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Only those with a great imagination can see the mystical railway known as the Rainbow Line, on which runs massive trains known as Ressha are driven by five warriors. These five warriors, known as the Ressha Sentai Tokkyuger, protect Earth's peace from the evil forces of the Shadow Line.

Jun Shison, Ai Moritaka, Ryûsei Yokohama, Jin Hiramaki, and Riria Baba in Ressha Sentai ToQger (2014)

Excellent sentai series with exciting train footage and emotional storyline

Yes. I know it is also the weirdest and most atypical of the sentai seasons. I have a thing for the theater of the absurd and Toqger throws a heaping pile of it into the regular sentai recipe. IMAGINATION!!!!! It&#39;s so nice and fun! The characters are very likeable. The theme songs are good. The foot soldiers are nicely designed. The filler stories are great. Maybe not the best sentai season since it&#39;s so different. I think that might be Kakuranger. But it is my fave.

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Ressha Sentai ToQger

&quot;Ressha Sentai Toqger&quot; (2014-15) is the first sentai series I&#39;ve watched in its entirety (47 episodes). I have sampled most of the sentai series that have appeared on Japanese television since 1975 and watched significant portions of some, including &quot;Kyoryu Sentai Zyuranger&quot; (1992), which was the basis for the first season of &quot;Mighty Morphin Power Rangers.&quot; Subsequent sentai seasons have formed the bases of subsequent seasons of the Power Rangers franchise. Sadly, &quot;Toqger,&quot; the series under review, was never adapted for &quot;Power Rangers.&quot; The U.S. producers skipped over it and went to the following sentai season, &quot;Shuriken Sentai Ninninger,&quot; to form the basis of the current Power Rangers season, &quot;Ninja Steel.&quot; I suspect the reason for passing over &quot;Toqger&quot; was its train theme and emphasis on train lines of Tokyo and Japan, a visual background difficult to adapt to the southern California setting of Power Rangers. I happen to delight in train scenes in movies and TV shows and I was hooked on &quot;Toqger&quot; (pronounced &quot;toe-KYU-jer&quot;) from the start. The main characters, the Toqgers, ride on a colorful, mystical train on the Rainbow Line, which rides the Japanese rails unseen by all but those with the most hyperactive imaginations, usually children. The chief opponent of the Toqgers is the Shadow Line, which sends dark trains into towns to wreak all sorts of havoc. The Rainbow and Shadow Line trains are created via CGI and provide lots of thrilling scenes as the trains burst onto the scene, often out of nowhere. There are also plenty of location shots of actual Japanese train stations and railroad yards and real trains both in and out of Tokyo. Each end credits sequence includes a montage of actual Japanese train lines, a treasure trove for train buffs. The Shadow Line is run by a smooth, handsome-looking villain referred to as Emperor Z, who presides over a team of very elegant monstrous creatures with names like General Schwarz, Baron Nero and Madame Noir. The Shadow Line rides into Japanese stations and turns them into Shadow Stations, with an assortment of devious methods for sucking out citizens&#39; energies and ambitions and turning this life force into dark mist which powers the Shadow Line. The Toqgers then ride in on the Rainbow Line, confront the villains and restore the town and its citizens back to normal. In the course of the action, they use their trains to combine and create giant fighting machines (called &quot;Zords&quot; in the Power Rangers franchise) to use in battles with giant Shadow monsters in nearly every episode. The five college-age youths, three male, two female, who become the Toqgers—Right, Tokatti, Hikari, Mio, and Kagura—are quite an interesting and varied group of personalities and their intricate relationship is another chief draw of the series. When we meet them in the first episode, they&#39;re afflicted with amnesia. We soon learn they have a shared childhood and the flashbacks to this childhood occur quite regularly as they gradually piece together who they are and try to remember where they&#39;re from. We see their childhood selves often and the valiant young actors who play them look just like their older counterparts and give equally strong performances. It soon becomes clear that the ultimate destination of their journey on the Rainbow Line is their lost hometown. The finale takes up several episodes and is absolutely heart-wrenching. The Toqger colors are Red (Right), Blue (Tokatti), Green (Hikari), Yellow (Mio) and Pink (Kagura). Akira, an older male railway worker with a hard hat, joins the team in the 17th episode as the Orange Ranger, the sixth Toqger, and provides an interesting contrast with the more volatile younger members. Another big draw for me was the frequent use of Japanese locations in Tokyo and elsewhere. Many fights between the Toqgers and their Shadow Line opponents take place in office plazas, shopping malls or waterfront plazas in the Tokyo area. One of these is in Chiba City, east of Tokyo, and is a frequent site of battles in these series. I made sure to visit the site when I was in Tokyo last year. Some fights take place on university campuses, in building lobbies and high up in sprawling offices overlooking the Tokyo skyline. Since the trains travel to towns outside Tokyo, there are episodes set in spanking new suburban developments and parkland, picturesque resorts, and seacoast towns. I enjoyed the villains in this series. Emperor Z looks like he could be a J-rock star or leader of an aging boy band, which is not at all a bad thing in a series like this. He also has some connection to the children&#39;s childhood past. His confederates all have dark Victorian-style costumes and masks. They fight among themselves and often have their own agendas. One of them, General Schwarz, even makes a secret deal with one of the Toqgers. Madame Noir is very protective of her daughter, Miss Glitta, a monstrous girl with a very sweet voice and manner who wears a Gothic Lolita costume and is secretly in love with General Schwarz. One of the best episodes, #21: The Runaway Bride, has Miss Glitta switch places with Mio, the Yellow Ranger. Glitta is overjoyed at taking on Mio&#39;s cute and agile form and runs with joy through city parks, laughing with glee at her newfound freedom. Poor Mio, trapped in Glitta&#39;s monstrous form, is comforted by her friend Kagura (Pink Ranger), who noted the switch and walks with her through Tokyo streets looking for Glitta-as-Mio to engineer a reversal of the process while pedestrians and drivers of passing cars stare out at the odd duo. It&#39;s very funny, but also very touching. I rented the series from a Japanese DVD store and watched it in Japanese without subtitles, aided only by a Wikipedia printout of episode synopses that provided roughly half of the key plot points. Forgive me if I misinterpreted a plot element or two in the course of this review.

Uh the costume bad,the mecha bad the monster bad and the storyline bad!!. Toei not really serious making this bad series.the past series and the series after it are more good.

User reviews

Ressha Sentai ToQger

Toqger is my favorite sentai of all 45!

Excellent sentai series with exciting train footage and emotional storyline

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