Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers

"Go go away Power Rangers"

here isn't really a way you could not have heard about Power Rangers, unless you haven't left your house for the last ten years. It took the youth of our nation by storm and made all their parents afraid that they were going to grow up to be psychopaths. In 2004, Power Rangers is still being made but my point being that Power Rangers was a really popular show. And like any popular show scads and scads of video games were made based on it.
This one was probably the worst of all. I admit that I got it as a Christmas present when it first came out, because I liked the show at the time and it was no secret from my family. Three of my favorite things are superheroes, giant robots and monsters that are obviously guys in rubber suits, so when I first saw the show, it was pure bliss.

The Sega CD game follows the major developments of the first season of the show. Rita Repulsa is released from captivity on the moon, and decides to celebrate by breaking something. Something big. Like planet Earth. Her ancient enemy Zordon, a disembodied head in a tube, instructs his neurotic robot pal Alpha Five to "recruit a team of teeangers with attitude," and the politically correct team of Jason, Billy, Zack, Kimberely and Trini are given the power to "morph" into spandex super suits from prehistoric creatures to fight Rita and her ridiculous monsters.

You're required to help them by guiding them Dragon's Lair-style through Day of the Dumpster, Green with Evil, Green Candle, Crystal of Nightmares, and Doomsday. You follow onscreen lightning bolts to direct a ranger a certain way, and press buttons to punch, kick or block during a fight, or mash them to fill up a meter when a particularly nasty attack is hitting them. To make things easier for the kids playing the game, the game gives you a life bar rather than a one strike and you're out set up like in Dragon's Lair, so you can goof up a couple times and still win the episode. The life bar also partially refills itself during certain times, like when the rangers morph or when they switch to the Megazord (the really big robot).

Except...not very many of the already few people who owned Sega CD's were kids. It was a console that die hard gamers alone tended to have. It's also debatable whether the six year olds the show was aimed at would have the reflexes and memorization skills needed to conquer Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. Even with the game's adjustable difficulty setting, things can get pretty hectic out there.

And that's another thing. Power Rangers for the Sega CD is, for some reason, one of those games that has an adjustable level of difficulty but you can only get the full experience playing on the hardest level. In other words, if you play on "easy" you can't play any farther than the end of Green with Evil, if you play on "medium" you get stopped at the end of Green Candle. And even for seasoned gamers, the "hard" mode is not forgiving. There are a lot more commands, the grace period to respond to them is much shorter, and much more damage is suffered for responding incorrectly. That all being coupled, of course, with fewer continues (with one life each) and a higher bar for getting more. Seems kind of unfair to the first time gamers that would, ideally, have been playing this game. Not to mention the asinine level where the Power Rangers are supposed to lose no matter what, you automatically lose half your life even if your play is flawless, but I seem to recall you still lose a life if your life bar is empty. Run that by me one more time?

The graphics are grainy and ugly, although I suppose they were counting on kids who had already seen the episodes to be playing the game. Or at least ones familiar enough with it to recognize the shiny yellow blob as Goldar and the red one as Jason. If you think about it like that, though, it defeats the whole purpose of playing the game. If they shot some new episodes you could only see by playing the game that would be a reason for Power Ranger fans to play. As it stands, they've already seen everything the game has to offer.

The sound is okay, but it's all stuff you'd hear on the show. The gameplay, which is the hub of any game, sucks rocks and is way too repetitive because the game, like the show, has a tendency to recycle footage from earlier fights. Dragon's Lair was really linear, it can't be denied, but each scene managed to feel like its own little thing. Every scene in the Power Rangers game feels exactly like all the other chop socky levels, or all the other guys dressed as robots fighting levels.

Mighty Morphin Power Rangers for the Sega CD was probably only made because of the abundance of full-motion video games that were being released for the system and because it seemed like there was some easy money to be made by doing so. But in the end, this is the Power Ranger game that the developers would probably like to forget about the most. If you're a Power Rangers fan, good for you. But stay far, far away from this game.

Reviewer's Score: 2/10, Originally Posted: 07/23/04, Updated 05/29/07