Power Rangers: Battle For the Grid Sucks
I know what you’re thinking, why am I reviewing a game that’s almost 2 years old already? Well, when the game first came out there wasn’t much in the way of playable characters and I wanted to wait for some DLCs to flesh the game out some more. The other thing was the price, I had a feeling that Power Rangers: Battle for the Grid was overpriced, the game is priced for about $50 for the “collectors digital edition” (whatever the fuck that means). That price put it on par with other fighting games such as Street Fighter V and Mortal Kombat 11, however, looking at the graphics and gameplay for PR: BFTG the game looks like it would be more at home on a mobile device than a next-gen gaming console.
So I held off and waited for the game to (finally) go on sale, and it literally took over a year for the developers to slash the price. Compare that to games from major studios (Fallout 76, Red Dead Redemption 2, etc) were they were having sales on these massive titles a few months after their release. Which should probably tell you a lot about BFTG: It probably wasn’t making bank and so it took over a year for the developers to reduce the price. What you have is an overpriced fighting game that lacks the quality of similar games in the same genre. I suspect that most of the huge price tag has to do with the licensing. Which, is another huge disappointment, since as a Power Rangers game, Battle for the Grid fails at even the most basic tenants of the franchise.
This game is also the first game developed since Hasbro bought the franchise from Saban. In the past, most games (as well as the action figures) were made by Bandai, the toy company/game developer that also made toys and games for the Super Sentai franchise in Japan. Since Bandai is a rival toy company, Hasbro went with developer nWay, the same company that made the Power Rangers: Legacy Wars mobile game.
I’ve read and watched a lot of reviews and I think that people who have played this game get far too excited that it’s a Power Rangers game that they overlook the many, many flaws with this game. But I’m getting ahead of myself…
So What’s This Game About
The only thing more lifeless than the cut scenes in this game is Thury Trang.
The game is loosely based on the Shattered Grid story arc from Boom! Studio’s Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers comic book. In that comic book there’s an alternate reality with an evil version of Tommy Oliver, the Green Ranger, who is trying to take over the “multiverse” — and when I say multiverse, I mean the “good Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers timeline and all future generations of the Power Rangers brand. So, it’s really a Duo-Verse at best.
In the game, you play the remaining good Power Rangers who haven’t been defeated by evil Tommy, aka Lord Drakkon and his minions, which amount to a bunch of generic Mastodon foot-soldiers (troops that stole Zack, the Black Ranger’s powers), and evil Kimberly Hart (the pink Power Ranger) and Goldar. The game boasts that it features characters from over 25 years of Power Rangers history by giving you a whopping 21 characters from 9 different Power Ranger series, the lionshare of them coming from Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers.
It features a three on three battle system where players can select up to three different fighters on their team as well as a Zord/Monster to assist them in a battle.
So what’s wrong with this game? Oh, let me count the ways…..
It’s Visually Underwhelming With Monotonous Game Play
Just because the show had a shoestring budget doesn’t mean the video game should match it.
As I said above, for a game that was made for next-gen consoles, this game looks more like a blown up mobile game. No, it looks worse than that, it looks like a PC game that you are playing without hardware acceleration from a graphics card. Comparing the quality of graphics to this game to say, Street Fighter V (which came out 3 years prior to PR:BFTG) is like comparing a Picasso to a child’s crayon drawing.
It looks to me that they pulled a lot of the character models from the Legacy Wars mobile game, which is just sloppy and lazy.
The gameplay is also incredibly monotonous. If you’re playing story mode, get ready for battle after battle of Mastodon foot-soldiers every other battle. If that’s not annoying enough, get ready for battles prematurely ending for a cut scene instead of letting you finish the match.
The gameplay mechanics are also very, very, derivative of the Marvel vs. Capcom franchise. In fact it feels almost like someone reversed engineered Marvel Vs. Capcom 3 to make this game, only with cheaper graphics and worse hit detection.
