If you follow me on Twitter, you'll see me semi-regularly posting about Power Rangers. My oldest son is a fanatic for the franchise, and through him, I've been exposed to more of the IP than I ever was when I was a kid; when the series was arguably at its peak of popularity. We've been playing the various SNES Power Rangers games, blasting through the different incarnations of the television show and playing with the action figures nearly every day for the last couple of years and his passion hasn't shown one iota of easing up. I was trying to get him invested in Pokémon, but Pikachu was quickly curbstomped by the Megazord (metaphorically, of course) and there's been no looking back.
The SNES Power Rangers games are largely decent fare. Of the ones that we've played, I wouldn't say any of them are a must-play, though I did have a lot of fun with the game simply titled Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. It feels like Bandai slightly struggled to fully capture the full spirit of the TV show. These Power Rangers titles are close to being great games, but they're weighed down by unfortunate, bizarre design choices, some of which may have been due to hardware limitations of the time. For instance, Mighty Morphin Power Rangers was designed to be solely single player, which was a major fumble, in my opinion. And then Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie, which serves as an adaptation of the first Power Rangers film, features multiplayer, but lacks a password system, which is infuriating when you're kicked all the way back to the beginning upon reaching Game Over, not to mention this was released at a time when password systems were very common. making its absence all the more peculiar. My son enjoys these games, but I couldn't help but feel like we still needed a proper classic-styled Power Rangers game that really faithfully captured the tone and elements of the franchise. Enter Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: Rita's Rewind.
Developed by the wizards over at Digital Eclipse, Rita's Rewind absolutely nails what I craved from an old-school Power Rangers game. I swear it feels like the developers were aiming to correct basically every gripe I had with the classic games. Proper beat-em-up gameplay where they wield their "Power" weapons, throw powerful punches, crunchy kicks and create wildly satisfying, fluid combos that frequently send you juggling some helpless foe up into the sky, only to be slammed back down to the earth. There are also crazy looking elemental super moves that you can trigger to inflict massive damage, or even wipe the screen of lesser foes. I recall my son and I looking at each other, wide-eyed with our jaws on the floor as soon as we finished the game's first combat encounter. At the end of each stage, the Rangers accumulate experience points and level up, which grants you experience points that you can use to increase their core stats. I never felt like these made a huge difference, but it was a cool enhancement to the combat system regardless. Rita's Rewind's approach to combat felt like an enormous leap from the Power Rangers games of yore.
My favorite feature of Rita's Rewind, and something that I lamented that we never saw in the earlier titles, is the implementation of the Power Rangers' giant, robot, animal vehicles - the iconic Zords. The Megazord, the hulking form that the Zords take when they all combine together, is a prominent part of many Power Rangers games, but the individual Zords have never been part of any game, at least not from what I've seen. In between some of the standard side-scrolling brawler stages, you'll climb into your chosen Ranger's bespoke Zord and storm across some sort of a battlefield, typically in pursuit of whichever baddie you're currently facing in the story. Here you'll pilot your Zord in a sort of rail-shooter sequence, where you have to avoid environmental hazards and blast enemies and obstacles in your way. The visual style that Digital Eclipse utilized here hearkens back to the Mode 7 pseudo-3D effect we used to see in a lot of SNES titles. We absolutely loved these segments of the game, though they could be quite difficult.
As you'd expect, the Megazord does indeed make a few appearances in some stages. At the end of the Zord rail-shooter stages, the Zords will fuse together to form the Megazord, and you'll face off against a supersized version of whichever boss you were chasing. In Mighty Morphin Power Rangers on SNES, these Megazord battles play out like a streamlined fighting game, which was a neat way to employ the Megazord and to mix up the gameplay that you had encountered so far in that game. In Rita's Rewind, these Megazord sequences try something a little different. Pulling clear inspiration from Nintendo's long-dormant franchise, Punch-Out!!, these Megazord-centric boss battles throw you into a first-person boxing-style fight where you try to dodge, duck, dip, dive and dodge around the enemy's blows, while attempting to land your own critical blows. Once you manage to reduce the boss' health pool all the way, you're given the Power Sword and you deal the final blow. I love the idea of these Megazord fights, and I think the Punch-Out!!-style boxing was a neat concept, but ultimately I found these battles to be the weakest element of the game. The boxing combat just didn't feel polished, and frequently felt like we were taking cheap hits.
From top to bottom, Rita's Rewind feels like a game made by and for lifelong Mighty Morphin Power Rangers fans. There's such a rich attention to detail throughout the game. Throughout each stage, you'll find little collectible trinkets from random episodes of the original show, or you may find familiar Angel Grove citizens who need to be rescued. It helps that we recently watched through the entirety of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, but it felt like I was constantly pointing at my screen like Leonardo DiCaprio from Once Upon a Time in Hollywood as I recognized each callback. Another really cute inclusion in Rita's Rewind is Ernie's juice bar in the Angel Grove Youth Center, which the Rangers use as a lair of sorts. In the game, it serves the same purpose, as well as being the place where you can swap between the different Rangers and talk to the citizens that you rescued.
While it's not the best beat-em-up I've ever played, Rita's Rewind is a genuine delight from beginning to end. You'll likely beat the game within a couple of hours, but we had so much fun with it that we kept going back to various stages to try and beat challenges or to try and find the collectibles. I would advise that you wait for a good discount and not pay MSRP for Rita's Rewind, as the $35 price tag is far too steep, but otherwise, I feel very confident in recommending this game, especially if you're a fan of the old school Mighty Morphin Power Rangers series.
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