Adventure Time: Pirates of the Enchiridion

One fine morning, our two intrepid heroes wake up to discover the whole of Ooo has been flooded! Is this judgment from a vengeful Glob? Is it revenge from BMO for the heroes missing breakfast? Is it just Ice King being an idiot? Turns out, it's that last one, spoilers except not really.

Adventure Time returns to the world of video games once again, this time as a turn-based Role-Playing Game. Finn and Jake travel the world of Ooo on their trusty boat, Jeff, searching for the Ice King's lost crown so they can make everything right!

Gameplay: 0/5
I like RPGs. I mean, I really like RPGs. The first website I ever made was a no-longer-existent AOL site dedicated entirely to RPGs. My favorite games of all time list includes a lot of RPGs like Tactics Ogre and SaGa Frontier. So know that there isn't any bias against RPGs when I say this: Pirates of the Enchiridion's gameplay is TERRIBLE.

Pirates is very basic. Game progression is a succession of very basic fetch quests. Combat is very basic attack, defend, use special attack (and before you get excited, know that "special attack" here just means "basic attack plus elemental damage"). I get that it's aimed at kids and not seasoned gaming veterans, but you know what? Pokémon is also aimed at kids and it's way deeper than this. Kids aren't that stupid... especially not if they're watching Adventure Time which actually gets pretty deep in the later seasons, to an extent that I'm forced to wonder if it's truly meant to be for kids at all.

But just being a crappy, generic RPG is not enough to earn a 0. The game is also extremely unoptimized and unstable. First, load times are insane. There are minute or more long load times whenever you change area, and pretty long load times before each battle too. Seriously, you made it ridiculously easy because you were scared you'd drive kids away, but you expect your average ten-year-old to keep their interest up through a three minute loading screen? What is wrong with you?


Get used to this screen, you'll be seeing it a lot.
The game also froze up on me once, and I encountered a glitch where, if you finish a battle with a party member in the "sleepy" status then the battle won't end and you'll have to reset. So yeah, that was fun.

Presentation: 3/5
It's Adventure Time. What do I need to say?

Okay, but seriously, the show isn't the worst. Animation is good, the colorers managed to stay in the lines... noodle arms and ball heads are silly but that's what Adventure Time is.

The game... it looks like someone tried to redraw the show with half the budget and one third the talent. It's not horrible but it has issues.

Story: 4/5
The story is the one saving grace of this game. They brought in actual writers and voice actors from the show, and the result is that it feels just like you're playing through an episode of the show.

That said, it's still not perfect. The biggest issue is that it feels a lot more mundane compared to the show. To be fair, this is not entirely the fault of the writers, but an inherent limitation of the medium. A video game has to follow hard set rules, so it isn't entirely fair to compare it to a cartoon that can just do whatever wacky thing it wants and is well known for doing so.

Of course, if you're not totally caught up on the show then none of this story will mean anything to you anyway... but then, why are you even playing the game and why should the writers pander to you?

KR Rating: [2] BAD

In summary, there really is something to like here. The story is great and legitimately fun, but that's assuming you can stand the boring gameplay, tedious loading screens, and bugs long enough to see it. AT fans definitely deserve a better game than this.

PROS:	CONS:
+ Uses writers and VAs from the show, captures the feel of the show perfectly.	- Generic fetch quests and boring, zero-strategy combat.
+ Legitimately hilarious. I especially love the terrible-on-purpose sea shanties.	- Load times so long even Ice King would die of old age before they finish.
+ Still a better pirate game than Sea of Thieves.	- Freezes so much I think Ice King wrote the code too.

Television Review: Power Rangers Lost Galaxy

Super Sentai Equivalent: Seijuu Sentai Gingaman (Star Beast Squad Ginga Man, named for the Ginga Forest where the characters live)

Following Zordon's sacrifice at the end of In Space all monsters have finally been wiped out from the galaxy. At last, humanity no longer needs to fear destruction at the hands of space demons and so turns their attention fully to space exploration with the first colony ship, Terra Venture. Meanwhile in a distant galaxy where monsters still live, the evil Scorpius and his minion Furio invade planet Mirinoi hoping to gain the ultimate power of the magical Quasar Sabers. Shenanigans ensue and a squad of young soldiers from Terra Venture's defense force find themselves transported to Mirinoi where they draw out the Quasar Sabers and become a new generation of Power Rangers!

