It’s Morphin Time! The early 90’s had me dancing each morning as my brother and I would be dropped off at our babysitters’ house before we went to school. At 7:30AM we would watch an episode of Power Rangers to pump us up for the day. When the game came out, I was understandably excited, and promptly beat it. When I recently revisited I was scared that it would not match the awesome memory I had of it, but luckily (for the most part) it has held up quite well!
The story is about as deep as a regular Power Ranger’s episode – Rita is sending monsters to Angel Grove and you and the rest of the Rangers must defeat the monsters! The game is primarily a side-scrolling beatem’up. At the start of every stage you select a Ranger and battle through a sea of putties as a regular person until about midway through the level. The Ranger then meets the boss and transforms into a Power Ranger! The boss quickly runs away and the Ranger must battle through the rest of the stage, but this time all beefed up with weapon and power bomb in hand! The player then finds and defeats the boss at the end of the stage! This formula is rinsed and repeated for the first five stages, but with varying bosses and locals.
Level design is fairly simple with the first half mainly focusing on pounding putties while the second half usually threw in another somewhat interesting mechanic. For instance, in the second stage, you need to scale the height of a factory, and in one of the later levels, you find your way into a laboratory with a blasting laser that you must duck to avoid while continuously moving forward. While simple, these mechanics added just enough variety to keep the game interesting.
While I found the game fun to play, it is extremely easy. Once the player makes it midway through the level and turns into a power ranger, the health bar is fully charged! Power bombs and health are scattered plentifully throughout the level – I don’t think I died once up until the last boss! With that in mind, I still had fun playing the game!
The other thing that kind of bummed me out on this game is that its not cooperative two players! While I understand that the design of this game would not work with cooperative two player, the Power Ranger’s are a team – and I just never got the feeling while playing this game at all up until the last two levels.
Speaking of the last two levels! After the first five levels are complete, the Rangers come together to create the Mega Zord! Rita causes one of her monsters to grow and you get to battle it in simplified street fighter style battle! Once this battle is complete, you head to the moon where you battle one last monster before Rita’s forces are defeated!
As a kid, I was so blown away by this. The developers really got a great sense of scale which helped you feel like you were battling in a gigantic robot! What makes it even cooler is that once the game is beaten, you get access to a code that allows you to play two players where someone drives the Mega Zord and the other drives the Monster! This was a really cool feature that extended the replay of the game.
In terms of graphics, I found that the game looked fine. It was certainly not pushing the limits of the SNES, but it gets the job done. I found the Ranger costumes a bit funny as they all look identical apart from a colour change. The music on the other hand is phenomenal. When I turned the game on recently, I was expecting a butchered Power Rangers intro but was happily greeted with “GO GO POWER RANGERSSS!” I was extremely surprised at how good it sounded. The levels have decent music and sounds effects as well, but it was how they nailed the intro song that really gave the game authenticity.
Overall, Mighty Morphin Power Rangers is a simple, fun, but short SNES game. It can be beaten in 1-2 hours, and apart from the battle mode (which is kinda fun), there is not a ton to come back to once the game is done. This game is pretty inexpensive, so if you can find it for under $10 pick it up. I give this game a fun 6/10.
FINAL SCORE: 6/10
RetroGame Man 
I remember this one, had some fun times with it, but never finished it. I always did find it funny that the yellow and pink rangers looked like men once they morphed
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Hahah never realized that! Thanks for reading!
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Megazord Streetfighter sounds fun. In the recent Power Rangers game the robot battles were just a series of quick time events.
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