The Spring 2025 Anime Preview Guide

Go! Go! Loser Ranger! Season 2

Having passed the Ranger exam, Fighter D continues to infiltrate the ranks of the Rangers as he finally finds out what color he'll be assigned to. As for the Rangers themselves, they're now one Ranger short—and facing the increasingly violent, frustrations of Red. Meanwhile, worry continues to build that a boss monster—possibly even multiple boss monsters—are on the loose nearby.

Go! Go! Loser Ranger! Season 2 is based on the manga series of the same name by Negi Haruba. The anime series is streaming on Sundays on Disney+ and Hulu.

Go! Go! Loser Ranger! Season 2 is based on a manga by Negi Haruba. The anime series is streaming on Hulu and Disney+ on Sundays.

Right off the bat, it must be said that watching this fresh off the heels of having also watched The Red Ranger Becomes an Adventurer in Another World last season—I'm feeling more than a little bit of tonal whiplash. Still, don't let that fool you: I'm very glad to see this grim take on the Putty's plight back on. It was definitely, at least in my opinion, one of the most memorable anime to come out last year.

In any case, this was a pretty strong opening to what I hope will continue to be a good show. There's two main focuses of the episode: Fighter D, obviously, but also the Rangers themselves in the aftermath of losing Blue. Toward the end of season 1, Loser Ranger was being pretty obvious in its hints that Red, in particular, isn't exactly the hero of justice he paints himself as. But now that the balance of the Rangers is literally thrown off, even the public is starting to see the cracks in his facade—quite literally this episode. It's a bit on the nose as far as metaphors go, sure, but Sentai is nothing if not over the top.

I really hope that the contrast between the real Red and the Red that he presents himself as to the public takes center stage this season, because I think it's definitely the most interesting thing this show has going on story-wise. Not to say that I don't also care about what's going on with Fighter D—it's very clever, and I love that too. I've seen my fair share of Sentai, but I wouldn't call myself an expert on the genre—still, I've never seen a take quite like this one on a Red Ranger and I'm super interested to see where the show goes with that. And I only felt that all the more after this episode, which puts how unhinged he really is into a blood-soaked focus.

I think the fatal flaw of the first season of Loser Ranger was definitely a badly-paced middle section that brought all the momentum it had built up in the beginning to a slow drag that wouldn't pick up again until the last few episodes. Hopefully, now that our main story is fully established and Fighter D's already integrated into the Ranger force, this season can avoid having a similar issue. Still, this is such a unique and fun-to-watch series, so I'll absolutely be watching more to find out for myself.

It's good to have Go! Go! Loser Ranger! back, even if Disney and Hulu still seem to be doing everything in their power to make sure no one knows they have it. I really dig its dark satire of Super Sentai tropes. While I'm not nearly enough of a tokusatsu head to know how well it's handling itself on that angle, I am a big fan of the show's director Keiichi Satō—and a lot of the spectacle and commercialization of heroics that made his work on Tiger & Bunny so great was all over the first season of this show. It added a lot to its theatrics. Although I did think the whole cadet exam arc stretched a little too long, I still enjoyed the first season more often than not—and with how much its last couple of episodes shook up the status quo, I was looking forward to seeing how that would change things going forward.

Thankfully those changes are pretty immediate, as we're introduced to a mystery man calling himself Hwalipon who goes on broadcast and exposes everything the Dragon Keepers have been up to—from their show being a sham, to their abusive methods of recruitment. Between how quickly this happens and the fact that he plays over some of the footage as a physical puppet, I had a hard time telling if this “live broadcast” actually happened, or was a way of recapping things to the audience while setting up his character. Given that we don't really see anyone reacting to this for the remainder of the episode, I'm leaning towards the latter, but I am interested in seeing more of him—especially since it's all but certain he's Petrola in disguise and this all might be part of a new scheme to take control of humanity.

What is clear, though, is that even without having all of their crimes potentially exposed, the Keepers are having a hard time maintaining their image now that Blue's dead—and it's pretty crazy seeing how quickly they fall apart. Red is struggling to keep the mask from slipping, while the others are just kind of doing whatever they please. And while Red is so much of a narcissist that his biggest concern about Blue's death is how much it throws off their poses, he's clearly not happy about the direction things are going. I'm curious to see exactly how the Keepers plan on taking control of this ongoing PR fiasco.

