I basically forced myself through the first season of Sentai Daishikkaku because I kept waiting for it to “git gud” like the ratings suggested, and it just never did. It sat at this really frustrating level of “not awful, just mediocre” all the way to the end.
What I expected vs what I got
On paper, it should have worked for me. I like isekai, I like fighting shows, and I am more than up for a sentai deconstruction with a villain grunt trying to take down the “heroes” from the inside. The early episodes tease something sharper and darker, with hints of The Boys style “the heroes are actually awful” energy, so I kept waiting for the show to lean into that properly. Instead it settles into this weird middle ground where it never commits to being properly nasty, properly funny, or properly character driven.
Story, characters, and why I bounced off it
The story ends up feeling surprisingly predictable for something that advertises itself as a twist on the usual sentai formula. You can see a lot of the turns coming, and even when there is a reveal it rarely lands with much weight because the build up has been so messy. The cast did not help either; outside of Fighter D, who has his moments, most of the characters either grated on me or felt like slightly tweaked versions of archetypes I have seen a hundred times before. People talk about how fun and unpredictable they are, but I mostly found them annoying or flat, especially once the show starts throwing more and more faces at you without giving them proper development.
Action, animation, and the “parody” angle
Given how many fight scenes there are, the action should be a selling point, but I thought it looked pretty rough a lot of the time. There are whole stretches that feel like repeated frames, slideshow movement and very basic choreography, which is not great when half an episode is just people hitting each other in a car park. I have seen some fans say that the appeal is in the parody aspect and the way it plays with sentai tropes, and maybe that is what people are latching onto. Personally, the satire never felt sharp enough to carry the show, and the uneven tone made it hard to tell whether I was meant to laugh with it, at it, or just ignore the whiplash.
So… what are people seeing that I am not?
By the time the credits rolled on the final episode, I was mostly left wondering if I had watched the same anime as everyone enthusiastically rating it so highly. For me, the story was predictable, the characters were mostly annoying, the animation in the fights was middling at best, and the constant battles just highlighted how flat the whole thing felt. I normally enjoy isekai and fighting series, so it is not that I am allergic to the genre; this one was just so thoroughly meh that I cannot imagine revisiting it, let alone being excited for more.
If you are someone who genuinely loved this, I would honestly like to know what clicked for you. Is it the parody angle, the worldbuilding, certain characters that worked better for you than they did for me? Because from where I am sitting, I just do not see what everyone else is seeing.
10.5 out of 13 users liked this review