Lost Galaxy was the first series of Power Rangers to not directly continue the story from a previous season, though there are still a lot of carryover elements from In Space. The Astro Megaship returns along with Deca and Alpha 6, and there are memorable reappearances from the evil Psycho Rangers and a now-good Astronema.

Lost Galaxy also did manage to keep up some of the things that made In Space so good. Notably, it kept the idea of having complex villains each with their own unique motivations and agendas. It also gave us some of the best villains up to its point. There's Trakeena, the spoiled daddy's girl who tries to fill her villainous father's shoes after his destruction, noble demon Villamax whose only goal was to serve the person he saw as the universe's rightful ruler, all the way to the other end of the moral spectrum with sleazy traitor Deviot who played every side for his own ends.

The Rangers themselves are fairly competently written too, though not quite as well as the villains. Quite often one of them (usually Maya, the Yellow Ranger and an alien girl from Mirinoi where apparently manners don't exist) would do something stupid for no reason except to allow the audience to learn a moral lesson. This lesson was usually some variation of "don't be a stupid jerk like this stupid jerk."

It's also worth mentioning that Lost Galaxy was the most expensive Power Rangers series ever made and it definitely shows. The space battles between the various factions in the show are fairly well made as far as late 90's CGI goes. Honestly, this show wanted to be Star Trek so bad it hurts. I swear the theme that plays over shots of the Terra Venture colony ship is only a few notes off from a lawsuit.

Also, for a series called Lost Galaxy, they only actually spent 7 episodes out of 45 in the titular lost galaxy, and then the total fallout from that event ends up being... nothing. Okay, it did finally convince Trakeena that Deviot wasn't on her side, but that's about it and she was already suspecting anyway. Honestly, the entire lost galaxy... "thing" is a perfect example of the indecisive writing this show sometimes suffered from, and why it can't get that full five out of five.

KR Rating: [4] GOOD

PROS:	CONS:
+ Some of the best villains in the franchise.	- The rangers aren't as well written as the villains.
+ Solid action, pretty good quality effects.	- Sometimes major plot points just go nowhere.

8 Rules To Follow For Character Creation or Customization in Video Games

As I mentioned in last week's post, I have a thing for character customization in games. It's what attracted me to a lot of my favorite game series and I'm willing to forgive almost any number of flaws in a game as long as the game does it well. Done right, it allows you to more deeply immerse yourself into the game's world and can add entirely new levels of replayability. Tactics Ogre remains one of my favorite games for just this reason, as I basically played it like a Lego set, making my own characters, giving them all backstories, and playing out battles between them in Training mode.

That said, don't think that character creation is a "get out of jail free" card for any game. In fact, it can easily become the one thing I hate about a game if it's done poorly. Following are the rules I would like for every game moving forward to follow with regards to character creation and/or customization.

8. Give me options.
Don't get me wrong. Being an artist myself, I totally get that making tons of alternate designs for a character is tough, and can take a lot of time and resources that could be better spent on other aspects of the game. That's the reason why this one is so low on the list.

That said, it is still important that you give me options. This is especially true if you're making the sequel to a game that had way more options than your current game does. You hear me, Soul Calibur 6?

7. If you're going to give me alternate outfits, make them look different.
I'd like to give special mention here to the first Dissidia, where most of the characters had terrible palette swap outfits that were 2 shades off from their default.

That's an extreme example, but this is a far more widespread affliction than that. Other offenders include The Lord of the Rings: The Third Age, or for that matter the far more recent The Lord of the Rings: Shadow of War, where most of the armors you can find look pretty much the same except with a line going in a different direction, or a spike here or there. Boring. If you're going to half-ass it this much, you'd might as well just make palette swaps. Speaking of...

