Seijuu Sentai Gingaman (1998)

Everything the show did well:
-Fine team and villains overall.
-Cool backdrop setting.
-Some monsters of the week are enjoyable.
-Really cool action both outside and inside the mechs.
-Pretty likeable side cast.
-Biznella is a pretty fun villain.

Everything the show did bad:
-Really generic show overall, besides the action and a handful of episodes the show really doesn't do anything that particularly interesting and mostly take a REALLY safe approach.
-The team, while it doesn't have anything particularly bad about them, they just barely have anything interesting going for them. The pink ranger Saya and the second Black Knight in particular are pretty mediocre. This is due to Saya having less focus episodes than the rest of the team and the second Black Knight's personality overlapping a lot with the red ranger Ryouma, not only that but he leaves the team up until the final arc in order to train, but his training pretty much barely mattered in the end which made his absence in the team feel pretty unnecessary.
-The main villains don't have much interesting in them, especially the main villain Zahab and one of the villain generals Battobas. Despite the attempts to give Bucrates and Iliess character they still manage to be uninteresting due to inherently being connected to the Nothing-character main antagonist. Only Biznella manages to be interesting and he goes out in a pretty disappointing way.
-The quest-like plot progression that show adopts makes the story feel really draggy at times and makes so that the show cannot make proper use of its villains.

Reasons for the show's strengths:
The staff was inspired by Kamen no Ninja Akakage and decided to make every general have their own army.
Main writer Yasuko Kobayashi was allowed to have more freedom in the final quarter which allowed the show to improve which allowed to the show to have better villains like Biznella and also allowed for the standout great episode 40.
The staff went to great lengths to have horse scenes in the show.
Producer Shigenori Takatera is good at coming up with interesting settings.

Reasons for the show's problems:
Main producer Shigenori Takatera wanted this season to be a more traditional return to form due to the every season since Jetman being outside of the norm (I honestly don't know how he thinks that considering that Megaranger, which he produced, is a fairly normal Sentai outside the High-School setting, and this was the 3rd Sentai to have said setting). This lead to him restricting most of the creative freedom of the show's main writer Yasuko Kobayashi. This lead to the show feeling really generic from start to finish and never really committing to any of its original concepts.

Overall:
The show takes things way too safe for my liking, it doesn't feel like one is missing much for not watching this show and if you've seen other Sentai you can predict most of what's to happen. e for my liking, if you have seen just about any tokusatsu show prior this one you can easily predict most of the story. I cannot really recommend this show when there are far better 'safe' Sentai shows out there like Dynaman, Gaoranger and specially Kiramager, these shows manage to be safe by following the usual sentai formula and common tropes while still doing interesting enough things to make them stand out from the rest, Gingaman on the other hand just doesn't have much going besides its action and a few side characters. It doesn't do anything offensive enough to be considered bad or even mediocre, but it's a painfully average show overall and I can only recommend it if you are a Super Sentai completionist or if you want to watch crossovers where Gingaman is prominent, its tribute in Gokaiger in particular is really great and won't make that much sense unless you've seen Gingaman prior.

Leia Mais