Fresh Precure! 02:
If this is Moebius' plan to take over the world, he should just quit right now.
Another episode, another Cure, this time Aono Miki aka Cure Berry.
Well, what do we know about Miki? Basically, she's ostensibly perfect and has an uncomfortably-close relationship with her sickly brother, who many people accidentally mistake for her boyfriend. This was her intro episode.
I'm already reevaluating some of the statements that I made about the art style in the first episode, though I'm not convinced that it works for this show yet. The pencil sketch look is very prevalent, and I'm beginning to turn to the opinion that it actually looks good but it doesn't mesh with the character designs very well, which are much cleaner on the whole. Here's an example of a shot that was actually kind of visually interesting:
Another good sign for the show is that it's at least one-for-two on tolerable mascots. Chiffon is just a babby cuteblob doll thing, but Tart the weasel is actually more in the vein of Luna/Artemis, being an animal with full adult human cognition. He's generally exasperated and not particularly cute, which makes him sort of a much grumpier version of Cologne from
Heartcatch. Unfortunately, there are also little floating crystalline key-shaped things with big eyes that resemble the horrid Fairy Tones from
Suite, so I have no doubt that
Fresh is going to have its own share of annoying mascot shit even with the presence of a good character like Tart.
The Waka...Wakame...whatever the MotWs are called in this series are already second to the Desertrians in
Heartcatch in terms of creativity. They actually exhibit properties of the objects that they're created from. For example, in this episode, the monster was created from a soda machine and had the power to shoot various drinks from a giant hose as well as the power to launch flurries of cola cans Itano Circus-style. It was fairly fun to watch and makes up for the as-of-now dull attacks and battle choreography of the Precure. If the monsters had a more human shape, they'd pretty much just be Daimons!
Fresh Precure! 03:
Yamabuki Inori aka Cure Pine aka character who is destined to have the best scenes because she's the yellow precure. She works at (presumably her parents') veterinary clinic and loves animals. That's about it.
I think I have the names of the enemies down now. They're called Nakewameke, which is kind of a tongue-twister. I believe it simply translates to "screaming and crying". If nothing else, it gets the enemies' objective across. Nakewameke continue to be pretty cool, especially considering that this might be the first instance that I'm aware of in which a living creature is turned into a MotW in a Precure series:
It's only episode three and they're already fighting something that could pass for a boss in Dark Souls instead of telephones and toasters like most other Precures would. If Love and crew were in the Heartcatch universe they could fuck up Dune by episode ten at this rate and without the aid of plastic shit.
The line art in this show continues to be really uneven. What's the last anime you can think of that had
jaggies in it?
Fresh Precure continues not to be a looker, but it's showing signs of heart, at least.
Fresh Precure! 04:
This fucker
right here. You think you know horrible mascots, but you don't know horrible mascots. Meet Chiffon, a screaming, crying, sniveling, babbling, telekinetic (!) piece of shit who's only there to girly up the show and sell stuffed animals. I know that that describes
every mascot, but the others can actually communicate, at least. Chiffon doesn't even have enough language for an annoying verbal tick~kuru~nyapu nyapu~Ichuuukiiiii. As mentioned, he can also make stuff move with his mind, so I expect all sorts of really dumb hijinks over the course of the series.
My face after realizing I'm stuck with Chiffon for 46 more episodes.
To top it all off, the girls have to feed him with some kind of plastic device that looks suspiciously like a tamagotchi and poofs out bottles of milk. You mean that this show isn't going to rake in the yens selling juicers and doughnut makers?
The villains all have fairly good design.............for a Precure series. A high bar, I know. Wester looks like he could hold his own in a fight against that pinnacle of Precure villain masculinity Kumojacky, but that's an issue to be resolved in terrible fanfiction
that I'll probably write someday. Members of Infinity follow the usual Precure villain routine. Scour the immediate vicinity for happiness -> summon a monster when happiness is found -> get wrecked by little girls. These dudes (and one lady who I hope figures
very prominently into the series) at least manage to look not terrible while doing it. And when you're destined to lose, isn't that really all that matters?