6. If you're only giving palette swaps, then give me LOTS of them!
Palette swap costumes aren't ideal, but I can still work with them, and I have before. I spent almost all of Dynasty Warriors: Strikeforce with Lu Xun palette swapped to white, role-playing him as a paladin with fire powers.

So my request is, if you're going to just do palette swaps, give me LOTS of them! Palette swapping is super easy so there's no excuse to only give me one color change that's just two steps off from the original, and no I'm not going to let it go, Dissidia.

Or hey, better yet, give me a color slider so I can make my own palette swaps.

5. Give me control.
Obviously, the point of character customization in a video game is to be able to put a part of yourself into whatever game you're playing, whether it be role-playing as an imaginary character, or creating an idealized fantasy version of yourself. So, even more obviously, I need to have control over who and what my character is.

This one is a fairly rare offense, but it does happen. Examples include Final Fantasy Tactics A2 not giving you the option to name your characters, or Fable forcibly covering you in scars because it's impossible to not take damage.

4. Don't make my created characters worse than the defaults.
Speaking of Final Fantasy Tactics, Tactics RPGs - especially those made by Ivalice Alliance and the former Quest Corporation - are a major offender on this front. Apparently nobody told them that the point of character creation is supposed to be to allow me to make my own characters. Instead they seem to be under the impression that character creation is just about recruiting expendable idiots to fill out my party until I figure out how to recruit the special people.

I'm not playing Tactics Ogre because I think Denam and Catiua are cool. I'm never going to use your characters, and giving them bonus stat points and access to exclusive classes is just an insult.

Actually, this one happens a lot more often than you'd think, and affects more than just character creation. Other examples include Galactic Civilizations II's spaceship builder, where the preset ships all come with more stuff on them than their chassis' weight limits should actually allow, meaning ship building is pointless because the presets (which, incidentally, are also the only thing the AI uses) are always better.

3. Make me feel like I'm a part of things.
Here's a surefire way to make me hate your game with a passion: let me create my own character, send me through hours of missions, then at the end reward me with a team photo that includes every character in the game except for mine. Go screw yourself, Syphon Filter: Omega Strain.

And no, I get that it would have been difficult to somehow put your character into a prerendered image... so maybe just, you know, don't paint yourself into that corner to begin with? If you can't make it work then just don't do it.

2. If it's character creation, don't tell me who I am.
A lot of people use the terms "character creation" and "character customization" pretty much interchangeably, so I feel I should define what I mean first.

Character customization is more like what you see in a game like Mass Effect. The main character of Mass Effect is Commander Shepherd. Period. You can decide whether Shepherd is a male or female, some facial features, abilities, armor, which is his or her favorite store on the Citadel... but it's still Commander Shepherd.

This is opposed to character creation, which allows you to actually make your own character who you play however you want.

It is very important that, if you are going to give me actual, legit character creation, DO NOT TRY TO TELL ME WHO MY CHARACTER IS. This is why Fallout 3 was great, while Fallout 4 was - at least from a story perspective - hot, steaming garbage. Fallout 3 didn't give me absolute freedom, no. I was from a vault, dad ran away and left me, yada yada, but beyond that I could play my character as whoever and whatever I wanted. Fallout 4 on the other hand could not stop bashing me over the head with its own idea of who it wanted my character to be. You are middle-aged, you have a child, your spouse is Nate and/or Nora. DO NOT QUESTION THE GAME.

And no, I get that they need to give you at least some amount of backstory just to connect you to the game, but it should be as minimal as possible. "You're a new adventurer looking to explore the labyrinth." "You recently left the vault, have fun." That's fine. Not only is it all you need, it's all you should WANT. If you want a singular, deeply nuanced character, then stop playing games with character creation.

1. Let me make an attractive male character.
I can tolerate a game pretending that picking a name and a hair color is character creation. I can play a game for a hundred hours knowing that my created character will always have only 90% stats compared to whatever Cloud Strife wannabe the dev wants me to use. I can even get into a game that tells me the young prodigy inventor I wanted to make is instead a middle-aged retired soldier with a wife and kid.

