An early look at Kyoryuger

In hopes of keeping my blog from dying a cruel death (bad sarcasm), I have decided to talk about Kyoryuger. So far after two episodes it seems like it has some potential to be a good show. Kyoryu Red is quite a fun and potentially interesting character, depending on where his background leads. One element I really liked was how all the Kyoryuger's tried to keep their identities secret from each other at first. It was an interesting twist, especially given they were all at the restaurant together. The show also has kind of an Abaranger feel to it, with the shapes of the mecha, the villain's home base feels kind of like the Evolien Garden, a main villain to be revived later, and the tone and flavor of the show. The cast and the production crew is promising, with Riku Sanjo (Kamen Rider W) as the main writer and Koichi Sakamoto as the action director, not to mention Ayumi Kinoshita (DekaYellow) and Nao Nagasawa (Hurricane Blue) playing side characters. I also like the henshin sequence, with the little dance they do and the music playing. A little cheesy, but it's better than the previous 36 teams standing around and doing nothing while waiting to transform. :P

Despite all the good, there are some things in Kyoryuger that drag it down a little. The most obvious is the merchandise looking overly silly. They look too much like toys and not like actual weapons or fighting machines. With the two previous dinosaur themed sentai, Abaranger's CGI mecha wasn't perfect but still looked believable as giant robots you would use to fight giant monsters, and Zyuranger's mecha's looked exactly like what you would expect real giant dinosaur robots to look like. Furthermore, they had awesome designs. Here, the mechas and the guns look too simplistic and too much like toys. It looks like they ditched mecha costumes for the actual merchandise on the toys shelf.

Besides the mechas, the villains seem a little too silly so far, but they're not as annoying as other past villains like Walz Giles. I'm also not a fan of either the intro or outro theme songs. They're not horrid, just not my type of music.

Other than the underwhelming toy designs, so far so good for Kyoryuger. I hope the show can keep it up.