A relic of the eighties' multi-colored team anime, the recent Bandai DVD release Ronin Warriors, originally called Samurai Troopers, declares boldly that it is about a battle between good an evil. There's a twist. Five warriors have been granted special powers (an excellent idea) to combat the five evil minions (paired up nicely) of the Dynasty, headed by the evilest Master Talba (obviously someone to whom you would offer the cheap wine had he come to your dinner party with your cousin Olga).

The tale opens when a rift in the dimensional fabric allows an evil to seep into our world. Manifest in the form of a dark cloud looming above the city, the evil threatens mankind, a prognosis that comes with a line from a sage-looking octogenarian, "The world may very well end today." It seems all is lost until the appearance of a confident youth walking abreast a white tiger down the center of a crowded street (already a bad sign when the harbinger of salvation hasn't the sense to stay on the sidewalk). The geezer then changes his prognosis to the more optimistic, "The world may yet be saved." Limited sentence structure and the inability to hypothesize the shades of gray between the world ending and not ending, the old man pretty much sums up the first episode.

Not dropping a beat, the second episode picks up the battle, the good guys and bad guys combating each other armed with rivaling doses of bombast and zeal, spending more time announcing attacks than actually performing them. Flashing lights and crashing lightening belie the undeniable sluggish pace of the show. The pace is made even more arduous by the stilted dialogue, which, lacking flare or style, only services the story. Of course the story is merely a framework in which to feature battles, which exist to show off the design concepts, which entertains only the myopic imagination of a kind of person thoroughly committed to five man team warrior shows and thoroughly forgiving of derivative flavor.

The third episode gets a little more interesting only in that it focuses on a fight between the leader of the Ronin Warriors, Ryo, and one of Talba's henchmen, Anubis. Preceding this battle, Talba scatters the Ronin Warriors to various corners of the Tokyo metropolitan area (why he didn't do that in the first place taxes credulity). Ryo winds up in a Volcano, a colossal stroke of luck, let me tell you, considering that his armor suit happens to thrive on the power of fire. Slivers of character bleed out of Ryo as the challenges of an individual locked in dogged combat seem to bring out the more human elements of even the most grizzled warrior. This episode is also full of such useful strategic information such as A) an unprotected human falling into an active volcano probably won't survive, and B) beating evil requires the combined power of all five Ronin Warrior armors.

Episode four calms, turning to Ryo's search for the other four Ronin Warriors. And ample play is given to Mia and Yuri, the two civilian sympathy getters for the show (especially when Yuri returns to his home to find his parents missing, captured like everyone else in Talba's evil net).

Like the Pioneer release of Sherlock Hound, Bandai's Ronin Warrior release features the English language version on one side of the disc and the Japanese version on the reverse. The Japanese benefits from not being cast through the muddy filter of the Ocean Group's horrible ADR. However, it ails from having to deal with the exact same vacuous story. In either language, the script is chock full of elaborate, technical explanations of how the suits work, which would be great if this were an infomercial for the suits, but it ladens action in the throes of a pitched incursion against evil (this is the literary definition of evil, as embodied in such notable villains as Darth Vader and Colonel Kurtz, as opposed to the Bushese definition of evil as a country struggling for democratic independence from a totalitarian regime).

Ronin Warriors, as a colleague put it, is great for weekday mornings on local television stations, but the thought of purchasing the DVD with delusions that it deserves to share shelf space with your Citizen Kane, Godfather and Akira is reserved for only the most disturbed people that walk among us.