However, if there is one thing I can not abide, one thing that will make me hate your game with all the burning fury of a neutron star... it is being offered my choices of character, and seeing that my options are "Roid Mutant", "Scar Face", "Toxic Avenger", and "Girl" aka the only character whose face you can look at without dry heaving.

This is an epidemic that plagues almost all of the gaming industry outside of Japan. Seriously, what's up, game devs? Are y'all scared of being called gay or something? KNOCK IT OFF.

Operation Abyss: New Tokyo Legacy (Video Game Review)

In the near future of Tokyo hazard cases are on the rise and only an elite team of teenagers with attitude can put a stop to it. But since the Power Rangers are busy in Angel Grove, we'll instead join up with Alice Mifune, teenage commander of the Xth (pronounced "zith") Squad - an elite paramilitary force of magitek-enabled high school kids - to save the day!

I'll start with the game's good side. One thing you may know about me is that I love character customization. Give me character customization - or even better, character creation - and I can overlook almost any number of flaws in your game. It's what attracted me to City of Heroes, Soul Calibur, Monster Hunter... hell, it's what convinced me to stick with Etrian Odyssey until I learned to love that series on its own merits, and Etrian Odyssey's character creation isn't even that good.

This is where Operation Abyss puts its best foot forward and is probably the game's one saving grace. There are two options to choose from. The first is Basic mode which gives you a selection of a dozen or so fairly cool character portraits to choose from. Basic mode sucks. The second, much better mode is Classic, which is just a straight up paper doll where you can pick all your own features, and equipment actually changes your appearance in game. Unfortunately this does mean you can end up looking like a colorblind clown if you pick all your equipment based only on its stats, but Abyss also gives you an easy way around that, with the ability to reskin any piece of equipment by converting it into source code.

All of that said, if you don't happen to share the same obsession with character creation that I do, then this game really won't have a whole lot for you.

Operation Abyss is actually a remake of Experience Inc's first two games ever - Generation Xth: Code Hazard, and Generation Xth: Code Breaker - and it definitely shows. The game is easily their least polished work.

The writing is passable. It's as goofy as you probably expect from a Dungeon RPG with some bizarre typos, but it's generally competent with likeable characters and plot twists you'll only see coming from most of one mile away.

Gameplay is also passable, in that it more or less works. Combat is boring with very few interesting strategic avenues to explore. The equipment developing system is interesting but also poorly explained. There's no real point to changing classes (or rather, Blood Codes) since no skills or spells carry over... in fact, you're kind of punished for changing class since you have to restart at level 1 whenever you do and you don't get to re-allocate your stats, meaning that if you specced for a Wizard then decided you wanted to be a Conjurer... well, yeah, you're gonna suck.

The game is also pretty short. This is alleviated somewhat by it being the first two games put together. If I had played the original Generation Xth and it was over as fast as the first half of this game, I'd have been pissed.

The environments are where they really dropped the ball. Even by DRPG standards these envrionments are lame with the vast majority of them all being basically the same design with the colors changed. Suffice to say, if "ruined skyscraper", "dank sewer", "haunted hospital", and "refugee shanty town" sound like very aesthetically diverse locales to you... then you clearly did not do the graphic design for this game. (Also there might be something wrong with you.)

As much fun as I did have with this game, I just can not honestly reccomend it. If you want to check out this developer, one of their later games will be a much better Experience. (Pun definitely intended.) I personally suggest trying Stranger of Sword City instead.

KR Rating: [2] BAD

The Top 5 Lamest Bits From Super Smash Stadium

I've talked very briefly before about Super Smash Stadium, hands down the best massive Super Smash Bros fanfiction out there.

Okay, so I may be a bit biased since I was a part of it, but it was the first of its kind and the biggest, and while it was rather awkward early on, but I personally like to think that it eventually transcended the genre and became more than a mere fanfic but actually a great creation in its own right.

Even so, I will admit is that it was never perfect. Following are the five lowest points in Super Smash Stadium's history.

