Choujin Sentai Jetman (video game)

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Choujin Sentai Jetman is a platformer video game developed by Natsume and published by Angel for the Famicom on 1991-12-21. The game is based on the 15th season of the Japanese children's television show, Super Sentai, the is the show whose footage would later be used for the combat scenes in Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. You play the role of the five Jetmen heroes and their bird personas and must defeat the evil forces of Vyram.

I heard about this game because the Angry Video Game Nerd reviewed it in his episode reviewing Power Rangers games. After seeing it, I decided to play it. I beat both the easy and normal difficulties on 2019-11-26.

Status

I don't own this game, but I have beaten it at easy and normal difficulties.

Reviews

Good

  • The game has decent graphics and music. Neither are great for 1991, but they're better than most tie-in games.
  • The game has multiple difficulty levels (two which must be unlocked). Compared to easy difficulty, normal difficulty adds a couple more enemies to the stages, makes the shooting enemies a bit more aggressive, and makes the bosses deal more damage. Hard and very hard difficulties are identical to easy and normal, only your Jetmen can only take one hit before dying.
  • It's nice that the game has a password system, but it's not really necessary since it only takes about 20 minutes to beat the game, even at its most difficult levels.
  • It's nice that there are three different attack forms: sword, gun, punch.

Bad

  • It would have been nice if the Jetmen were more unique. They all use the same sprites just with swapped palettes, they all have the same special attack, and the sword and gun weapons are reused by two heroes making them entirely redundant.
  • Easy difficulty is far too easy, and even normal difficulty is too easy. Maybe if they cut the player's life in half it would be more on point for the time.
  • There isn't any story or dialogue in the game. Without knowing about the show or reading the manual, it looks like you're just beating up enemies for the sake of beating them up.
  • The complete ending is shown when you defeat the final boss regardless of the difficulty level. This means there isn't anything special to see when playing in the harder modes.

Ugly

  • The game is very lackluster for its time and genre. Had the game come out in 1987, it would have been more acceptable, but Mega Man II, which is similar in style, came out a full three years earlier and was vastly superior!
  • Each of the six stages are mostly the same, sharing a lot of enemies between them.
  • Each of the six stages are boring and too short. They consisting of only rudimentary jumping. There are no pits, no puzzles, no vertical scrolling, etc.
  • The controls for the boss battles are particularly bad. Jumping is mostly useless since you don't jump high enough to avoid attacks, and your jump attack can't hit the enemy unless they're also jumping, which they rarely do. Most of the bosses can be defeated just by pushing them into the corner and mashing the attack button, only a couple require a bit of strategy. The boss of the final stage, in particular, can only be defeated with either insane reflexes or a special strategy that isn't obvious at first.

Media

Box Art

Graphics

Videos

Titles

Language Native Transliteration Translation
Japanese 鳥人戦隊ジェットマン Chojin Sentai Jettoman Birdman Squadron Jetman

Link

Link-MobyGames.png