What's so bad about Go-Busters?

[FlashNeko]

"Ryuuji turned into a psycho when he overheated"
"The Go-busters had to kill their parents!"
"Hiromu contemplated suicide!"

Okay, so, the problem with trying to crunch a show down to "soundbites" like this is that you can make anything sound a lot darker than it actually is.

"The Hurricangers see every single classmate and all but one of the teachers they ever had brutally murdered in front of their eyes. The Goraijers are physically and emotionally abused by their insane father to become super ninjas bent on misplaced revenge."

"Crime will never stop and the best the DekaRangers can hope for is letting the space courts bring lethal judgement down on the ones who perform it after the fact."

"Sosuke spends the last day of his life in unimaginable agony that he has to power through and then passes away without getting a chance to say goodbye to his friends and partner."

"Precious are things that only SGS can allowed to use and must be sealed away from the world because normal people cannot be expected to use them properly."

"The sacrifice of the previous Sentai teams was completely meaningless as Zangyak survived to continue bringing misery and destruction to countless worlds. Now the only force left to oppose them won't do so because said force doesn't feel like it."

I could go on but I think you get the point here.

Really, I think the biggest problem with Go-Busters is that it made the mistake of intentionally trying to be more subtle and subdued than most other Sentai shows. Like, people claim Hiromu doesn't have a character that grows and changes over the course of the show but he does... it's just not as in your face about it as it would be in a more overt series.

Now, the problems with this is that you run the risk of coming off as "boring" to people expecting the more standard way of doing things as well as having it clash tonally when Bandai shoves you out of the writer's chair because they want to change everything to a more "standard" format.

Also, in retrospect, it's pretty obvious Enter was intended to be the real final villain from the start, with Messiah serving as the Javious to Enter's Dr. Hinelar.

 

[lazycoconut]

But then a lot of praise I've seen for Go-Busters also "crunches those elements down to soundbites" and people then gush about it being this awesome grimdark srs masterpiece. I remember a post somewhere (not here) with people talking about how Kobayashi had deliberately created a run of the mill show up to that point so she could stun the viewer with this absolutely brilliant ending where Enter absorbs everyone's data and Hiromu is suicidal and it's the end of the world oh noes and making it sound more like "The Day After Tomorrow" than a Sentai series

 

[Galaxian]

ending where Enter absorbs everyone's data and Hiromu is suicidal and it's the end of the world oh noes and making it sound more like "The Day After Tomorrow" than a Sentai series

I didn't managed to stick with GoBusters until the end (that godawful crossover with the new Gavan completely destroyed my, already waning, interest in the series) so reading that from the outside looking in makes me thing of Evangelion :laugh:

 

[FlashNeko]

Eh, there is a sub-section of any fandom that will try to grasp at straws as any proof that the things they watch are SERIOUS FOR ADULTS so you can't really judge a show by those merits either.

And really, given Kobayashi's past experience with Sentai, while I'm sure she would have done more to drive up the drama, since that seems to be what she likes writing about, I somehow doubt she would have gone grimdark with the ending. Even TimeRanger, which you could probably more successfully argue got pretty damn dark at times, still ended on a hopeful note.

If anything, we might have actually gotten more out of some of the dropped plot threads like Yoko potentially being Masato's daughter (and making her and J "siblings", hence why they end up playing off each other a lot) and also letting Masato die earlier in the show so that the cast could actually... like, react to it and grow from it instead of it just sort of happening at the very end.

 

[Black Fang]

(that godawful crossover with the new Gavan completely destroyed my, already waning, interest in the series)

I was just about to comment about this, having just finished it. Is it considered bad because the cast supposedly acts out of character? That's the only thing I can really think of, aside from whether having the Space Sheriff universe be the same as Go-Busters is a good idea, or whether this two-parter is even in continuity (Which it'd have to be since Enter returns. In that case it'd be like OOO's 1000th episode debacle).

But overall it felt like the now-typical, uninspired Sentai VS movie. Not great, but nothing particularly atrocious about it. Or were people expecting something bigger? The aforementioned 1000th KR episode irritated me much more.

 

[Lynxara]

I'm only grateful to this show for inviting Shinkawa Yua to guest star in an episode because I've been wanting to see her appear in Sentai, but even so, I hated her role as Pink Buster. she's actually a good actress, as in she can play both good and evil roles convincingly, but this role they offered her was really not letting her show any of said acting skills. I read that they invited her just because she's perfect at everything, except action. like WHAT?? :sly: they obviously wanted to up the ratings because she was one of the uprising young actresses in Japan last year, but obviously it didn't work.

Man, is that what was up with the Pink Buster episode? I thought it was a pretty good episode, but found the emphasis on the guest star just totally baffling in context. Why introduce a new character that late in the series if she's not a regular? Thanks for posting this, it puts that episode into some perspective.

 

[Jacky392000]

Man, is that what was up with the Pink Buster episode? I thought it was a pretty good episode, but found the emphasis on the guest star just totally baffling in context. Why introduce a new character that late in the series if she's not a regular? Thanks for posting this, it puts that episode into some perspective.

I read it on the Toei official site and the episode was a last minute idea or something. then they talked about how they needed an actress who was popular at that time and they thought "Oh hey, you know that girl who was in GTO 2012 and got a breakthrough? Let's use her! She's beautiful, she's fashionable, she can act, but there's one problem: she sucks at action scenes. So, like... let's let her do it for the experience!!"

yeah, it would've been cool if the Pink Buster episode was somewhere in the late 20's or early 30's and then she can come back again to steal Hiromu's stupid heart but it looks like she didn't bother anymore because we all know Hiromu is such a boring person to fall for. :laugh:

 

[Lynxara]

The episode definitely felt like a last minute idea, which in and of itself isn't bad. The show was clearly flying by the seat of its pants and making stuff up as it went along at that point. It just had a tendency to do stuff that was obviously killing time rather than trying to tell its story.

Yeah, if she had shown up earlier and been a recurring guest star (and could do action better), Pink Buster could've been a lot of fun. Hiromu is a fairly boring Red, but his chemistry with Pink was good, and a love interest could've spiced him up and made him a little more distinct.

 

[NateRiver]

If anything, we might have actually gotten more out of some of the dropped plot threads like Yoko potentially being Masato's daughter (and making her and J "siblings", hence why they end up playing off each other a lot).

INCEST!

Go-Busters is the most cereal and grim dark show in existence.

3edgy5me 2/10 NO SLEEP

 

[Dr Kain]

Reading this thread makes me feel really bad about seeing Go-Busters among my favorite shows… :c

Don't. I hate Go-Busters with a passion. Maybe even moreso than Goseiger now. However, never not want to like something just because other people don't. Sometimes you might realize it isn't what you thought it was later when you rewatch it (that has happened to me with things like Revenge of the Fallen and The Phantom Menace), but don't just hate it because other people tel you to. Sure, I might flame you for it. I might make snarky comments to you about it. But that does not mean you have to hate it.