(I should note, however, that I will not be counting anything from after Metal Man took over the site, meaning nothing from Season X1 or X2. This is specifically about the site's original run. If I was going to include Metal's contributions, it would be as "absolutely everything involving Metal Man.")

5. Ash Ketchum
"But wait," I hear you say. "Ash Ketchum being in Super Smash Bros would be stupid, sure, but how is it one of the worst things ever?" Well, what if I told you that he didn't have any of his pokémon with him, not even Pikachu? What if I went on to tell you that he was a clone of SSB fighter Ness, who mastered all of Ness's psychic techniques after a single training session? And what if I also told you that, in order to differentiate his moves from Ness's he screamed the obnoxious pun "PokéThunder" instead of PK Thunder? And what if I now ask you to please put down the knife because murdering the author wouldn't be worth it?

Maybe a little explanation would help. Early on all SSS matches were created by having the characters fight in the actual Super Smash Bros game and writing down what happened, and so any original characters had to be clones of existing characters in order to facilitate that. This was also before Pokémon Trainer was an official character, so we couldn't just clone him.

Why make him a clone of Ness, specifically? Why not just let him be in the Stadium as a non-fighter, being the trainer for Pikachu? Why use that godawful PokéThunder pun? Only the original author - Lemmy Koopa - knows for sure.

The writers work in mysterious and often stupid ways.

4. Yoshelly
If anything about SSS spoke to the "teenage kid's fanfic" stereotype then Yoshelly, a superfluous pink Yoshi described in her first appearance as "the most famous Yoshi at Dinosaur High School", was that thing.

Yoshelly was born from a strange combination of feminism and misogyny. On the one hand, the stated reason for her creation as a character was a perceived lack of female characters in Super Smash Brothers. (This was in the time of the first game, when the only definite confirmed girl was Samus Aran, though we were also operating under the idea of Jigglypuff being a girl.)

But on the other hand her first appearance involved her being given away as a love slave to the winner of Match 8, so yeah.

Yoshelly never had much in the way of personality, power, or impact on the plot and, like most of the other characters on this list, she was thankfully done away with by Lord Reid during the Comic Match in season 3.

3. Kirbetty
Kirbetty, like Yoshelly, was supposedly created because of a perceived lack of female fighters, and like Yoshelly she was a poorly considered mistake who was thankfully ended in the season 3 Comic Match.

Also like Yoshelly, Kirbetty was introduced to act as an existing character's girlfriend, in this case Kirby's. What makes Kirbetty worse by far is that, unlike Yoshelly, Kirbetty actually replaced an existing character. The storyline already had a girlfriend for Kirby in Jigglypuff, and when Kirbetty joined it was as part of the "cat fight" that forced Jigglypuff to leave the Stadium until the very end of season 1.

2. The Rex Storyline
This was an attempt at an "interactive story" connecting the website with the message boards. The villain of the story, Rex (or as he was known on the boards "!REX Airship!") was going to appear on the message boards for a bit to mess with the fans, before getting defeated by all the heroes of the Stadium. I know, it sounds fun and it possibly could have been.

But then they let Lord Reid play the part of Rex.

While we all thank Reid for ridding the Stadium of Ash, Yoshelly, and Kirbetty, that doesn't change the fact that he was also very sadistic, selfish, and generally kind of an asshole. Rather than lighthearted riffing and playing with the fans, he tormented people, pretending that an insane hacker had taken over the site and was going to destroy it forever. This was especially bad considering all of this happened only a couple of months after a real hacker actually did take over the message boards.

The Rex storyline was by far the lowest point for SSS. A large chunk of the fanbase ran away from fear or stress, and even more left out of disgust after Rex's true identity was revealed. The only reason the Rex storyline isn't number 1 is because, while it was highly damaging to the fanbase, it wasn't so much for the site itself and a newcomer to the site now wouldn't even know very much had happened. The same can not be said for...

