A story element in JRPGs and similar mediums that I can admit to enjoying is when a villainess becomes a heroine and I’ve often seen many people ask for more of this type of dynamic. One example that comes to mind are games such as Luminous Arc 2 and Stella Glow where the prominent antagonistic figure, a witch, ends up joining the party and becoming open to romance. As soon as I read the premise for this series during the season’s start, I was immediately interested in checking this one out.
And it wasn’t too bad, but it definitely wasn’t amazing either.
The premise is simple, the Red frontman of a super sentai group known as Gelato 5 falls in love with one of the lieutenants of the evil organization known as Gekko and they have to try and keep their relationship a secret to their own teammates while also steering conflicts between the two organizations to have them encounter each other more often as an excuse to be together more. On the surface, the premise really sells itself to be a novel concept but I felt that the series quickly decided to focus on other things.
Naturally, just repeating the same joke about pretending to fight when there are witnesses would get boring so the series tries to incorporate some other elements of both organizations to spice things up. This is fine but one of the biggest irks to me in the series was that the characters were all mostly in highschool and I felt this was a completely unnecessary point to be established. While I’m aware of the teenage sentai team was one of the more established ones, I really think they could have done away with that point in the setting and it would barely change anything, having the characters be young adults just makes more sense to me.
What occurs beyond hiding their relationship is that we get to learn about the other members of the team. The Sentai Squad have the four other members as well as their Dr. Light equivalent who invents all their stuff. The enemy side surprisingly gets more development than the good guy squad because they simply have more members to utilize between their animal-fused members and the other group of girls that make up the team. I was personally expecting more development from the sentai squad, only two of them really get any actual screentime while the other two just act as the stereotypes they are, so far at least.
In between the utter disappointment DAL was and how much work was put into Kaguya-sama, this show falls squarely in the middle where the premise alone promised some funny situations and I think there’s still plenty of room to improve but I don’t think too many things they can pull off will actually live up to said premise when the entire series is based around it. There’s only so much you can do to keep things secret.
But hey, that opening with Yukarin and Ooishi was really catchy.
Lair of the Idle 