"Busters, Ready Go!", the first opening, perfectly embodies the determined mindset of the team as they fight against Vaglass to avenge the people that disappeared 13 years ago. Despite being replaced by the more catchy and energetic "Morphin! Movin! Busters Ship!", it decidedly gets put in particularly exciting CMOAs, making the sheer catharsis of the scene that more sweeter.
"Boost Up! Beet Buster!" features Psychic Lover combining samba and hard rock in the most awesome way possible, to put it lightly, capturing the lighthearted badassery of Beet Buster and Stag Buster.
"One Wish One Day", Hiromu and Nick's image song, is hopeful and lighthearted, showing off the camaraderie these two have.
"Perfect Mission!" is pure hard rock goodness, combining edgy guitars and a melodious orchestra in perfect harmony while letting NoB's vocals truly shine.
"Kizuna ~ Go-Busters" is lovely, lighthearted ending that gets some really funky guitar and synths that really elevate the song from light listening to something that you can really dance to. This one was done by Nazo no Shin UnitＳＴＡ☆ＭＥＮ, a seiyuu vocal unit comprised of Daisuke Kishio, Kenichi Suzumura, Jun'ichi Suwabe, Hiroki Takahashi, Kosuke Toriumi, Makoto Yasumura, and Hiroyuki Yoshino - all of whom have voiced a MOTW in the series before.
Catharsis Factor: After all of the crap Enter sent the team's way once he usurped Messiah as the Big Bad, it is incredibly satisfying to see that his plan to use Hirom as his Soul Jar and taking Jin's data hostage was rendered entirely useless, thanks to the latter's Heroic Sacrifice, allowing the Go-Busters to finally get a chance to destroy him. Using all their attacks against him, they use a combined version of Hiromu's "Volcanick Attack" to take down Enter once and for all. Even Enter seems to acknowledge the Go-Busters in this moment, accepting his death gracefully.
Complete Monster: Enter is responsible for turning innocents—including children—into his robot slaves and using them as human shields, showing sickening amusement with his own cruelty. After the destruction of his boss, Enter takes over as the new Messiah, seeking to assimilate all of Earth to rule supreme. Turning the heroic Hiromu into a Soul Jar to allow himself to continuously regenerate if defeated, Enter forces the Go-Busters to considering killing their friend to stop him. When Hiromu threatens to kill himself to stop Enter, he tries to put Hiromu into a coma to force him to become a docile part of his nefarious scheme.
Evil Is Cool: Enter. Whether it be his plans, his calm way of speaking peppered with French, or his character design, everyone seems to agree Enter is one of the best villains in Super Sentai history.
Fanfic Fuel: The operations Ryuji and Yoko are involved in prior to Hiromu entering the picture.
Enter's Go-Buster form has no official name, but people have adopted the term Dark Buster.
Friendly Fandoms: A surprising amount of Love Live! fans watched the series due to both sharing Arisa Komiya (Yoko).
Germans Love David Hasselhoff: In Japan, Go-Busters isn't that well-liked and is seen as a weird Big-Lipped Alligator Moment for the franchise, even to the point of being sidelined in their own crossover movie with Zyuden Sentai Kyoryuger by both the Zyurangers and the Abarangers. However, western fans like it for a lot of the same reasons their Japanese counterparts disliked it, seeing it as a fresh and experimental take on the Sentai series.
He Really Can Act: Episode 50 is one of the best showcases of what the main cast can really do, as Jin reveals that he's going to destroy his body to destroy Messiah Card no.13 once and for all, thus killing him permanently. Hiroya Matsumoto's impassioned speech as Jin reminisces about life is truly spectacular while the others barely say a word, only straight-up sobbing at the revelation. It's only around four minutes in length, but the main cast's raw acting makes it one of the most heartbreaking moments of the series.
A big shout-out here goes to Hiroya Matsumoto, who brings some real gravitas to Jin's character in this scene. He drops all pretenses and sincerely cries his whole heart out, making every single word of his speech count as the others stand around in sheer confusion and grief at what Jin is about to do.