Meanwhile, Fighter D is still busy maintaining his facade as Hibiki even after how close he got to being exposed towards the end of the last season. To that end, he finds himself on a walk with the Pink Keeper—and as concerning as her behavior is, I did get a few chuckles out of her attempts to hide how much of a brocon she is while Fighter D is busy thinking of how he can get himself into Red's squad and take him out.

This walk also leads the two of them to run into a young man named Chidori who gets accused of being behind some recent abductions. While he tries to play himself off as harmless, it's clear he's hiding something and that something might connect him to Fighter D's former bosses. These abductions lead Fighter D to believe that more of his bosses besides Petrola may still be around—and his plans to join the Red Squadron get sidetracked when he's sent to the Green Squadron instead. However, since the Green Squadron have secretly been trying to keep track of the remaining boss monsters this whole time, this lines up pretty well with Fighter D's current goals of learning their whereabouts. It also makes for a great way to kick off the season since there's no telling what the Boss Monsters have been up to while their underlings have been forced to suck up to the Keepers. Frankly, it'd be nice to learn more about them. There's no telling how many of these mysteries will actually be resolved by the end of this season, but it's good to see the series has so many new directions it can go in. I'm still onboard to see if Fighter D can finally claw his way to glorious revenge.

After an extremely long, extremely dense arc making up the end of the first season, it makes sense that Go! Go! Loser Ranger! season 2 starts with something of a clean break. This premiere is structured around the resultant status quo shift—seeing how some things have changed and others haven't. There are some gaps to fill—literally in the case of the dearly departed Blue Keeper's place in the Ranger lineup. His hole in their positions symbolizes the disarray the team is dealing with even as they try to roll out their rehearsed Sunday shows. That's bad news for the already unstable Red—and probably even worse news for all his friends and enemies.

That tone of uncertainty permeates this episode of Loser Ranger even as its characters attend meetings and go about their days. Fighter D's never been the best at planning—that's what makes him a fun protagonist. Even as a would-be schemer, he has no clue what to do now that he's fighting a battle on multiple fronts. Several Boss Monsters are still out there and rooting out their presence is the focus of this next arc. But the who, where, and how many is still uncertain. The underlying chaos is laid out in the opening of this episode, as new bad guy Hwalipon pops up to try to get the public to question the reality of the world the Keepers sell to them—while also catching the real-life audience up on what happened last season.

Hwalipon's appearance is Loser Ranger putting its best foot forward, anime-wise, for the beginning of this second season. It's stylized with all manner of effects—even getting into mixed-media with puppets! Puppets are always an appreciated inclusion. That quality treatment extends to the rest of the episode in touches—like the sketchy line art demonstrating Red's deterioration during the Sunday Showdown. And of course that also applies to the new opening and ending—with the latter being notable as an adorable video-game-themed exercise that still includes the dancing from the first season's ending. The sheer style of Loser Ranger's anime direction doesn't look like it's going to be slowing down.

That's good as the rest of this opening volley is kind of slow. As mentioned, it's a lot of new-status-quo exploring, including a little too much focus on off-putting oddities like Pink Keeper's brocon tendencies. That's a joke that's gonna need a little more remixing if they don't just want to run it into the ground—even as I appreciate how it compares her with the other kinds of crazy on the Keeper team. Whatever's going on with new character Chidori is pointedly obscured at this point and I appreciate how Fighter D's attempt at a fair deduction is duped by the guy's own apparent lies.

D running into Usukubo, complete with a boob-face gag that feels a bit out-of-place for this series, dives more direct into the intrigue with both of them being assigned to Green squad under Hisui. Hisui rules, so I'm excited to see more of her, and the reveal of their boss-monster-hunting job feels on-the-nose in terms of plot convenience but also amusing in how it moves D forward in his goals in a way he'd never be able to do himself. So even as Loser Ranger appears to be gearing up for another long-haul arc, the particular dominoes being lined up feel solid enough—and it still looks cool even when nothing much is happening.