Gosei Power Kaihoki Tensouder

The Tensouder is the key to unlocking the Goseiger’s power. Through the use of the Gosei Card system, the Goseiger can summon weapons, initiate attacks, activate their armor, and call forth the Gosei Machines. Additionally, the Tensouder acts as a communication device between other Goseiger and the occupants of Gosei World (provided, of course, that the Heaven’s Tower is intact).

To scan a Gosei Card, you pull down on the ‘jaw’, which opens the mouth. Then a Gosei Card can be placed inside the mouth. When the mouth is closed, the Tensouder will announce the card’s name and a unique sound effect will be heard. The red LED flashes when the mouth is opened, and when a card is placed inside.

When the Tensouder’s mouth is opened, the eyes will automatically shift from green to red!

The Goseiger share some Gosei Cards, but others are specific to either the individual or their tribes. For example, while each Goseiger has the same Combine Card for the Tensou Gattai Gosei Great giant robo, their Change Cards look and function the same, but are customized to the individual. Just about every single toy in the “Tensou Sentai Goseiger” series has a minimum of one Gosei Card, so no two are duplicated. To get you started on your collection of Gosei Cards, five are provided here, mostly focused on Gosei Red. Along the back of each Gosei Card is a category, explaining the function of the card. The Tensouder will announce the category before speaking the name of the specific card. (The category of any Gosei Card can be found along the back of the card.) Four of the categories are represented in the Tensouder set: Change, Summon, Explosion, and Combine.

CHANGE – Goseiger (Specifically, activates Gosei Red’s henshin sequence) (Card #001)

SUMMON – Skick Sword (Gosei Red’s personal weapon) (#006)

SUMMON – Gosei Dragon (Gosei Red’s Gosei Machine) (#010)

COMBINE – Gosei Great (This Gosei Card is shared by all five Goseiger) (#012)

EXPLOSION – Skick Power (Gosei Red’s TwisTornado attack) (#014)

After each Gosei Card is announced, a unique sound effect plays which is paired with the red LED.

2010 marks the first time in the Super Sentai Series where cards are utilized as part of the toyline and TV series rather than as a separate entity of play (such as its predecessor, the Rangers Strike collectible trading card game). This gimmick extends beyond the toy line, however … Across Japan, the Super Sentai Battle: Dice-O game has been created. In addition to encouraging simply collecting the Gosei Cards for tabletop games between two or more players (hence the extra numbered stats across the bottom of the Gosei Cards, which have no function in the TV series), all Gosei Cards can be taken to real video arcades, and inserted into specially-designed gaming machines. Using the barcode atop each Gosei Card, the game machine recognizes each card uniquely and will affect the action on the screen! While cards began being distributed in late 2008 (during the run of “Engine Sentai Go-Onger”), they could not be used until 2010. To promote the arcade experience further, the “Goseiger” character Datas was specifically designed to resemble the real arcade machines when in his Standby Mode (and can also read a few Gosei Cards as well)! By itself, using cards to convey special techniques and summon fantastic creatures has become a standard in Japan game play; “Pokémon” and “Yu-Gi-Oh” just to name some of the more popular ones that have migrated successfully to the United States. I find no problem with this, even though I’ve never wanted any cards. (Well… that’s not entirely true- I do want just a few from 2004’s “Kamen Rider Blade”.) While I believe that it was about time that Super Sentai broke into the card-playing arena (no pun intended), I don’t think that this was as successful a debut as it could have had, and that’s mainly because of the other gimmick included in “Tensou Sentai Goseiger”: head-swapping mecha. Having one collecting gimmick is challenging enough, because you have to force yourself into getting sets that you don’t really want in order to get the collectible item that you do, but to have two in the same series, which have no real relation to each other? (Oh, by the way- what kind of effed -up gimmick is swapping robotic animal heads anyways???) Go one way or the other, PLEX, but don’t go both ways at the same time because they’ll detract from each other! Not to compare Super Sentai to another franchise made by the same companies too much, but the thing I liked about “Kamen Rider Blade” (aside from the TV series as a whole) is that each Undead suite card could be used in conjuncture with another to make unique character-signature attacks, and the card-reading device for each Kamen Rider was different, even if how they were used was the same. (By the way, I would like to get only the Garren Rouser for just that reason…) Each Undead card was unique, and no two were similar, except perhaps in the cards used for henshin (if I remember correctly, those were all Two of [Suite] for each Rider). There are already dozens of Gosei Cards, and most of them do exactly the same thing while simply looking different. For example: if you put any of the five Change cards into this toy, they all produce the same sound. Also, they’re really picking this summoning thing to death- not only are their cards to summon the Gosei Machine mecha, but also for the Headders that make up those mecha as well! (So far as I know, every ”Goseiger” toy has a minimum of two Gosei Cards. By the end of summer alone, I wouldn’t be surprised if we passed 52 cards.) I mean, talk about overkill…! While I was not planning to get this toy, it is somewhat required if you want to know what all those Gosei Cards sound like (without watching the show). If you’re interested in collecting Gosei Cards, then you probably need this set just to get those five cards. For the most part, it’s not a bad toy by itself. I like how the eyes change when the mouth is opened and closed. The voice heard is not only the same one from in the show, but it’s the voice of Master Head and the series’ narrator (Ikuya Sawaki). I have no real complaints, other than that the volume is a hair too high… again (though not as bad as on the Souken Gasshin Geki Sabers from 2007’s “Jyuken Sentai GekiRanger”), and there isn’t any audible/visual warning to let you know the toy’s power is still on. Why is it that when you open the mouth, it always says “Gotcha!”? (I suppose it’s better than a consistent ringing or beeping, which has been known to get really irritating in the past… but why that word?) Also, mark my words: the bottom of all these Gosei Cards are going to get bent and torn up really fast the more you run them past that little clip inside. Nice to have the clip, but I wish it wasn’t quite as tight as it is now. The one thing I’d like to know is just how the toy reads these cards to begin with! The barcode atop is clearly meant for the arcade machine’s laser scanner, but such a device would be prohibitively expensive for a toy. The cards aren’t notched, or have holes punched in them. I even ran them under a blacklight and found no special markings. I must confess, I’m impressed that they were able to do that! The only reason I got the Gosei Power Kaihoki Tensouder is because I could scan the cards in my video reviews to demonstrate them for you- the readers and watchers of CollectionDX.com and YouTube (which is becoming an expensive-if-necessary habit). It’s good at what it does, but if the card-collecting gimmick for the whole series had been a little better thought out, I might have appreciated it more. Two out of five stars.