Steve Watts
When the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers emerged as many Americans’ first exposure to the popular Super Sentai series, it was hard not to feel like it was riding the wave of Turtle-mania that defined the early 1990s. After all, it was a band of color-coordinated heroes who traded gentle quips and used martial arts to dispatch endless faceless baddies. I watched MMPR at the time, but I was also just cresting the age at which I felt a little embarrassed by its undeniable camp. Three decades later, Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: Rita’s Rewind once again feels a bit like it’s riding the turtles’ coattails. TMNT: Shredder’s Revenge was an excellent retro brawler throwback, and by comparison, Rita’s Rewind is a pretty good retro brawler throwback, but one with some of its own special charms–as well as its own frustrations.
Rita’s Rewind fully recognizes the passage of time, even pinning down specific years. The original Rangers are still fighting evil in 2023, now against a mechanized Robo Rita–a timely reference to the villain of the reunion movie, 2023’s Power Rangers: Once and Always. But apparently overwhelmed by these Rangers who have decades of experience, Robo Rita hatches a plan to go back in time and team up with her flesh-and-blood self. The modern-day Rangers say it’s too dangerous to follow her through time and risk a paradox, so they just have to hope their younger selves are able to withstand the machinations of two Ritas.
That places Rita’s Rewind strictly on the 1993 timeline, which means it’s the first time the Rangers are encountering mainstays like Goldar and the Green Ranger. The only real difference is that this time we see Rita Repulsa bickering with Robo Rita over strategy.
That self-aware setting makes this ripe for callbacks, like some of the earliest and most iconic monsters in Power Rangers history. Your progress is divided into stages, but also episodes, as the same monster will typically span three stages to make a complete episodic story. It’s a cute hook that cleverly invokes nostalgia for the classic, campy TV show. At one point there’s even a clever homage to the trailblazing game Final Fight.
Most of the stages are typical brawler fare, as your chosen Ranger takes on a variety of Putties (and occasionally Tengas) with their own themed attacks. Light-blue Putties, for example, will run straight towards you with a spike, but if you successfully dodge, they’ll crash into a wall and get dizzy for a few seconds. None of the enemies are particularly bright, but they’re built to overwhelm you with numbers. Your moveset is limited to a few basic attacks, jump-kicks, and dash-moves, but it’s generally enough to deal with the enemy hordes. For times when you might get overwhelmed, there’s a super attack you can unleash after collecting enough Power Coins to charge it, and it almost always clears the field.
The Rangers are well differentiated in their animations, which help to express their individual personalities. The Black Ranger Zack’s down-smash attack breaks out his power axe, for example, while the Pink Ranger Kimberly shoots down like an arrow and strikes a pose like she just stuck the landing in a gymnastic event. It’s cute. That said, their individual attack strength, range, and speed feel effectively the same. That makes picking your Ranger more a matter of personal preference than strategy. The super attacks similarly have different screen-filling effects, but when they all clear the board, there’s not a functional difference.
Sometimes brawler stages are interrupted by a Time Disrupter, a green device that will rewind everything if you don’t destroy it quickly enough. That’s an inventive little twist, since you have to juggle dealing with Putties while also trying to damage the Time Disrupter, or you’ll have to fight the same Putties over again. But the Time Disrupter retains whatever damage you did, so you can chip it down over multiple rounds. Sometimes this can even work to your advantage–once I lost a life while a Time Disrupter was active, then time rewound and I got the life back and performed better to keep it.
In between stages, you hang out at the local juice bar, where you can talk a little to other characters or play simple arcade games. It’s a sweet little diversion that helps sell the feeling of watching an old Power Rangers episode.
Most episodes culminate in a vehicle-chase segment with your individual prehistoric-themed robot, which in true Power Rangers fashion, usually then transitions to a big MegaZord brawl. These are rendered with a retro Mode-7-esque effect and are styled like arcade shooters, firing your weapons to get temporary power-ups to more swiftly take down the enemy ships flying towards you. The MegaZord battle is more akin to a first-person Punch-Out, as you shift left or right to dodge attacks and then wail on your super-sized enemy to charge up the Power Sword, which rains down from the sky to deliver your finishing strike.
These stages seem intended to break up the pacing, but they’re often frustrating. The hit detection in the vehicle segments is imprecise and hard to judge thanks to the Mode-7-like effects, so it’s easy to sustain a hit and die or, worse, get crushed by a piece of geometry. That means you lose a life. But unlike the regular brawler stages where you continue right where you left off, these start you back at an often arbitrary-feeling checkpoint. If that’s before a boss that you had nearly beaten, it means you’re starting from scratch with the boss at full health. It can be easy to lose all three allotted lives, which then prompts you to use a continue–a limited resource on most difficulty levels, which starts you back from the beginning of the whole stage.
The big boss-finishing MegaZord segments feel strangely off in a different way. Dodging is floaty and imprecise, and getting hit resets the meter to build up your Power Sword. But there also doesn’t seem to be any damage. If it’s even possible to die in these segments, I never saw it. There are green, yellow, and red lights in the MegaZord cockpit that seem intended to signify damage, but they never lit up. It’s possible that these segments are meant to be impossible to lose, and the only penalty is delay, because it’s supposed to feel big and empowering. But it seems just as possible that, faced with imprecise dodging that would make damage too frustrating, the developers just opted to make you invincible.
Like a classic brawler, Rita’s Rewind can be finished in a few hours, and once you’re done, there’s not much reason to replay. There is a bonus unlockable character that you can play with, but they handle mostly similarly to the other Rangers. The Rangers don’t level up with experience, and there isn’t a currency or shop to buy bonuses or extras. The stages do have bonus objectives, but it isn’t clear what completing them gives you other than bragging rights. There are multiple difficulty modes to test your skills, of course, and there is a Speed Run mode with an on-screen timer, if replaying the game to top your best time strikes your fancy.
Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: Rita’s Rewind feels light and disposable. It’s a largely enjoyable brawler throwback that plays well and accurately captures the spirit of the original old-school Power Rangers. The vehicle segments can be frustrating, but the larger issue with MMPR is that it’s ephemeral. Like watching an episode of Power Rangers on a lazy afternoon, you’ll have a little campy fun and then immediately forget about it.
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