Delicious Party♡Precure

So, apparently my profession is being completely at odds with the so-called "internet fandoms" or "internet opinions", being those concerning comic books, tokusatsus, dragon ball animes and, last in the line, Pretty Cure series. Why, you might ask? because I don't understand what people see of wrong in this, exactly. This is what the original terrible manga by Naoko Takeuchi tried to do with the Sailor Moon franchise (regurgitating badly the Toei tokusatsus by meshing them with the shoujo and magical girls, something already tried by the terrible 70's Cutie Honey animated monster) just polished and perfected to an insane degree (it's the same company ... doing these Pretty Cures shows, go figure) in a way that it 100% works this time around from start to finish, something the 70's Kamen Rider of the franchise (Futari Wa) nor the terrible two series I've watched before getting into Kimi To Idol and this (Smile and Go Princess) did. There's also an insane amount of fanservice for the fans of the animated life-changing experience made from the horrible Naoko Takeuchi manga in the 90's, with particular attention to the Seiyuus of the sexy ASF Kokone and Amane trying to impersonate as much as possible the eternally relevant performances of the legendary Aya Hisakawa and Michie Tomizawa as Ami Mizuno/Sailor Mercury and Rei Hino/Sailor Mars while voicing character that are reminescent of them, so moonies should be confident to give this series a go more than they should give confidence to the completely useless SM remakes. The chara is great, the music is great, there are no ultraboring mary sues to speak of a là Go Princess Precure (URRAH!), everything is great...except for ONE THING ONLY, that being the Black Pepper character. As a person who understands the problem of characters with universal appeal mainly advertised from the source to women that are his favourites like Wonder Woman, I get why they did it. Still, this being a Kamen Rider/Super Sentai show with an all cast of beautiful women who are the reason why grown men like me watch these shows (thank you XXX fanart of Amane Kasai/Cure Final on Pixiv for convincing me to give this series a try, once again), the presence of a man doing rider jumps/rider kicks is distracting. I already have the Kamen Rider and the Super Sentais for me every week in that sense (I'm thinking of the last excellent episode of the reborn No. 1 Sentai Gozyuger and Gozyu Polar beating the shit out of the main monster of that episode with his own legs), another man in the middle of the action doing the same activity where the main attraction are the ladies serves nothing (which is the reason why they correctly sidelined the terrible manga Gary Stu Tuxedo Kamen in the 90's Anime, of all things). For the rest, watch this show and enjoy the hell out of it - possibly in tandem with the equal, in terms of being a Superhero fiction Masterpiece, my second favourite Rider of all times, Kamen Rider Geats, and with also very good Avataro Sentai Donbrothers show, all from this same year that served us this show - like I did and don't care one single bit of the MAL or any other site's ratings. You won't regret it.
As a side note, since I managed to do what I couldn't with Smile Pretty Cure (finishing and enjoying it plenty while also watching well-written episodes), you can be sure the fan-favourites (?) Kamen Rider Kabuto and Decade and the likes of Urutoraman Max and Urutoraseben X by, respectively, Shoji Yonemura and Yuji Kobayashi (the writers of Smile Precure) as well as single episodes of these two (episode 17 and 18 of my favourite Kamen Rider of all times, the Kiva, permitted) from now on will NEVER BE TOUCHED BY ME even under torture, since clearly the problem of that terrible show was in those two people, whose career in the toku and anime field again I strongly question. Thank you for reading my review.

For a score of 6.96 as of the time of writing this, which is lower than the usual pretty cure MAL score, this series doesn’t deserve the hate that it gets. Of course, everyone has different preferences, but this anime needs a higher rating. I will explain what I thought this precure entry did well, and what it didn’t do so well.

The story is similar to all of the other entries: a magical land gets attacked and three to four precures have to protect their world and the magical land, so I can’t really say much about the premise of this show. The spacing in ... between the cure debuts helped developed the friendships between each of the current cures, with the friendships between Yui (Cure Precious) and Kokone (Cure Spicy) getting more depth, and allowing Kokone to develop her social skills with the main cast. It also helped with Rosemary’s friendship with Yui.