If that’s not bad enough, the narrative of the game constantly switches from you playing the good guys to you playing the bad guys with very little indication, often times having the bad character fighting the character you just played adding to the confusion. I swear there were times I didn’t even know which character I was controlling because the game is not fucking clear on it at all. The controls in this game are a button mashing nightmare with power moves have to be timed just right, but don’t expect them to land half the time because the AI is constantly trying to move your opponent right in your face. So expect round after round of repetitive fights that are an exercise in frustrating button mashing. Another annoying component is that the game almost perpetually has a “SAVING” prompt in the bottom right corner of the screen in story mode, it covers everything including subtitles in the cut scenes, what sort of amateur hour gaming flaw is that?
This all surrounded by a loading screen where you hear the first 30 seconds of the theme music of Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers EVERY. FUCKING. TIME. It’s a good choice for a title screen, but each loading screen? Fuck right off. Whoever thought that was a good design idea needs to be locked in a room and tortured with that song for the rest of their lives. But just the first 30 seconds on a perpetual loop.
Literally the Worst Audio and Dialogue I’ve Heard in a Long Time
Usually, when you have a game coming out for a next-gen console you’d expect the audio and dialogue to be at least half-way decent, right? Well, this came manages to fail that.
They manage to get some of the original cast of the TV show to do character voices in the game including Jason David Frank (Tommy), Austin St. John (Jason), David Fielding (Zordon), and Kerrigan Mahan (Goldar), but you wouldn’t be able to tell because the music and sound effects in this game drown out half of the dialogue. Jason David Frank’s lines all sound like he whispered them into the microphone so he wouldn’t wake up his mother since he’s voicing the end boss of the game, that’s not exactly the menacing villain they’re trying to make him out to be. Since we’re talking about original cast members, they got mostly male actors back, yet when it came to voicing Kimberly, they didn’t hire Amy Jo Johnson to reprise her character. If this was a decision on the part of nWay, then it was a big mistake.
The rest of the voice cast is horrendous. Particularly whoever did the voices for the Mastodon troopers. Blocks of mahogany are less wooden than the way this voice actor delivers their lines.
The fucking awful voice acting is especially bothersome when I read that in-match dialogue was added to the game after the initial release. Like many other aspects of this game, the pre/post-battle dialogue seems like it was added as an afterthought because the characters always say the same thing before and after each match and none of it makes any sense in the context of the battle. For example, at the start of every match, the Ranger Slayer (evil Kimberly) says “By your command Lord Dakkon” or something to that effect even though the character isn’t present in the scene. So she’s responding to a command that only she can hear?
If You Look Up Derivative in the Dictionary….
Then there’s the text dialogue because nothing screams cheap like only having 5% of the cinematics feature actual speech and the other 95% is all written word. If you didn’t have the budget to pay Jason David Frank to do the minimal dialogue tree in story mode, then maybe you shouldn’t have hired him to begin with? At any rate, the story was written by Kyle Higgins who also wrote the Power Rangers comic book for Boom! Studios. If there’s anything I can say about Higgins is that he writes his dialogue like you’d expect someone who is almost 40 would write it. What I mean is that the dialogue reads like how a 35-year-old thinks a teenager with attitude would sound like in 2020. This is not to say that Higgins is a bad writer, he has done some great work over at Marvel and DC (notably his lengthy run writing Nightwing), but whatever the hell he was trying for Power Rangers just comes off sounding hacky, and not the good kind.
The other notable flaw is that the writing in the game makes a lot of leaps in the narrative as though it has expected you to have read the Shattered Grid comic book. So if you haven’t (like me) get ready for a lot of “huh?” moments when certain plot elements suddenly pop up. Would it help me to read the Power Rangers comic book? Probably, but honestly, there is something about the comic that I find very off-putting, but we’ll get into that later.
The plot was literally: They all showed up. It’s not that hard.
The other off-putting thing about this game is that it relies on a “multiverse/time travel” story narrative to explain how Power Rangers from different eras are all suddenly working together. Which, I’m sorry, this is old hat. However, ever since Marvel Comics hit it out of the park with Spider-Verse, everyone has been trying to imitate its success. So for them to use this overplayed trope with Power Rangers it’s very uninteresting. Particularly when you think that on the TV show having multiple Power Ranger teams working together doesn’t require a whole lot of exposition, there’s a bad guy so powerful that two or more teams team-up to stop them. This is partly because Power Rangers recycles its battle footage from Super Sentai, and let me tell you they don’t waste time coming up with an explanation as to why past teams are working with new ones, they just fucking do it and it is fucking glorious.