1. Ganna Legacy
Ganna Legacy was a story written by SSS's then-president, VGW. It was sort of a fanfic, in that it included a small handful of characters from Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars, but it was mostly it's own thing. I know you're probably asking, "so what's the problem?" The guy is allowed to write more than one thing. Unfortunately, VGW disagreed with the previous sentence.

Even though the stories had dick all to do with each other, VGW decided that they must be one, and that SSS was the one that was going to have to change to accomodate the new material. Ganna Legacy became required reading to understand the plot of season 2, which was really bad for two reasons.

First, Ganna Legacy sucked. It was boring and mostly existed as an ego wank for VGW's Marty Stu self-insert character, Dark Horse.

Second, the story was never actually finished and then what little there was got lost in a server crash, officially rendering the entirety of season 2 incomprehensible.

But wait, Ganna's legacy of shame doesn't end there! When VGW stepped down at the end of season 2, he was replaced by Zeratul, who proceeded to overreact to the whole debacle on a level somewhere between "anime villain" and "political pundit." Reasoning that season 2's problems lay with the fact that it had a story (as opposed to this particular story simply being bad and poorly executed) Zer banned the entire concept of story from the site for season 3. He immediately terminated any and all attempts at ongoing story arcs, character development, and even running gags. In the end, the rest of us were left to come up with a story for the season 3 finale at the last minute, after Zer dropped off the edge of the Earth.

So basically, Ganna Legacy was responsible for ruining two entire seasons of the site. That's why it remains the lamest part of the entire Stadium.

Video Game Review: Dungeons of Dredmor

Let me make this clear - I like rogue-likes. I do. One of my friends actually bought this game for me for Christmas two years ago, saying that it was similar to one of my favorite games - Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. At that time I played this game and wrote a negative review for it on Steam which relied heavily on comparisons between the two games.

That was unfair, I admit. I should judge the game on its own merits, not on how well it holds up to my own favorite game. I also bought both the DLC for the game – “Realm of the Diggle Gods” and “Conquest of the Wizardlands.” So, we'll see if all of this improves my experience at all.

Gameplay
The game works. I can say that for it. It runs competently and seems to be more or less free of bugs. It did crash on me once, and actually gave me an achievement for it - “Suddenly the Dungeon Collapses.” So that was.... cute.

Sadly, that's about the only good thing I can say here. The game is just boring to me. I'm sorry to all the people who love this game, but it is. At no point while playing did I ever find myself really looking forward to what was going to come next.

I never looked forward to the next floor, because I knew it would be exactly the same as the floor I was on, but with different wall and floor graphics.

I never looked forward to seeing a new enemy. There were occasional clever designs, but they all work basically the same and are super wimpy. At no point was I ever forced to switch up my tactics at all.

I never looked forward to finding some fancy artifact weapon because they're never interesting. In most rogue-likes finding a good artifact can make or break your entire run, but here? At most it's just going to be the same as a normal weapon of its type but maybe with +1 or +2 to some stat that I never use. Yawn.

I also never looked forward to my next skill, because the game has you choose all of your skills when you make your character and you can never deviate, so there's no room for experimentation whatsoever. To be fair, I guess that puts the game on par with most other RPGs... but it's still disappointing.

Also, the levels are just... tediously long and boring. There is a “No Time To Grind” option that shrinks levels in size while giving boosted experience, but it doesn't increase loot, and so is therefore absolutely worthless.

In all: it works, but Is just so boring. 3/5.

Presentation
Well, our main character isn't an “@” symbol, so that already puts it ahead of most rogue-likes.

Okay, but seriously, I have no real complaints about graphics or sound. Because the view isn't exactly top down, enemies, items, and traps can sometimes be obscured from view by parts of the environment... however, when this happens, the game politely points them out in various ways – sparkle effect on items, a pointy arrow for enemies, and a red outline for traps. So that's nice. It doesn't point out stuff hidden behind doors or dungeon objects, though.

I would also like it if my equipped armor actually changed my character's appearance, but it's not like the game has to do that. It would just be a nice bonus if it did.

I'll give presentation a 4/5.

Writing
Finally, the last part. I usually put this as “story” but... you know, it's a rogue-like.