While we are on development, I would like to note that while the show does develop relationships better, it has a flaw: It doesn’t have consistent character development. There is a big gap in the amount of development that Yui gets compared to Kokone and Ran (Cure yum yum), as well as the mid season cure, Amane (Cure Finale). Kokone gets the most amount of development because she is the only cure except Amane that gets a character flaw. Yui, our main leader, doesn’t get much character development because she isn’t given any flaws. She is portrayed as the usual genki girl protagonist, and pretty much only talks about how food brings smiles and quotes her grandma gave her.

As a matter of fact, her only development is the death of her grandmother when she was young. Ran gets some development as she learns to accept her uniqueness. Amane does get some too when it shows her transformation from a villain to a cure. But she is overall a flat character.

The art style of the anime is well done, and the way the eyes and hair shading were done was very different from most pretty cure seasons. This anime has one of the prettiest art styles. Character designs for both the civilian forms and cure forms were another strong point, but Amane/Cure Finale’s design was confusing. Colors were all over the place for her precure form and it was hard to identify her theme color, which turned out to be gold instead of purple.

The villains of the show were likeable, especially Narcistoru. The revealing of who was Godatz was unexpected and they could have introduced Godatz’s real form earlier.

The romance that Takumi had for Yui was very underutilized, and a waste of potential. There was a lot they could have done with the development of their friendship to potential lovers. I was disappointed that Takumi had never confessed. The entire idea of the romance was there to be there, and I wish they could have done more with it.

The food theme was utilized and it was great that the anime had shown how food brings smiles.

Overall, this show is a good entry to the precure franchise.

After the colossal disappointment that was Tropical Rouge Pretty Cure, once Delicious Party Pretty Cure was announced, I was like "PLEASE let this be good! PLEASE let this be better than Tropical Rouge!!!" Thankfully, to my relief, Delicious Party did go out of its way to address a lot of issues that TroPri had, though even as it is now, DeliPre still has a lot of issues of its own. The CooKingdom is the origin place of all cuisines from all around the world. However, because of a theft incident involving the sinister Bundoru Gang, a group of elusive phantom thieves, the kingdom's prized treasure, ... the Recipe-Bon, is gone. Three fairies of the CooKingdom must venture to Earth and meet three girls in order to reclaim the Recipe-bon from those phantom thieves. When they cross paths with Yui Nagomi in the town of Oishina City, they grant the little easy-going, vegetable-loving girl the power to become a Pretty Cure to combat the bandits, with her friends Kokone Fuwa, Ran Hanamichi, and Amane Kasai joining her in their cause. Together, they must defeat the Bundoru Gang and make sure food in general doesn't get erased out of existence.

I'll get the positives out of the way first, because there's a lot that DeliPre manages to do right that Tropical Rouge just flat-out didn't. In Tropical Rouge, the main narrative was that the villains stole people's energy and motivation and gave it to their leader, and the way it was presented there gave the series no real sense of tension. All it really resulted in doing was making people lazy, and as a result, the battles were about as boring as eating lunch, and there was literally no real conflict save for the very end. DeliPre addressed this in that its villains basically want to either steal food, make it taste bad, or make it disappear completely, which is shown to have very serious implications and consequences, especially if you think about it on a grander scale. They basically want to make people starve to death by erasing food completely, which makes for a far more compelling, palpable, and serious threat than just making people lazy. Granted, this is a children's show, so we know that everything's inherently going to be all hunky-dory at the end of every episode, but that doesn't change the fact that the villains' schemes here, if left unchecked, are inherently more threatening and compelling than TroPri's could ever hope to be.

