The player assumes the role of Ranger X, piloting a powered exoskeleton who leads the fight back for his home planet against the invading Rahuna forces.

[4] Ranger X was first project to be developed by GAU Entertainment (now Nex Entertainment), a Japanese video game developer founded by former Wolf Team staff, with both Toshio Toyota and Toshio Yamamoto serving as designers, with artist Ree Senfhu co-creating the pixel art, in addition of Yoshinobu Hiraiwa acting as composer and Noriyuki Iwadare creating the sound effects.

[8][9][10][11] Yamamoto claimed that the team created Ranger X with a lot of intuition without copying other titles, not wanting to be bounded with the need to imitate others, as their goal was to make a Sega Megadrive game of high-quality.

[9][11] Toyota stated GAU created custom software tools that allowed the team with pushing the hardware capabilities of the Mega Drive to its limits.

"[9][11] As Ranger X is an action-shooter game, Hiraiwa wanted exciting and lively sounds as a basis but he went towards a darker tone for compositions, leaning towards surrealism and energetic, which matched his personal view of the title.

[17] Similar sentiments were echoed in Sega Force Mega and GamePro, who felt that "the unique dual action of flying and riding a motorcycle gives this game a step up against over other shooters".

[3] Still, the game received recommendations from the majority of critics, with Mega concluding that "it's so chocka full of imagination, that you'll be left wondering why other shoot 'em ups are so repetitive".