For a 25th Anniversary, It Sure Ignores A Lot of History
That’s the other problem with this game, for something that is supposed to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Power Rangers this game has a distinct lack of Power Ranger history. Most of the playable characters are from Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers. At which point they should have just forgotten about doing a “celebration of Power Rangers history” and just made a straight out MMPR video game.
It’s like calling a book the “definitive history of World War II” but it only has a chapter on 1939 and a few random facts about Little Boy hastily added at the end.
I think it’s in poor taste to make the Trini character look like a car wreck.
The other thing I really dislike about this game is that it borrows elements from the comic book published by Boom! So instead of characters from different eras of Power Rangers you get all of these unwanted variants of the original Power Rangers cast. For example, you can play as Trini, but she’s wearing a suit of Dragon Battle Armor for no apparent reason.
Then you’ve got Lord Dakkon which is basically an uninspired amalgamation of the Green and White Ranger costumes. What Megazord does he pilot? The embodiment of yawning? Because that would be a good fit. Then you’ve got the aforementioned Mastodon troopers, who look like a Rob Liefeld wet dream: covered in pouches and toting impossibly large guns. I’m still pretty mad about these Mastodon characters. You have an opportunity to motion capture Hip-Hop Kido and you said pass? What a missed opportunity.
Anyway, like I said, this game features a lot of plot elements and characters that are based on the comic book. Which, I’ve given a shot, but really, I just can’t get into it. The big reason is that the comic book feels like it is forgetting its roots. The additions of Lord Drakkon and Dragon Armor and the like go against the esthetic that was established by the Japanese TV show that MMPR is based on, Kyōryū Sentai Zyuranger. The moment you decide the Japanese aspects of this show are irrelevant and unimportant you lose all of the appeal of this patchwork television show.
For a game that is supposed to celebrate the history of a franchise it certainly misses a lot of what makes Power Rangers great. Let’s talk about the things that are sorely missing from this game….
Where are the Monsters?
How can you look at something this awesome and not put it in your video game?
Other than Lord Zed and Goldar, this game suffers from a distinct lack of monsters. Part of the appeal of Power Rangers was the monster of the week. While most of these monsters were destroyed by the end of each episode that doesn’t change the fact that they were a unique and integral part of the TV show. The lack of unique monsters, especially when you have 25 years worth of monsters to choose from is such a monumentally bad oversight.
That is something that every single Power Rangers fighting game had before this one: Monsters. There was a selection of monsters you could fight.
Another missed opportunity is, instead of those annoying Mastodon troopers (I really, really hate them) they didn’t include any of the generic foot soldiers? You don’t a single Puddy Patroller unless you’re playing as Lord Zed, in which case they are part of Zed’s special attacks. While it’s amusing watching a gang of Zed Puddies curb stomping a Power Ranger, not having them as generic foes to fight in the game is a huge disappointment.
While we’re on the subject of monsters….
Where are the Zords?
It might seem quaint now, but at least the 16-bit era got the formula right.
That’s the other missing aspect to this game is the lack of Zords and the fact that they aren’t playable characters. In this game, you get assists from either the original Megazord, the Dragonzord, Goldar and the Delta Squad Megazord. In the middle of the match you can summon them and watch as the giant kicks your opponent around the screen, blast them with missiles, or slash them with a giant sword.
However, part of the whole Power Rangers formula goes like this: The Power Rangers fight a monster. The monster grows to giant size. The Power Rangers call their Zords. A Megazord fights the giant monster. This is not rocket science here people. In fact, past Power Rangers fighting games managed this very easily.
Other Miscellaneous Nitpicks
There are a also a lot of other little things that make this game awful. It’s like the developers knew enough about Power Rangers enough to make a game, but it gave it all the charm of tying an elderly couple to an anchor and dropping them into the ocean.
Like I said, above, none of the developers of this game really tried to capture the nuance of the Japanese footage from Power Rangers. Part of what made the show interesting to watch was all the detailed fight choreography combined with all the crazy camera work. Look, here’s your source material right here: The Red Ranger vs the Green Ranger from Zyuranger.
