? How come I have one extremely long life bar as opposed to several lives? Why is it so easy to refill your health and nor worry about dying? Why am I on the same screen for the last 5+ minutes killing Puttys without any type of progression to the stage?! Why couldn’t it have been made more obvious that I’m supposed to punch a rock formation with no obvious visual cue to advance the stage, after 10 minutes of killing Putty monsters?!
I have to admit though, even though the audio isn’t as great of a replication of the movie or the TV series, its close enough to make them worth hearing. More or less, they do fit each situation, like when you’re playing the White Tigerzord against three enemies, and you hear the White Ranger Tiger Power song going. Voices do sound raspy, but the overall production quality is a lot better than the average Sega Genesis title. Graphically, while some backgrounds lack color variation, the rangers, Zords and enemies, for the most part, look well colored and detailed.
If this is a Power Ranger movie game, why did they include the original yellow, black and red rangers into the story, when they were replaced before the movie was made?
The biggest problem with Power Ranger The Movie is how nauseatingly repetitive the game is. Fight through nothing but Ooze monsters, more Ooze monsters and a boss, the Putty monsters and more Putty monsters, rinse and repeat. The boss fights in the Zords are fun, as you’re not playing the same Power Ranger with the same attributes and same attacks, against the same monsters. Those fights don’t last long enough, and you’re back to the same old thing once again. If it weren’t for those boss battles, Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers: The Movie would be a lot worse off.
We need more than that. We need an entirely new game.
Rating: 4.5
(note – this was mislabeled as a Super Nintendo review on top. This was a review for the Sega Genesis version of Power Rangers: The Movie. I thought I edited this days ago to reflect that this was a Sega Genesis review, but apparently I did not hit Update. My apologies for the confusion.)
[...] on February 9, 2010. Filed under: Uncategorized | After reading this review of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie on Chocolate Lemon, I decided it might be fun to dig out my own copy of this game to give it a try. It didn’t [...]
I thought it might be fun to dig out my own copy of this “gem” and give it a try on my blog: http://blog.gamesylvania.com/2010/02/09/mighty-morphin-power-rangers-the-suckage-genesis-retrospective/
It uh, yeah, I kinda hated it. BTW, I figured out the rock thing by accident. I don’t know, I just bumped into it and noticed that it moved.
As for the sound, I couldn’t stand the show and never saw the movie, but the music was the best part. Great soundtrack. I used to enjoy playing along to the theme song on my guitar. Unfortunately, the Genesis really didn’t do it justice. At one point it just sounded like static noise because of all the crunchy guitar sounds (I was playing on the original hardware with the headphone jack hooked up to a decent stereo). Some developers really knew how to make the Genesis sing (see Sonic Team) while others just did what they could. Overall, this felt like a half-assed attempt to make a game as cheaply as possible. The sound was just one small casualty.