Series Review- Tensou Sentai Goseiger

Warning: This review probably contains spoilers!

Also it's fairly long :)

Alright this is my first review of a series as a whole, so bear with me as I'm not sure just how I want to format these yet.  I've been trying to finish Goseiger for a while now, and I'll get into why on a bit, but it probably took about a year or so to actually finish watching the while series(and movies).  Now, Goseiger is to what most sentai fans call one of the worst sentai series ever, but after finishing the series I can say with pride that it was actually fairly good.

Story

I guess now would be the best time to talk about the story.  The whole concept of this series was that these 5 Gosei Angels in training are trapped on Earth after the Tower of Heaven(the bridge between our world and theirs) is destroyed by the Warstar aliens.  So basically, they have to defeat the Warstar and try to find a way to get back to the Gosei World.  Throughout the series, despite its hardships, I always loved this concept of the angels who come down when the Earth needs to be protected being trapped here. But, some of the things they did along the way annoyed me a bit. These 5 angels: Alata and Eri from the Skick(Air) Tribe, Agri and Moune from the Landick Tribe, and Hyde from the Seaick Tribe.  Why only one from the Seaick Tribe you ask? Spoilers, cause Magis, Hyde's partner, died.  So after the TOH is destroyed, they all meet each other, and befriend this kid named Nozomu. (Btw, fuck Nozomu)  Anyway, Nozomu decides to let them stay with him and his astromoner dad while they are stuck on Earth.

• Warstar Arc
• The Warstar aliens are the monsters for the first like 12 episodes or so.  So the main baddy Mons Drake, Dereputa, and Susei no Buredoran are the leaders of the Warstar and they attack Earth and what not in the generic kill all human villain style.   It ends fairly quickly with the Goseigers blowing up the ship This was undoubtedly the hardest arc to get through, not because of the villains themselves, but because of the god-awful character development episode, specifically Eri.  Datas is cool though, he shows up during this arc and helps out the Goseigers in detecting monsters.

• Yuuma Beast Arc
• In the very next episode we see the debut of the Yuuna Beasts, Makuin and Kingugon.  Now their mission is to basically polute the whole world so all living things die.  Oh yeah, and they were sealed up by the original Gosei Angel a long time ago.  So after they appear, we see Buredoran, who apparently survived the giant ship explosion, and he has a new look and is calling himself Chupacabra no Buredoran and wants to help the Yuuma Beasts and he does.  During this arc, we see the debut of a couple cool things mainly GoseiKnight who is all kinds of badass. GoseiKnight is an ancient header who transforms into a knight and can fight on the ground and can become a zord.  We also see the debut of the Super Goseiger power.  Now throughout this arc we see Buredoran trying to betray Mukuin and Kingugon many times and eventually he dies.  Oh and Nozomu gets a boner for GoseiKnight for some reason.  So in the end of this arc Master Head gives the Goseigers the majority of his powers so they get GoseiUltimate and they defeat the Yuuma Beasts.  The end of this arc is where I feel the series really started to pick up the pace and catch my interest a little more.

• Mantorintis Arc
• After the long battle with the Yuuma Beasts, this new robot empire from anciet times shows up called the Mantorintis.  The Mantorintis is composed of Robogog and Metal Alice.  So they have all this data on the Goseigers and build robots best suited to defeat them, but alas cannot.  After a few episodes the Mantorintis build a robot out of Buredoran's corpse, but steal his memories.  They fight tthe Goseigers, and Alice gives Buredoran his memory back and he of course betrays Robogog and kills him. 

• Burajira Arc
• So now, it's revealed that Buredoran, who is the Gosei Angel, named Burajira, who originally sealed the Yuuma Beasts a long time ago.  After he sealed them, he time-traveled 10,000 years in the future to right before the Warstar attacked, and has been using the other three groups to gain power to destroy the world then rebuild it for himself. So he kidnapped GoseiKnight, and made him fight the Goseigers, while the Goseigers defeated 3 monsters that would become dark gosei power drills.  These drills are supposed to go into the Earth and destroy it, but of course the Goseigers stop him by defeating him, and then using some Gosei Global technique. They then become full-fledged Gosei Angels, but choose to stay on Earth.

