Ronin Warriors, Vols. 5 & 6:
The Hardest Battle and Arise New Armor (2001)
Review by Doc Ezra
Film:
DVD:

Series Concept by Hajime Yatate
Directed by Masashi Ikeda and Mamoru Hamazu
Character Design by Norio Shioyama

Features:

• Reversible cover art
  
• Corresponding episodes of Legendary Armor Samurai Troopers on disc reverse
  

Doc's Anime Warnings:

• An opportunity missed for a great ending
• Deux ex machina plot
• Transformation sequence...still annoying

Rating: 13+

Anamorphic: N/A; presented in its original TV aspect.

My Advice: Pass.

In The Hardest Battle, our heroes struggle valiantly against the evil lord Talpa, who has reintegrated the powers of his three lackeys' magical armors into himself. Anubis escapes this fate and turns to the side of right, joining the young protagonists against his former master. Unfortunately, Talpa takes this as bad form, and summarily absorbs all the good guys except Ryo (why is it always the guy in the red suit? I'd just once love to see one of these goofy "color team" shows where the guy wearing orange was in charge...or green, blue, anything except the guy in red). So Ryo has to do battle with Talpa himself, and channels the spirits of his comrades to form a new suit of armor, glistening white. And then kicks Talpa's butt.

And had the series ended there, all would have been well. Despite some mediocre dialogue and a high cheese factor, having the sheer cajones to end the show with four of the five heroes dead and gone merits some appreciation. Everybody assumes the young crowd can't handle such things, but it sells the audience short. Kids could damned well appreciate a show in which their favorite heroes had to make the ultimate sacrifice to save the world. Even if it didn't sell as many cool toys. But the network execs couldn't leave this one alone, and predictably screwed it up.

See, as soon as Talpa is gone, a new demon shows up, named Serenbou. And he's nastier, get it? And so the whole cycle starts over again, with our heroes questing for spiffy swords to go with the spiffy new armor. And some more lame bad guy lackeys to fight. And oh, Talpa's not really dead, so you've got to fight him again. Yawn. The powers that be decided they wanted another season, but couldn't be bothered making sure there was a new set of plots to go with all those episodes. So they just tweaked the old ones and re-used them. This doesn't speak well for the next five discs in the series, but I suppose they could surprise me by having an original thought some time before Volume 10.

The presentation on DVD is decent, though. Audio and video are clean (though I still don't understand the purpose of leaving in the pre- and post-commercial "title card" still frames...why not just make the show run seamlessly?). Again, the extras consist of nothing but reversible jacket art and the original Japanese episodes, which are usually cooler than the Americanized version, but suffer the same weak transition to the second season re-hash of the first season's ideas.

If you've enjoyed the series so far, you'll probably like most of disc five, but I can't imagine even die-hards being happy about the cop-out ending to season one and the trope of a returning Talpa on disc six. It negates any of the point or power of the first season, particularly in light of the miraculous return of the team when most of them should be dead. All that work (a disc full of episodes), and Talpa's gone like a week. Just some admin leave before a more serious bid to take over the world. Lame.