Fresh Precure!

It's time to review Fresh Precure! Another fantastic season and the one to praise for introducing a successful formula that most later entries followed in terms of villains and story.

The story this time is set in Clover Town Street, a very cheerful place where the main characters live. After the protagonist of this entry, Love, gets involved in the attack of the enemies from this story during a performance of the unit band Trinity, becoming a Precure in the process, she and her friends will have to fight to save the world from a bad ending.

The cast of Fresh is one of the strongest from ... the franchise IMO, this time the main trio (the cheerful and passionate for dancing Love, the kind and animal lover Inori and the fashion fan Miki) were already friends from before the start of the series and they really felt like a group with their interactions. Due to what happened at the start they also started to practice dancing with the help of the leader of Trinity and that gives them another point to work hard together that gets really nice use through the story.

While the main trio is solid (although I'm not that big on Miki, who honestly suffered from lack of spotlight) and I really like Love, it's with the fantastic side cast that the series really shines. The main villain trio of the story for example are characters I grew to love a lot. Wester is a super goofy character that delivered tons of laughs with his personality, Soular is the serious business one of the group that gave great challenges to overcome for the Precure with his plans, and lastly there is my favorite chracters of this entry: Eas, who had an incredible and emotional arc that I absolutely adored. The story does a great job showing the place and situation this characters come from and it's hard to not grow to love them as the episodes pass, maybe even more than the main trio.

And I still have to mention other great side characters like Daisuke, who is a great love interest for Love and forms part of some of my favorite episodes of this entry with the focus on those two, and the mysterious Kaoru, who gives as many laughs as donuts he sells. This entry also has two of my favorite mascots with Tarte and Chiffon, the first feels very different to the usual mascot as Harry from Hugtto did due to his personality, and Chiffon is really freaking adorable. I can perfectly understand the dislike for baby characters (I'm not that big on them either) but this one particularly stood out in the positive side, being 99% aww 1% cry.

Now it's time to talk about the art and music, Fresh is actually the entry that looked the least appealing to me visually from the few info I saw from each before starting, but I ended up being pleased with what I got even if I liked others more. The color palette of this entry is less colorful than usual, and while this entry had good quality overall, it rarely stood out as others did with fights outside of two or three very nice moments. The transformation scenes and stock footage attacks are solid although I feel that this entry suffered from the second ones being too long. Overall it could definitely be better but it was consistently good. When it comes to the music, this entry has one of my favorite transformation songs and nice OP and EDs, that together with some nice songs through the episodes made me satisfied on that department.

Fresh Precure is one of the best choices for first Precure to watch thanks to the great execution of the formula and the lovable characters it has, I really recommend to give it a chance!

The themes remind me of the thought of communism, which is giving up individual personality traits, for an "ideal" life (Labyrinth vs Pretty Cure) and it can be a pretty difficult subject to broach, especially in a kid's anime. I think technology was definitely an important theme, as it emphasized how machines are meant to be top quality, instant results types of things, but it sacrifices individuality: memories, the ability to make a lasting impression on your or someone else's life. I could probably write an entire essay on the topic of Fresh Precure alone, but I'll try to keep it brief. First off, Eas' ... arc. While I think that Splash Star was pretty good on Michiru and Kaoru learning the error of their ways, this was a huge jump from that, one might even argue a jump that, if done wrong, could not only be a bad story arc, it could even create unintentional themes of negative consequence Precure didnt mean to dive into (i.e., that it's okay to cause destruction and chaos as long as you apologize, etc.) I am happy to say that Precure did a great job not only emphasizing, but understanding the morals behind Eas decisions, her motivations. The season finale in my opinion has been a slow boil from episode one, although a moment never felt dull here. It's great that Moebius' arc is essentially caused by humans, since this is a realistic theme of humanity to advance and evolve.
Precure also did an outstanding job in taking the piss out of themselves: making fun of their own tropes and themes from past seasons, things that have seemed contrived from out of nowhere (such as the theming of seasons themselves; Flora barely had a part in her own season finale despite the entire adventure being about the Cure Rose Garden), and even the subversion of typical monsters-of-the-day into HELPERS-of-the-day, which I believe is a first in magical girl history to subvert this trope in this type of way. My point is, Fresh knew exactly what they wanted to get out of this show going in, and as a result they were able to build up not only tension, but make important moments completely iconic without wasting time. This is why no episode got a 1: they were extremely careful with not only giving characters time to build up and develop, but how they develop. Take Miki, a typical fashionista sterotype, who had to confront her fear of octopi and had the help of Setsuna, and managed to fight an octopus monster alone. Or Buki, who had a semi-irrational fear of ferrets that actually strengthened her and Tart's bond to the point I'd say she and Tart were closest by even midseason. Not even a single side character annoyed me this season, nobody who I wanted to throw in the Delete Hole, not even the crushes or even Kaoru. In my opinion, this is peak Precure: it has hit its Golden Age.

I finally made it to Season 6. Let's begin!

Visuals:
1) not much difference from last season
2) I didn't enjoy the transformations sequences compared to previous seasons
3) characters look more like 16 year olds than 14 year olds. It's just 2 years but in puberty 2 years is a lot
4) there's a few continuity errors. This is better explained with an example. On the 3rd episode, a character and a dog go play in a water area where the water level reaches this character's ankles. A few minutes later, we get to see an actual truck fall in and it sinks completely.
5) inconsistent ... animation, sometimes sloppy


Sound:
1) top notch casting as usual for most roles
2) dialog and animation aren't always in sync
3) it's much more enjoyable when cutesy characters aren't voiced by male seiyuus forcing their throats to give us a very high pitched sound
4) soundtrack is forgettable

Story and characters:
1) I was super into this up until episode 12. It felt somewhat fresh (no pun intended) and it was pretty funny, too. However, the vast majority of the episodes after that it so predictable, boring and repetitive that my interest and level of enjoyment died down. It felt like every episode was the same. 50 episodes is too much for this type of show.
2) There's this guy character that's meant to be a love interest for one of the girls. He's pretty annoying and I can't relate or sympathize with him. However, this guy confesses his feelings for this girl and because the world is going into chaos, they postpone the answer. Finally the world is back to normal and... THE GIRL TELLS HIM "I'm not going to answer!!! :D" as if it's an acceptable response. This ruined what was being a very average ending to this season.


So, despite the promising start, it still ended up being a disappointment. It's a 6/10.