[NES/FamiCom] - Kyouryuu Sentai ZyuRanger - 40/50 - by C.R.V.

"Quick Alpha find me five teenagers with attitude..."

*Insert Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers theme music here...

Back in the later half of the 90's a group of five seemingly typical teenagers amazed & "inspired" kids as they transform into five colourful warriors fighting an array of weird creatures out to destroy the world. Not only this but it is mandatory that every episode has a battle between a Giant Super Robot & a jumbo-fied version of the monster the rangers fought & killed earlier

Yes, Power Rangers was & still is a global phenomenon that started out as an attempt to introduce something uniquely Japanese to a western world & though the original & the suceeding installments were obviously re worked to tailor fit western tastes like having the "real villain leader" of most of the original versions replaced by other lesser characters in the original (in the case when they "ruined" Dairangers & made lord Zed the head of the villains) or by totally non-existent villains in the originals (which later became the trend).

And what really strikes me as odd is when you watch Youtube videos of the original Japanese versions where you'll read silly Americans saying stuff like, "this ain't right, stupid Asian rip offs" Totally EPIC Fails as those rip offs they were referring to were infact the originals & the American Power Rangers were the knock off, ROFL!

But I digress, this is a review of a "Ranger" game, so on with it.

Game title: Kyouryuu Sentai ZyuRanger (For all intensive purposes, I shall rephrase that to "Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers")

Region released: Japan
Game System released on: The NES or to be exact the FamiCom
Publisher/Developers: Angel Studios
Date released: 11/06/92

Box art courtesy of GameFAQs:

Original Japanese title screen courtesy of GameFAQs:


Fan Translated Title screen:


*Before I continue with the review, yes you read that correctly, the game was recently fan translated hack modified to english. More on that later.

The low-down:

What is it?

The game is your typical side scrolling platformer that banks on the sucess of a children's TV show by licensing the shows characters & putting them in a "usually" not so good game.

Game Statistics
Content: 9/10

The game should have gotten a perfect ten, if the programmers only included the "mandatory" Megazord battles usually associated with the Super Sentai franchise, but aside from that, the game is pretty much thorough, in that every Ranger is present in this game which spans only five short but sweet levels. Even my personal favorite Green Ranger makes appearances in this game during the mandatory in between levels "mini game" selection intermissions.

Mini games!? What the hell...!?

The very unique & a bit "useless" part of this game are its mini Games

You can acess these either at the very start after you fire up the game on the main title menu, or in between levels, just before the game issues the password for the next level & yeah, about that. Being an early NES or FamiCom game this game doesn't have battery back ups of any kind so you rely on passwords to acess the suceeding levels in the game.

Bandora's Quiz Game



In this Mini game Bandora (known in the American Power Rangers as Rita Repulsa) will ask you, the player trivia questions regarding stuff about the show which by the way are about the original Japanese show, however these are so easy you'd be a total idiot to not know the answer. Most questions are for example,"From what species were the ZyuRangers descended from?" Obviously the answer is "Dinosaurs", duh!?

Barrier Block


Uh!? Souldn't we be fighting Giant monsters instead of playing table tennis?

Wow picture this:

Two Giant Robots playing pong ;D

Yep you & optionally a second player can duke it out in a game of pong ;D

Doki Doki Bomb



A game where you & an optional second player try to blow each other up literally with a ticking time bomb. Your goal, to NOT be the last one who has the bomb in his posession (including having the bomb in his field & not just merely holding onto it) when it explodes. Note that in this mini Game, if you're playing alone you take control of the Dragon Megazord, kinda cool eh?

Gameplay: 7/10

The main game is fairly simple really, you play five levels & in each level you only take control of one lone Ranger (pun not intended) as he or she embarks on a journey to beat one of Bandora's Commanders at the end of the level.

At the start of each level you have your "Generic" Ranger using his or her "generic" blaster weapon which is kinda weak to use against several monsters until you reach a half-way door that leads to a secret room where Belza (who was replaced by Zordon & Alpha in the American version) will hand you your Ranger's signature weapon, like Red Ranger's Sword which by far is much stronger than his/her toy gun.


Spider eye monster: Ha! I laugh at your puny gun!


Red Ranger: Is that so? Then how about this?

Along the journey you will see little orange icons all over the place seemingly un-important at first glance but collect ten of 'em & you get to summon your partner zord, which is an absolute let down as you only get a statistics summary page with all the zord's vital stats on it.


147 Feet!? Wow!

But you do get your life bar refiled to the max after you've summoned the zord so it isn't that bad actually

When you reach the end of the level you duke it out with a boss monster which is one of the four generals of Bandora with the final level having you up against Bandora herself. These boss fights aren't that tough as each boss has a definite attack pattern you can easily learn, but every damage they deal you takes like 4 or 5 life bar points per hit so the battles can get nasty.


Get down here! Or do you want me to stick it up your arse in mid-air?

Graphics 7/10

They're not very pretty yes, but I love the fact that they used large sprites for the characters in game, minus points on the not so vibrant use of character repaint job on the Rangers though.

Audio 7/10

Again not so shabby, but fine non the less, you will wish they used the more familiar American Power Rangers theme music in the game though.

Should you play this? 10/10

Yes! God damn it, go play this game! It's Power Rangers for Christ's sake, never mind the Japanese nuances it's still the same series we all loved.

The Scores

Content: 9/10
Gameplay: 7/10
Graphics: 7/10
Audio: 7/10
Value: 10/10
Final Verdict: 40/50

A brief word about the Fan Translation patch

Dank-Trans who did the fan translation modification hack for this game did a mighty fine work in sticking to the authenticity of the names he used in the translation. Unlike what happened with the TV show, he used the original character, weapon & vehicle names used in the original Japanese show. This is okay, unless you're an American Power Rangers purist & think that he should have used the American names instead.

Technically speaking though the translation is pretty spot on, no Engrish or awkward grammar here & no sprite mess ups too.

You can play the game without the patch, but you might have problems when it comes to the quiz mini game.

The Fan Translation patch can be found here:

http://www.romhacking.net/trans/1395/

Enjoy!

 

Great review.

I love your reviews, as most of the reviews I've read of yours have been more classic games, which I just love.

 

No one seems to review these older games as much as the newer ones so I decided to focus on them, plus to be honest I really love these older games than these newer ones as well.

 

Thats just me but too many and big SS's.

GREAT REVÄ°EW THOUGH!

(damn capslock.)

 

Great review ^^,

*Off Topic*

Where i can download that emulador for my computer?

 

the EMULATOR can be found at many sites...


google "nes emulator"...


I'd get "rocknes" it did me good.

 

Thanks to telling me the emulator name ^^

 

@asdzxc123789: Those Screenshots, if that's what SS means (please write out your words fully ) were big because I play on emulators on such a big window size because of my vision impairment as I find it hard to play on smaller screen sizes.

@ADGS231: The NES Emulator I use is Nestopia, which is THE BEST NES Emulator ever, however it's so good that newer versions of it have been programmed to mimmick the NES Console "perfectly" that it can no longer run games that have been hard patched with hacks such as this Fan Translation. But have no fear, I have a link to the one I use which is Nestopia 1.37 you can get here.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/nestopia/files/

Just expand the colapsable menus for Nestopia 1.37 & download the Nestopia137bin.zip file.

Don't get 1.38 to 1.4, those versions no longer read hard patched NES ROMs.