I'll be brutally honest. I don't like Dredmor's writing style. In my original review I described the writing as “edgy” but I don't think that's really the right word for it. The writing is just immature. I can't even call it parody. It's just random jokes that mean nothing.

This game was clearly written by the type of person who thinks “irreverent” is a compliment, and who believes knowing the word “sesquipedalian” makes you smart. And if you don't know what I meant by that last bit... then you're probably the type of person I'm talking about. I don't guess that really makes it bad, though. If you like Family Guy and Robot Chicken, you follow Cracked, and you think the Clock Crew rules the Portal... then you'll probably love this game's sense of humor.

But if you'll excuse me, I need to pop my monocle back in, and go think about how much I hate you while enjoying my Beaujolais and camembert, and partaking of more intellectual entertainments... like anime. Anime is great. 2/5.

KR Rating: 3/5 MEDIOCRE

In all, I give it basically the same score I gave it before. Owning the DLC didn't really change my impression that much. There's some fairly interesting additions in them, but nothing that makes the game any less boring to me. Even Conquest of the Wizardlands, which adds a huge number of randomly generated "wizard tower" mini-dungeons, is just... they're all the same. Yawn. At the end of the day, even with the DLC, it's still Dungeons of Dredmor.

And now that that's all said and done... yeah, I just can't end this without bringing up Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup again. It's an excellent game and a perfect example of a rogue-like done right. In that game, I actually did look forward to reaching new regions because they had unique properties and interesting enemies. I also looked forward to finding new artifact items because they actually meant something. Finding the right artifact weapon or armor could make or break your entire run, unlike this game where randarts just mean +1 to some stat I don't care about and I'll probably just sacrifice them to my Horadric Lutefisk Cube... speaking of immature writing.

I just can't recommend this game to anyone when I already know there's another game that's just like it only better in every way AND ALSO FREE already out there. I can't.

Television Review: Power Rangers In Space (Spoiler Warning)

Super Sentai Equivalent: Denji Sentai Megaranger (Electromagnetic Squad Mega Ranger)

In Space follows directly after Turbo's downer ending. (Oh yeah, spoiler alert.) Divatox has finally succeeded in destroying the Command Center. Worse, the Rangers discover that Zordon has been captured following a devastating invasion of his home planet by the evil Dark Specter and his daughter Astronema. The Rangers, drained of their powers, make a desperate trip into space to search for Zordon... along the way they encounter the Astro Megaship and its pilot, Andros, the last surviving Space Ranger. Andros reluctantly agrees to take the team on as his new Space Rangers and joins them in the search for their lost mentor and to defeat Dark Specter and Astronema and save the universe.

Let's get this out of the way right now - In Space is good. In fact, I can say with confidence that In Space is the first truly good series of Power Rangers, which I must admit really surprised me. Mostly it was the title that threw me - usually adding "in space" to the title is what a studio does when they've just completely run out of ideas. But it was good, even by regular "not Power Rangers" TV show standards.

The villains weren't just mindlessly evil space demons, but actually had real motivations and characterizations. Ecliptor and Astronema both managed to be truly compelling and honestly sympathetic.

The heroes were pretty well written too, with actual flaws and a lot of really good interactions with each other. Alpha 6 also got a new, less obnoxious voice, and Dimitria went away forever. Win-win!

The one real flaw I find with this series, which is sort of a minor flaw in the grand scheme of it all, is that because of the increased focus on the Rangers' interactions with one another the actual monster battles sometimes seem to come completely out of nowhere. There was more than one time I found myself suddenly asking, "wait, why is there a giant monster all of a sudden?"

Well, I suppose there is one other issue... the show does seem to run out of steam a bit toward the end, finishing off with a massive deus ex machina ending as - SPOILER ALERT FOR A TWENTY YEAR OLD KIDS' SHOW - Zordon sacrifices himself to create a wave of magic that washes over the galaxy, either disintegrating or purifying all of the show's many villains and finally winning the war against evil (at least until the next series).

Still, all in all...

KR Rating: [5] GREAT