Compare that to the video game…..
It is so bland by comparison.
That’s the other thing they get wrong as well, in the game all of the Power Rangers are jacked for some reason. That has never been the case on the show. The Japanese actors in the costumes are always quite lithe (Except for the occasional fat member) because — duh — most martial artists aren’t bulked up like a steroid fiend. Even when you go back and watch the original show, even the American actors weren’t this jacked. It’s really not a very good look for these characters. These are supposed to be teenagers with attitude, not Mister Universe contestants.
Lastly, this game is missing is finishers. In every incarnation of Power Rangers there is a scene where the heroes combine weapons to destroy the monster.
You know, that thing they did every episode.
Then, after the monster grows and the Power Rangers battle it in their Zords, they usually pull off one last finishing move to destroy the monster for good.
A Power Rangers game missing these elements is fundamentally flawed.
To Future Generations: How to Make A Proper Power Rangers Game
Where the designers at nWay got wrong was trying to make this game like a Capcom fighter, especially when they copied the wrong elements. What makes a Capcom fighter great is all the crazy combos and fighting moves combined with the fast pace and crazy camera angles that accompany those moves. Power Rangers fails big time on this one.
Also, when it comes to the fighting structure, they should have took a page from Mortal Kombat. I’m not talking about the blood and gore, I’m talking about the finishing moves. This is where you could have had a Power Cannon, or a Megazord executing the final slash from the Power Sword.
So here are my points on how to make a proper Power Rangers fighting game:
For every Power Ranger there should be a monster representing the same era of the show. In fact, said monster should have been featured fighting opposite the Ranger, and I’m not talking about the various leaders/henchmen that appear in every episode of a given season (ie: Lord Zed, Goldar etc) but the monsters of the week.
Megazord/Giant Monster Battles should be a must. Each represented Power Ranger team should also come with its own playable Megazord.
Round 1 of a fight should be Power Ranger vs, Monster. Round 2 should be Megazord vs. Giant Monster. Or Ranger vs. Ranger in round 1 then Zord vs. Zord in round 2.
There should be finishing moves at the end of each round where the Power Ranger character (if they win) can perform a movie like summoning the Power Cannon, or a Megazord doing a monster destroying attack. Think Mortal Kombat finishing moves only more like the video above.
I’m going to say this up front, but selling the Power Rangers franchise to Hasbro was not a great idea for anybody unless you’re Haim Saban, who probably made a tidy sum for the sale. While Hasbro admittedly makes some very nice action figures, Bandai was doing a fine enough job with Power Rangers merchandise because they were just importing the toys that were already being made in Japan. Also, their gaming division Bandai/Namco makes some really great games. Look at Dragon Ball FighterZ, it is a near perfect fighting game for the franchise it is based on because when you play it, it feels like you’re watching a Dragon Ball TV show. You don’t feel that way playing Battle for the Grid. If anything, playing this game is the equivalent to what a grandparent thinks a Power Rangers is.
Making a fighting game isn’t very hard as anyone who has made one with MUGEN can attest. What’s challenging is making one that captures the essence of the franchise it is based on.
What nWay produced is a dead fish. A disappointing offering that, in my opinion, is the work of lazy developers who don’t really care much about the property. This game is awful and it seems like they cut every corner possible while still charging full price for it. It doesn’t stand up to the sort of quality you’d expect for a game on a next gen console. If I was a developer at nWay, I’d be fucking embarrassed by this release. I’m hoping that the money they make from charging over $50 for an upscale mobile game will go to hiring staff who actually give a shit about the quality of the product they are putting out. I haven’t seen this lack of care for a franchise game since the days of LJN. Let me tell you, if you’re a game designer in the 21st century and someone is comparing your games to one of the most notoriously awful video game designers of the 1980s, it’s time to either get your act together or just stop.
As for Hasbro, the last great game based on on of their properties was Transformers: Devastation, which was made by Activision. It was a near perfect game because Activision knew what they were doing. I think Hasbro should re-evaluate what companies they license to make video games because the stuff that nWay is turning out is utter garbage.