So in the main story line department, Goseiger's was very good.  Despite the horrible filler episodes, the last 12 episodes or so really got me hooked into the story and the show in general. Now, onto design.

Design

• Suit
• My thoughts on the Goseiger suits is that they are okay, but I have nitpicks about them.
• Pros
• Side helmet designs are awesome.
• Tribe logo on the chest is very cool
• Each tribe logo lookis like a set of wings
• Cons
• The lips on the helmet are a bit too pronounced for my taste
• I don't really enjoy the white pants, but I guess black pants on angels would be a bit off putting
• GoseiKnight
• I love him and his suit and i have no complaints about him
• Gear
• Blaster was cool, the header addition was pretty cool.
• Tensouder was big in my opinion, but it made sense and worked well in the series
• The personal weapons were nice, but they could have gotten rid of the giant card things on them
• Leon Cellular was cool, but seemed a little bit unnecessary to me, but it looked cool
• Leon Laser was really cool and I hope we get a good toy release of it in America
• Gosei Tensword = stupid gumball machine stick
• Super Gosei Armor was alright, but it really didn't need the giant headers on the chests.
• Datas was fun.
• Zords
• Individually i liked all of the zords minus the mystic brothers
• Gosei Great, Gosei Ground, and Gosei Ultimate individually looked very cool
• The Great/Ultimate combination looked rushed and had no thought and wasn't very good
• All of the multiple combinations looked too clusterfucky to me with all of the headers and such

Characters

• Now i'm not going to go into each character in depth 'cause I'm lazy and that would take way too long.  Instead I'll provide some general thoughts.  Alata was too naive, laid back, and silly to be a red ranger.  I really just didn't like how he transitioned from being carefree to like attempting to be super serious.  Hyde was probably my favorite character, besides GoseiKnight, he was serious, but he always had a presence about him that he was serious about the job he was sent to do. Agri was a good character too, but at times he seemed too reckless and focused only on himself.  Moune was alright, but nothing really stood out to me about her character.  She was just a tomboy who just got angry a lot.  Eri was extremely annoying, and was just was too childish to even be a ranger, and I hate her so much.  Besides their crazy personalities, one of the things that bugged me about them was their physical features: i.e. Alata's teeth, Eri's ears, and Hyde's freakish height.
• Side character wise, we really only had Datas, Nozomu, and the Professor.  
• Datas, while very annoying at points, did his job, and I felt he added a lot to the show.
• Professor Amachi provided great comic relief, and I loved that he somehow got caught in like every villain's plan.
• Nozomu, as you may have noticed, is a completely unnecessary character and I think he should die.  Besides providing love to GoseiKnight and a home for the Goseigers, he was otherwise a completely useless character.   
• Now you may be asking: Hey, why didn't you write anything about GoseiKnight's character?
• Answer: cause he was awesome and I loved everything about him.

Villains

• Warstar
• Fairly useless, but I liked their design, and they provided a good introduction to Buredoran
• Yuuma Beasts
• Great villains, who actually had somewhat well thought-out plans.  They provided the show with a background to Buredoran that we didn't find out was important for 10 episode after they died.
• Mantorintis
• While I enjoyed most of the designs, the Mantorintis only proivided us with two things.  The provided some nice GoseiKnght development, and they brought Buredoran back into the story which I thought was fairly well done.

Conclusion

It's common knowledge that most sentai fans would tell you to skip Goseiger cause it's horrible.  I am also guilty of doing this at one point or another, but that was when i was only at episode 19 or so.  While it isn't the best sentai in the world, I would say to give it a shot if you haven't already.   Watching the beginning of the show is definitely extremely difficult to watch, the last 15 episodes or so are just captivating and really highlight what the series was all there for.  I don't love it, but(never thought I would say this) I really ended up liking it.