Power Rangers Megaforce Episode 1 Review: A Mega Appearance

Well it's time for the next Power Ranger series to make it's entrance. With alien invaders coming to Earth, Gosei and Tensou need the aid of teenagers with talented attitudes to fight off the aliens. Now with Samurai trying to have MMPR elements, but Megaforce is the anniversary series that fans have been waiting for. Does the first episode give fans hope or does it start another dark path for the franchise?

For the cast of characters in this series we get teenagers like in MMPR. It has been a while since PR has gone back to the teenagers with attitude concept and I'm happy to see it come back. The leader of the team is Troy and he is a very well trained martial artists. This is easily a callback to Jason with the discipline angle. Noah is the Blue Ranger as he is the smart guy of the team like Billy was. Even in his first out of suit fight he was just getting lucky. The Pink Ranger is Emma who is pretty preppy, but has a strong love for nature and she shares that same attitude pattern like Kimberly does. Gia is the perfect girl as she is smart and strong now Trini never had that angle, but I do remember hearing fans calling her perfect. Finally my favorite so far is Jake the Black Ranger. He has the same easy-going attitude that Zach has and from what I have seen he is the best actor out of the group. With that the acting isn't that, it already seems pretty average right now and it's a much higher step than Samurai's acting. I can tell they will get better on the way and there does need to be some improvements which is mostly Troy's actor since he made some funny faces at times. Overall, I am happy with the cast of characters we have. I can't say much for the villains right now, but their voices are good expect for one.

Now there were tons of good references to the original PR series as they were put in pretty well. We have Troy telling to team to use the new powers given to them like Jason did in the first episode. Noah was amazed by the robot Tensou which is like Billy's fascination with Alpha. The last big one was then Emma making a joke about not being in the team since the helmet messes up her hair. These were nice touches and added some nice corny humor as it fits unlike Samurai that tried way too hard. A good touch for the story is that Gosei has been brought to Earth in absence of Zordon just in case the Earth falls in danger from alien invaders. I guess Gosei had a long resting period since Zordon had to put him there before his.... well you know.

By Samurai I mean Samurai, not Super Samurai

Now for the action portion that was mostly Goseiger footage when it got to the suit action, but we had a good out of suit fight. Now somethings I didn't like was the CGI soccer ball, but mostly things were good. I did like seeing the team use what they got on their hands for battle with Emma using her camera to blind her foes with a flash. Now how does that work with when they go into Megaforce. Well it works well after thinking about it. With Noah a bowgun seems to be a good weapon since he has good intelligence and will make accurate shots. Troy is probably the best with this transition since Alata his counterpart was the most skilled of the original five and if I'm correct he did use a real style for his swordplay. The other three then keep their attitude the same with some good dubbing. There were some odd noises that didn't need to be in there, but things matched up nicely as like Samurai it does good the transition of stock footage and the American footage. All I wonder is how some of the cards work out since you can see their real names at times, but I guess I have to see what the American toy line looks like first before I go to that criticism.

Says Megaforce and you can clearly see Gosei in the background, ugh.

Overall for the first episode this does show a lot of good potential for this series. What I am not happy with is very little with just some hiccups cause of the stock footage. The acting does need to improve, but it's not terrible. There are very good callbacks though as I can't wait for more of those moments. I will give this episode a C+ it's slightly above average thanks to the nice amount of references and actually working around the Sentai footage and not just following it. There isn't a lot I hate about this first episode, but it needs to improve a little more to get into those "A" or "B" rankings.