Apparently the Magi Yellow outfit can promote its actor to gold status (before Hiroya Matsumoto/Tsubasa returned as Beet Buster, Nic Sampson/Chip returned as the Sentinel Knight.)
Since the 'exporting' of Super Sentai internationally under the name Power Rangers is old news by now in Japan, the whole premise of Rangers protecting their world's power supply (the whole Enetron shebang) may have been Toei's attempt to create literal Power Rangers.
One old rumor before Go-Busters aired was that Gavan would be the teams mentor. Thirty episodes later, guess who appears? Well...Mind you, not the one we were thinking of.
Go-Busters being rife with references to Power Rangers, particularly "It's Morphin Time!", is hilarious when the source material for the franchise's progenitor appeared in Kyōryūger vs. Go-Busters.
One of the movies for this series concerns an Alternate Universe version of the team called Doubutsu Sentai Go-Busters. It would only be a few years later that an actual Doubutsu Sentai started making the rounds.
The controversy regarding the show being skipped in favor of adapting Kyoryuger as Power Rangers, after the announcement of Power Rangers Beast Morphers, which means that instead of being the first series since Dairangernot to be adapted, Go-Busters is now the first season to be adapted out of order.
Among all the Power Rangers references, fans compared the premise and villains to those of Power Rangers RPM in particular. Power Rangers Beast Morphers would not only feature cameos from RPM characters, but would be revealed to be a full blown Stealth Sequel in its final episodes, with Big Bad Evox being revealed to be a reincarnated Venjix.
Ho Yay: With Shelly and Yōko in episode 31 splitting desserts.
Love to Hate: Enter has proven to be quite popular amongst fans, who like him not only because of his enjoyment of being the bad guy, but also due to being a quite credible threat, being able to go toe-to-toe with the Go-Busters in fights and succeeding in several of his missions. His proving to be very clever and learning for his mistakes as the show moves on has made fans like him even more.
Memetic Loser: Hiromu will forever be remembered for freezing whenever he sees a chicken.
Their plan in Mission 3 pushes Messiah and Enter over this, as the Unwilling Roboticisation and near mass murder committed in the episode was outright said by Enter to be solely For the Evulz.
In Mission 44, Messiah takes a flying leap past it by assimilating Escape after his revival.
And in Mission 49, Enter enters irredeemable territory, assimilating an Enetron tank, turning it into a Megazord, along with dozens of innocent employees. He even attempted to absorb children! And his final plan has him doing this all over the world. As if we needed any more reason for him to be deleted!
Narm: Half the fanbase considers it Darker and EdgierDeconstruction. The other half of the fanbase is rolling their eyes at chickens and not eating enough candy being weaknesses.
Earlier impressions of the Commander Kuroki left with the sour taste in the viewers. It took his Hidden Depths to redeem him.
The core three Busters in general. With enough Character Development, they go from static characters to noticeably much more well-rounded and realized characters. Also, they become noticeably closer than before.
Retroactive Recognition: Go-Busters has been remarked outside of toku circles in later years as being the career debut of Arisa Komiya (Yoko) after she hit it big as an Idol Singer in the Love Live! franchise (she's Dia Kurosawa there).
Robo Ship: Usada and Yoko. Later, Yoko and J get paired up often.
Mission 29 reveals Enter and Escape are made up of the data of the scientists that disappeared into Hyperspace 13 years ago. Not only that, Messiah is revealed to have all of the scientists' data within his core, meaning that if the Go-Busters want to destroy him; they're going to have to kill the scientists as well - including their families.
Enter is revealed to be alive at the end of Misson 32, more dangerous than ever with his new Messiah cards.
J reveals in Mission 40 that some of Jin's data ended up in Messiah Card no.7, which is the same card that Enter uses to empower himself in his "Unite" form.
Misson 42 has Mega Zordloid transform into a Type Zeta Megazord, with Escape intent on making it the new Messiah.
