[DreamSword]

Heart Catch Pretty Cure!

Tonight I completed my third foray into the Pretty Cure franchise.

Heart Catch is one that I had a passing familiarity with going in, as it's often considered one of the best seasons in the entire franchise and responsible for giving the series a rather big newbie boom when it aired.

And just to get it out of the way, I will say that I don't think it's as good as Kira Kira or Hug. Infact I think it's a touch overrated?

Don't get me wrong, I do still think that the show overall is good and I had a good time watching it, but from what cursory reading I did around the internet, I do feel as though its reputation precedes it a bit. If you're going in expecting one of the greatest magical girl shows of all time, temper the expectation a bit.

From what I can tell, most of the praise the show tends to give comes from its third act, which is very good I will say, but it doesn't account for the rest of the show, which in my opinion, while good, isn't anything super incredible. Again, nothing wrong with that, but I myself was kinda unsure as to why this was considered one of if not the best season.

For example, one point viewers tend to give is the show's' "realistic/dark" scenarios it presents. And yes, they are there. But it's mostly in the later parts of the show, with most episodes actually being rather light and fluffy. Fun to be sure, but in terms of more mature subject matter it sort of doesn't compare to, say, Hug, which had depression and anxiety as running themes throughout almost the entirety of its run.

I also think that one thing that definitely threw me off when it came to comparison of the two shows that came before it is pacing. Now, the pacing in Heart Catch isn't exactly bad, but the advantage that a la Mode and Hug had over it was better utilization of the character arcs they had. Many an episode had to deal with a personal struggle of a member of the team, and as such even when the main "plot" wasn't exactly moving forward, it still felt as though progress was being made at a steady pace.

Heart Catch, meanwhile, definitely only brings up character arcs once in awhile and a good chunk of episodes are instead all about side characters who never appear again and aren't all that memorable, which in turn made it feel as though the show was coming to a dead stop at a handful of points. Heck, Chypre and Coffret, two of the mascot characters, are barely even characters in HC, especially in comparison to Pekorin from Kira and Harry from Hug, who had fully fleshed out arcs and multiple aspects to their characters and personalities. Heck, we learn basically nothing about the big bad!

But, all of that aside, Heart Catch does do what it does have to it rather well. Even if the arcs weren't as prominent, I did like most of the cast. It has one of the best movies in the franchise so far. The soundtrack goes incredibly hard. And most of the fight scenes are outstanding. It's also easy to see how this would be the show that would sow the seeds for alot of staples in the franchise going forward, whether or not one feels certain things are done better or not. It's also clear that the show did actually have a roadmap and that most of the plot wasn't exactly made up on the spot. Again, I did have a good time with the show, it just wasn't incredible to me.

As such, I give Heart Catch Pretty Cure a 4/6. It doesn't live up to the hype surrounding it nor does it have the big aspects I appreciated most about the previous two Cure seasons I've seen, but what it does have it does do rather well, and I can definitely see why it's commonly recommended as an entry point into the franchise as a whole. It's good, just don't go in expecting to be absolutely blown away by it.