Burning Rangers

""Good job Reed." "Hmmf, of course.""

Burning Rangers was one of the last games to be released domestically for the Sega Saturn. Fortunately it is one of the best action games released for the system. Burning Rangers and Nights: Into Dreams established Sonic Team as the development masters of short, fast-paced action games with infinite replay value. There is a lot of fun to be had here.

Presentation:
I usually don't care about this kind of stuff, but if you do Burning Rangers has some pretty slick presentation. The menu's are highly stylized and have a nice animated background effect running through them. The game opens with a nice little anime intro (which I prefer to the CG variety.) Burning Ranger feels like a game that Sonic Team was really into making.

Story:
Burning Rangers is about a futuristic team of firefighters. They are decked out in anime style armor with a similar look to Phantasy Star Online and even more so to Gun Valkyrie. The story starts out with the team doing what they do…fighting a fire in a research facility. You play as one of the new members of the team. You're following missions are in an under water theme park, a space station and an artificial satellite. As the game progresses an odd story starts to develop that could only be in a game staring anime futuristic firefighters. The story is driven by very nice anime cut scenes and scripted events with spoken dialog inside the actual game. It's interesting, but I think that the story is an odd fit. The firemen have a spaceship? Ookaay…

Gameplay:
This is what this game is all about. Burning Rangers is all about amazingly intense, hectic action. As a firefighter you have three basic tools. You have your fire suppression gun, you have you're jet pack, and you have you're navigator.

The fire suppression gun can be used in two ways. Way number one is to fire it in short burst by tapping the fire button. This way puts out fires slowly, but in the process turns them into crystals that can be used to power your shield (like the rings in Sonic.) They may also be used to rescue hostages(more on that later.) The fires burn at 3 levels of intensity, red, green and blue with blue being the hottest. The hotter the flame the harder it is to put out and the more crystals it unleashes when put out. The second way to use the gun is to create an explosive vacuum. You accomplish this by holding down the fire button until it is charged and then releasing the shot. This puts out even the most powerful flames, but destroys all of the potential crystals in the process. The vacuum shot is also used as an attack against the random, sparse robotic enemies and against bosses.

The second tool that you have is your jet pack that allows you to double jump and fly for limited periods of time. Learning to control your jetpack is invaluable as there is a lot of platforming in this game. You will also use the jetpack to make a quick escape from exploding walls. When you hear the initial swishing sound and see the wall get hot all you have to do is push down on the analog pad and you will rocket flip out of the way. They is just a bit of auto-control at play here that makes the game very user friendly.

The niftiest tool at you disposal is your navigator. She'll let you know where to go, what you current mission objective is and what your general state of being is. All you have to do is ask her by pressing a button. She'll also let you know if an area is about to explode in flames and she'll move along the story with scripted event dialog.

You have two main tasks to accomplish as you play through the game. You must put out fires and rescue victims. You have to constantly put out fires as you come upon them or they will burn out of control. There is a fire limit meter that goes up in increments of twenty. Every time it hits an increment (because you didn't put out enough fires) all hell breaks loose and every thing explodes. Every time this happens the explosions last for a longer and longer period of time. When this happens you will not be able to bring down the limit below the last multiple of twenty that it hit. If you allow the limit to hit 100% then the explosions never stop and you will surely die.

Your central tasks as you play the game are not only to put out fires, but to rescue victims trapped in the levels. To rescue those victims you must find them and teleport them back to your ship. To accomplish this you must have at least 5 crystals, but to get the highest score for the rescue you need to have 10. Trying to find “just one more” victim while your fire limit is spiking is quite a harrowing experience. The victims are hidden all over the levels and finding them all is quite a challenge. You must play through multiple times to rescue every victim as they are not all available in one run through. The open rooms and victim placements also change randomly with each sucessive play through. It is a guilty pleasure to rescue the victims because they say horribly acted little lines when you rescue them. They also send you serialized Emails after you rescue them that update every time you play the game.

After you finish a level you are given a score based on several factor. Even if you don't play games for score you'll find yourself playing this one repeatedly for just that reason. “…Must get an A!”

Graphics:
Burning Ranger is a mixed bag of quality. It is probably the most technologically graphically accomplished 3-D platformer on the Saturn. The first level in the game is amazing. I would dare say that, in its own way it could be favorably compared to the likes of One or Tomb Raider 2. The research facility is huge and beautiful. There are floors and walls crumbling and bright explosions all around you. This level possesses the best lighting effects ever seen on the Saturn. The fires are alive and dancing transparent sprites that give off colored light. There is an area where you have to use a green flash light that gives off high quality green light. The central character models are high poly (for a Saturn 3rd person action game) and they are designed well. After the first level the graphics begin to fall apart though. There are several different techniques being used to accomplish the transparency effects in this game, and most of them only work if used sparingly. Unfortunately in the latter levels this is not the case. The transparency effect can in some cases look worse than the Saturn's default mesh transparencies. In some cases liberal use of this new effect makes it hard to see what's going on. The three dimensional transparencies have issues at their edges of interaction with solid polygons. Also sometimes the true transparency appears over something it is supposed to be behind.
As I said the central character models are high poly for a SAturn game (higher than Lara, lower than Raziel). However the secondary character models are much worse off. Some of the robots look fine, but the victims and the bosses are blocky and dithered and just ugly! The levels are very big and well designed, but when a lot is going on or if the level is extraordinarily large the backgrounds will start to fall apart. They will drop poly's, loose draw distance, and the framerate will drop. With that said it is still just incredible that the Saturn is pulling all of this off, three dimensional transparencies,in layers, with transparent fires and explosions, and some destructable environments, through sheer brute force calculation...and some VDP2 magic!

Sound:
This is an important element of the gameplay so it had better be good and it is. The voices and sound effects are crystal clear, more so than the default voice quality of most Saturn games. The voice acting for the central characters is not bad at all. The effects play in surround sound to enhance the experience of dealing with exploding walls in 3-D. The only thing even mildly offensive about the sound is the laughable elevator music/rap soundtrack of the game. It kind of grows on you though…not really.

Overall I think that even though Burning Rangers is just a tad more ambitious than the power of its platform justifies, it still comes off amazingly well. It's a ball to play in short sessions and has as much replay value as Nights (nearly limitless.)

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 03/31/04, Updated 02/23/07