Escape crushing Enter in Megazord Zeta's hands in Mission 43, sick of all of the schemes that she's had to put up with in order to get the job done.
Misson 44 has two. First, Messiah absorbs Escape into his body, seeing no use for her anymore.Near the end of the episode, we see that Enter managed to escape death once again, closer to his goals than ever before.
The five-part endgame is chock full of these.
Enter reveals near the end of Misson 46 that he can merge organic lifeforms with inorganic materials, which understandably makes the Go-Busters react in utter horror.On that note, Escape is back with a brand new form, but it's clear that she is not herself, being utterly loyal to Enter and only Enter.
The end of Misson 47 is a doozy, revealing that Hiromu is Enter's Soul Jar, as Enter implanted Messiah Card no.13 into his body back in Mission 33.
Enter becoming a Go-Buster in Mission 48.
In order to extract Card no.13 out of Hiromu's body, Jin decides to destroy his body so that he can live. And if you're wondering, they all decide to go through with it though much anguish and argument, believing that it will be the best choice to take down Enter once and for all.
Special Effect Failure: When in close-up shots, the Buddyroids' eyes just look like glow-in-the-dark stickers.
The Buddyroids (save for Beet J. Stag) are mostly underused aside of being mostly comic relief and as parts for the Powered Custom. They do get quite a few emotional moments with the core Busters though, so it's not all that apparent.
Reika promised she'd steal Hiromu's heart at the end of her episode. Too bad she never showed up again, letting us forever wonder if they would get together...
Messiah, the "supposed" Big Bad of the series, doesn't get much in terms of personality, other than being a tantrum-throwing, ill-tempered, power-hungry virus. The fact that the series focuses more on his Dragon-in-Chief Enter doesn't help things. Though that may be intentional seeing as how Enter become the true Big Bad during the later stages of the show.
They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Messiah's origin is never revealed. Being a computer virus, one would think that it'd be a man-made entity, and some speculation is made regarding its origins (perhaps the scientists at the facility, or even Hiromu's parents created it). It would have made for an excellent reveal during the late stages of the series, but it was never even hinted at or touched on.
Tough Act to Follow: Quite a few fans think Go-Busters is a great show, but had the misfortune of coming after Kaizoku Sentai Gokaiger, which was brimming with awesome. It's worse if you compare it to Kobayashi's previous Sentai, Samurai Sentai Shinkenger, where the cup runneth over with epic dramatic awesome every single episode.
Vanilla Protagonist: With the exceptions of Jin and J, the three core Go-Busters (Hiromu, Ryuuji and Youko) are this, since they didn't get much Character Development (at least, in comparison to some of Kobayashi's otherseries), even in their focus episodes, making themselves static characters in some of the fans' eyes.
Vindicated by History: The season has enjoyed a resurgence in popularity for the same reasons people derided it at first (being too different), especially from Kamen Rider fans and people disappointed with Kyoryuger, ToQger, and Ninninger. Further proof of Go-Busters' vindication was observed when the announcement of Power Rangers Beast Morphers was met with much rejoicing.
Visual Effects of Awesome: The special effects are really top notch within the series. Notable is the almost complete lack of stock footage, especially when the previous season was full of it. The fact that the effects still manage to hold up in recent times really says something.
What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?: Sure, the show still has its cartoonish moments in the form of the Buddyroids and the rangers' weaknesses (minus Ryuji) amongst others, but it's far more willing to delve into topics such as mass-murder, Murder-Suicide, and cyber-terrorism on a week-to-week basis. Even when there are multiple Hope Spots, the show is far more willing to do things that most Sentai nowadays wouldn't have the gall to do, such as killing off the heroes' loved ones and one of the team's members in order to render the main villain dead.
", the first opening, perfectly embodies the determined mindset of the team as they fight against Vaglass to avenge the people that disappeared 13 years ago. Despite being replaced by the more catchy and energetic "Morphin! Movin! Busters Ship!", it decidedly gets put in particularly exciting CMOAs, making the sheer catharsis of the scene that more sweeter.