REVIEW: Ninninger 14
Sentai is mad at me guys. I've been joking about them reading my reviews before but now I'm starting to wonder if they actually are. Normally with this show I can pick apart a few good things in an episode and say it came up even in the long run. Ohh boy not so this week, this week has soo much of what I hate in Sentai focused around my two least favorite characters in this season. We don't really get plot movement, we don't really get backstory on anyone, we don't even get any deeper into anything. Really though this episode is such a huge piece of filler I feel fat. In fact I'm going to fill this first paragraph with as much filler about how much filler was in this episode because this episode was filled with filler. I had a feeling things would hit a slump for a bit until the new arc picks up, but holy hell was this week painful.
No more jumping by the way, that shit was hard on us both am I right?
So our team is just chillin' at the dojo, Nagi and Fuuka are getting back from school, it's a nice quiet time. Until our dumb as fuck cowboy jumps out of a god damn snack tray wailing his guitar sword around trying to attack Taka. Normally a gold cowboy rampaging in your house would be a problem, but Taka happily fights back, and most of the rest of the team couldn't give a damn less. I think Star forgot Gramps has more than one grand-child because he only seems to attack Taka. The rest of the team really doesn't even more so they are really just that used to not having to do anything when the cowboy wants to go nuts. I should take this time to officially put my foot in my mouth. I said in a few reviews before this show was shaping up to not be a total Red Ranger lovefest. I was wrong, I was sooo wrong. Fuuka however is pretty pissed about the constant cowboy attacks and tries to put her foot down and yell at the two, but thankfully more important stuff happens so we don't have to hear her whine too long.
This weeks monster is really really really dumb. Masakage wants to mess around with the ninja some more since he still says that if they are out of the way getting darkness will be a snap. So he makes a monster that can mimic voices out of one of the last payphones ever to enact his brilliant plan, making the rest of the team give up their Nin Shuriken so they can't change. Ohh don't worry it's even dumber than it sounds trust me. The first step of the plan was to get the team out with a bunch of foot soldiers while the monster stays hidden to get all their voices, and when they fought and beat them the monster slipped away unseen. During this rest, Fuuka accidentally hits Kinji in the face, and the two have a heart to heart. I'd say this was a nice moment, but it was pretty much the same ground we have gone over before. Kinji talks about how the Youkai killed his family, Fuuka talks about family sticking together, yadda yadda yadda. It is kind of funny that Kinji has to apologize for wrecking her house but that's it. I have heard people shipping them already, and fine I'm okay with that let the two worst characters shit up each others lives that works for me.
But here is where we see just how truly dumb as all hell our team truly is. See the second step of the monsters plan is to use his copied voice to trick Taka unto thinking Fuuka lost her shuriken, and to get it back he needs to get the other four and give them to some guy half way so she can get hers back. My more sharp minded readers might notice this plan is dumb as fuck, and all of my readers will know it works like a charm. I'm not shocked Taka fell for it, I'm shocked he got the rest of the team to go along with it, Nagi might not be the brightest but I would expect better from Yakumo and Kasumi. With that working well the monster tries to get Fuuka to give up her shuriken too, but runs into a problem with his lie and ends up giving his position to Fuuka who comes running with Kinji to see what's up.
The monster tries to cut his losses and get out of there before Fuuka gets there and ruins the plan, the other four get there first. Taka again sinks to even lower depths of dumbassery by forgetting that he just gave away not only his shuriken, but everyone elses too when he tries to transform. However I have to give this episode at least one point we actually get a pretty damn cool suit-less fight which is always a pleasure to see and it's done very well too. Finally Fuuka and Kinji hit the scene and quickly figure out they have been tricked. I like how the team comment on the two being so alike for both getting tricked like they didn't give up their shuriken too. So it's up to Star and White to take out the monster and at first Fuuka starts sucking ass like always while Star tries not to get killed by her in the process. Well she might well have sucked like always but this time she makes good use of it and comes up from a hole she fell in to grab the sack of shuriken and hand them off to the rest of the team and it is so on
With the team back in action the monster has one more card up his sleeve, he slips away again and manages to sneak up on most of the team, distracting them with voices of their teammates and then blowing them away with a sonic blast. This almost works on everyone until he tries to distract Fuuka with his brothers voice calling for help, she knows as well as we do that Taka is too dumb to know when he needs help so she knocks the monster a new one. To combat the monsters trick they use code names and call each other by their colors in a call back to older Sentai when all the members called each other by color in battle. I'd say this didn't change anything because the monster still knows your color, but I enjoyed the callback so I'll let it go. The whole team does a big multi-part finisher with everyone playing a part and Taka and Fuuka doing the final blow to cement this sibling bond thing they had going again this week. This family stuff is really wearing thin, so it's time for some giant robots.
Well, not really because this doesn't last long at all. All the teams mech line up, but the monsters sonic waves mess with them and they can't move. This might be a problem, but apparently WanMaru can also use sonic waves to not only cancel out the monsters, but break his phone all together making him unable to fight. So no real danger. Right after then they combine, finish, make explosions happen, that's it. These mech fights have been pretty lacking latly, one two monsters dead. At the dojo Taka is doing some late night training because what better does the Red one have to do besides fight, train, eat, and sleep? This time though Fuuka comes in and decided that she wants to train too, if she is gonna nag everyone every episode she might as well try to pull her weight a bit. This might have been nice if I wasn't so burned out on family stuff, so all I can think about is if anyone on this show has heard of a god damn candle.
This episode was just dumb, I really can't put it in more words than that because I don't feel I should put more effort into my review then they did the episode I'm reviewing. This was obvious filler to save some money in the budget to either save for future expense or cover past ones and it is glarengly obvious. All this episode really did was make me take back a lot of things I had been saying about the series from the show not being too Red centric, to family not coming up as much. I suppose I should be shocked, this is Sentai after all and it's always been known from jumping around in quality often but I just didn't expect such a dip so suddenly. I really don't care about Fuuka so her focus was lost on me, and I can't even say Kinji got focus because we didn't really learn anything new. All in all things went no where this week, I'm expecting this to keep up for another week or two and I'm hoping something changes that up a bit because I can't take another pay phone monkey.
