Mighty Morphin Power Rangers

"The best MMPR Game out there for its time"

I first played this on my niece's Game Gear. I was rather surprised to find it was a tourney fighter, as the SNES versions that I played were mostly side scrollers (except the fighting edition of course). As I played it, I realized the game had quite a call to me. The game was easy to pick up, and there were plenty of characters to choose from.

GFX:
I don't see a ton of games on the GG, but I know there was no quick and easy palette switching here. The male rangers looked male and the female rangers looked female. Also, the MegaZords actually retained the leg color when switched, so sprite switching was not used there either. I was actually surprised by that. Everyone looks faithful to the TV series, and there's a few sprite tricks included with some of the special moves. Nice touches with the cutscenes!

Storyline:
This actually follows the TV storyline somewhat, going through the evil green ranger before you can select him in story mode. Sweet. That's what I call attention to detail. Now, Rita does say stuff that she normally doesn't say in the TV show, but seeing as she wore herself out in the show that's actually a good thing.

Controls:
The controls are simplistic. Punch, Kick, and heavy attack. There were also three special moves per character, done by down, forward, and attack button. So while there wasn't any tonnage of moves, they did have plenty of depth and variety in them (some of the characters had some pretty differentiating missile attacks, not just uniform straight forward misslies) The simplicity of the controls ensures if nothing else that you will be able to use any character with some skill.

Sound:
I can't say much about sound on a hand-held console using less than SID chip power. But then again, I listen to MIDIs so I'd be WAY too biased about the music. It does get a bit repeatable after a while when playing versus mode. Different musics for different stages would have been nice.

Replayability:
Well, here's where I go out on a limb- I play it over and over again for the hidden dream mode. There's nothing like seeing the Megazord fight Red Ranger Red Ranger. It's too bad the hidden feature requires so much effort spent in the game.

Type Specifics:
Character selection: There's a ton of guys to choose from, though initially some types can't fight other types (e.g. rangers can't fight zords, and Dragonzord Fighter can't fight dragonzord or megazord because it uses parts from those two, nor can rangers fight Cyclopsis because that's a zord as well) but allowing Green ranger to fight megazord would have been nice... after all, he WAS shown beating the crap out of MegaZord once!
Character move depth: You use the same moves for each character but they do different things for each one. It has that feel of most wrestling games in that aspect.
Character Balance: It's not too heavily spread around here. No one character really dominates. The only character that would really seem to struggle is the Putty Patrol, but good gamers could do quite well with anyone.

I only dropped my score to 9 because I'm biased toward music, original MMPR characters, and the fact that there aren't many fighters out there that actually make fighting as easy to pick up as this one. It's far superior to the SNES fighting game version due to fighter selectability, and doesn't give EVERY character a projectile by default.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 04/15/05