It also helps that DeliPre actively spent quite a bit of time fleshing out its main plot, even if it didn't do so all the time. Again, TroPri had such a thin plot that it resulted in a lot of useless filler episodes that could have easily been used for other, more important things, like fleshing out any character that's not Manatsu or Laura. DeliPre remedies this issue by having several episodes dedicated to trying to figure out just what's going on, who stole the Recipe-Bon, and other things related to its plot, particularly in regards to several side characters, even if not all of those episodes manage to hit the mark. Points for trying! Speaking of characters, another issue TroPri had was that it not only gave so much screentime to Manatsu and Laura, it did so at the expense of the other Cures, who didn't even get relevant character arcs until over halfway into the series' run, with several not even getting so much as whole arcs. Poor Sango/Cure Coral. She deserved so much better. Plus, it didn't even try to flesh out or develop Manatsu beyond having her be an overexcited five-year-old who had too much sugar. DeliPre, while not doing it as well as other series, manages to flesh out not only the other Cures, but other side characters as well, giving them all their time to shine and compelling character arcs that actually make them feel more interesting than at first glance. Kokone and Ran especially wound up being more well-developed than I initially thought, with Kokone in particular being the most fleshed out of the cast, IMHO. The villains manage to do their job and are genuinely more threatening than the TroPri villains ever were, but barring Gentlu, their backstories could have used more fleshing out, and the resolution to Narcisstoru and Secretoru's plotlines seemed kind of...half-baked. But overall, the cast is much better this season.

...Though the producers might have gone overboard with trying to remedy TroPri's mistakes, because in their attempts to flesh out the other Cures and even some of the side characters, they completely dropped the ball on giving that same treatment to their main character: Yui. Not gonna lie, Yui literally has nothing to her beyond worshipping her grandma and her dumb catchphrase "Deliciousmile!" Any development she eventually gets is relegated to the finale, rather than having it naturally occur across the entire series or a lot earlier, and because she's basically spent the whole series relegated to the sidelines, any attempts to flesh her out come too little, too late for it to really have any real weight to her character. To be fair, I found Yui to be a lot less annoying than Manatsu from TroPri, but while TroPri had the problem of giving Manatsu a lot of screentime and not using it to flesh her out as a character beyond her one main personality trait, Yui has the opposite problem—she was constantly put on the back-burner in favor of the other Cures, and as a result, she comes off as bland and woefully underutilized. Even her friendship with Takumi doesn't get fleshed out enough. Speaking of Takumi, for all the show's posturing about him being a Tuxedo Mask-like figure for the Cures and helping them out, he was hardly ever relevant half the time, and was often excluded from the group except for when the girls could benefit from involving him in an activity outside of fighting. The series really should have made him more involved with the girls and the plot, and like Yui, a lot of his important character moments were shoehorned into the finale rather than having it happen across the entire series. On the flip side, you have Kome-Kome, one of the mascots, who the series tries to claim is more important than she actually is, and even gave her a lot of cool powers and focus episodes, but not only does her whole aging from a human baby to a teenage girl thing feel needlessly tacked on, but any development Kome-Kome gets doesn't really go anywhere, especially when all it results in is her being a MacGuffin for the Cures' power-up.

But mismanaged and underutilized characters aren't DeliPre's only problem. For God's sake, would it seriously kill anyone to NOT talk about JUST food for more than two seconds?! Seriously, I know food is the series' big theme and all, but it seems like every single thing in the characters' lives revolve around food and only food! They literally never talk about anything outside of food or show interest in anything besides food! It borders on being almost creepy in how obsessed these people are with food. People can have more than one interest, even if some aren't as strong as others! For example, Heartcatch Pretty Cure's big theme was fashion and flowers, but the characters in that show did have varied interests and lives outside of those two things, which gave them a lot of depth and additional layers to their personalities! Furthermore, later episodes in the show seemed to just either shoehorn in new elements that came out of nowhere or just flat-out pulled them out of their ass, with literally no foreshadowing or build-up whatsoever, along with falling apart at the finale and making no effort to resolve things in a meaningful manner.

So while Delicious Party Pretty Cure tried its hardest to rectify the mistakes Tropical Rouge Pretty Cure made, it's still plagued with plenty of its own issues, preventing it from being one of the better Pretty Cure series. But that doesn't mean there isn't anything to like about it, and is still a fairly cute show regardless. I am looking forward to Hirogaru Sky Pretty Cure after this, so you can rest assured I'll be watching that for sure, especially since it seems to be trying to break a lot of Pretty Cure conventions right out of the gate.