Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers (Game Gear)

 When it comes to Mighty Morphin Power Rangers videogames, I think most people's first thoughts will either be the single plane beat em ups on Mega Drive, or the awkwardly entitled Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers Fighting Edition on SNES, which is mainly remembered for the legacy it spawned in the form of Gundam Wing: Endless Duel and the Gundam Battle Assault series. But, as I found Dangerous Road while looking up a list of every game developed by SIMS, I noticed this on the list. I looked it up, saw some of that beautiful pixel art that the Game Gear has as its trademark, and needed to know more. So this isn't a super-obscure game, but it's one I think a lot of people will have automatically written off as shovelware and never tried out.

 

Interestingly, it's actually pretty similar in structure to the Gaoranger and Hurricanger games on Playstation: each stage has you picking a ranger, then playing through the action scenes of an episode. You fight some putties, the human-sized version of the weekly monster, and sometimes goldar will show up, too, and once you're done with that, everything gets bigger, and you control the Megazord against the giant version of the weekly monster (and again, Goldar sometimes shows up here). 

 

The game keeps things focused entirely on the first season of the TV show, and actually makes great use of the license. There are seven stages, the third and fourth of which are dedicated to that season's most iconic storyline: Green With Evil. Stage three has you fighting the brainwashed green ranger Tommy in human- and giant-sized forms, while the second has you fighting the Dragonzord, followed by a final battle to free Tommy's mind. Of course, the best thing about this is that for the final three stages, you can play as Tommy in the human-sized parts, and for the giant-sized parts, you get to pick between the Megazord, the vanilla Dragonzord, and best of all, Dragonzord battle mode. I think this might be the only game where that particular robot is playable, even!

 

The rangers all have their own movesets, and Tommy happens to have the most effective and cool-looking moves, and while the three mecha are pretty equal in power, they do still all play pretty differently to each other, and it's cool to have the choice of three really great-looking designs. The Game Gear, like the Game Boy, has more decent fighting games than you might think, especially the ports of Neo Geo games like Samurai Shodown and Fatal Fury Special. But those are ports, and even though SNK are renowned for the great storylines and characters in their games, they are still designed around the idea that they'll be played against human opponents. 

 

Power Rangers has the advantage of being made specifically for the Game Gear, and so it's also designed around being a single player story experience. So you have five (six later on) characters all with their own movesets, but no matter who you pick, you'll be playing through the same storyline with the same opponents. The game doesn't need to come up with reasons for allied characters to be fighting each other, plus considering this is a cartridge-based game for a handheld in 1994, being able to save space by re-using Goldar and evil Tommy as opponents was surely a big help to the developers.

 

This is a pretty great game! It's definitely better than the Mega Drive Power Rangers games, and I'd say it's an equal-but-different altenative to Fighting Edition, too. All of the MMPR seemed to get univerally slated on release, but if you ever feel the need to play an of-the-time Power Rangers game, you'll have a better time with this one than you'd have with most of the others. And if you finish it, the Game Gear's Power Rangers The Movie game is pretty much exactly the same as this one, but with monsters from both the movie and the second season of the TV show.