Anime General Chat

Great to hear from you Suiisbestgirl. I've only gotten to see the Precure series that are legally streaming. I'm surprised to hear that DokiDoki, Mahoutsukai, and Kirakira are considered lesser seasons. I adored KiraKira. It was so well made. I don't have a "best" Precure per say. But the ones I love the most are Wonderful, Go Princess, KiraKira, and Fresh. The worst though is definitely You and Idol Precure. It's just so bland and most the characters try so hard to be cute and silly that they just come off as obnoxious. Tropical Rouge is pretty bad too,. Also my big terrible hot take is that Heartcatch was pretty bad. But I understand I'm in the minority on that one. I'm huge a magical girl fan so it's great to be speaking with you.

Great to hear from you Suiisbestgirl. I've only gotten to see the Precure series that are legally streaming. I'm surprised to hear that DokiDoki, Mahoutsukai, and Kirakira are considered lesser seasons. I adored KiraKira.  It was so well made.  I don't have a "best" Precure per say. But the ones I love the most are Wonderful, Go Princess, KiraKira, and Fresh. The worst though is definitely You and Idol Precure. It's just so bland and most the characters try so hard to be cute and silly that they just come off as obnoxious. Tropical Rouge is pretty bad too,. Also my big terrible hot take is that Heartcatch was pretty bad. But I understand I'm in the minority on that one. I'm huge a magical girl fan so it's great to be speaking with you.

Yeah I keep hearing that You and Idol Precure was really bad and thats a shame cause I liked some of the character designs in that one and was hoping it would be good. im not sure exactly where most people stand with mahoutsukai, some people like it alot, for me its the characters and all the yuri stuff between the 2 main protags, Ha chan was also awesome. I really liked how they had multiple transformations(although i wish cure felice did too, but i understand that would be a lot of work) and the way that would affect their attacks and whatnot, the topaz form in particular was really fun to watch with the way they could walk on stuff in air and then use the giant mallet, I really liked that form. and the special attack where they jump off the magic circle with the ruby transformation was really cool too. and the ending to that season, it also had maybe one of the best endings to a precure series. speaking of, while i personally loved heartcatch for how cartoony it was and how dark it got, i have a few complaints about it myself, in particular i think the ending and final villian was handled a bit dissapointingly.

 

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like it annoyed me a bit that cure blossom stopped Yuri from getting her revenge after just having witnessed the death of her father. i get its a kids show but still. glad she at least apologised to her after. also the fact that every tragic thing and character death only happen to cure moonlight. i feel so bad for her, like sure shes meant to be the edgy/cool/mature one of the group but it might have been nice if she wasn't the only one that lost something. and then of course the way that final fight ends, with them not actually beating up the main villian and then just hugging him instead, like of all the precure villians to redeem, this was not the one. the fact he was like this creepy shota with a lizard with him, i was expecting some transformation into a freaky monster they would have to fight, but instead he just turns bigger which was lame, really wish they had given us a proper finale, like one thing i like about the early seasons is that while the villians didn't have much depth and were basically just soulless monsters/darkness a lot of the time, at least that meant precure could actually kill the villians back then or be more violent haha.(cure black is still one of the coolest cures! with that being said heartcatch has some amazing episodes like that mothers day episode, i also really loved seeing the grandma transform and fight in the christmas episode, the villians had fun designs and there was a lot of really cool fight scenes. i also think the stuff prior to Yuris dad dying was awesome like the final battle between dark precure and cure moonlight, the fact that they actually were allowed to kill off yuris dad was surprising and i didn't think it was necessarily a bad idea it just felt like the villian got off way too easily considering and seeing Yuri go apeshit on him and start kicking his ass would have been amazing(they could still have cure bloom come in and stop her from killing him after that)I also think that erika is a really fun character, although i think i like hime sama from happiness charge even more. happiness charge i liked cause of the character growth of hime and the others, and some of the stuff with Megumin, although i do agree they probably could have done a bit more with the yellow cure since she really doesn't have much else other then the food thing, but honestly it doesn't bug me as much as it did others, and i really loved her giant clover meteor attack that just looks absolutely devastating haha.in general i liked how creative the show was with all the different attacks like Megumin having laser eyes or hime with the giant fists etc etc.

 since im watching them in order i haven't seen wonderful yet, but im glad you have Kirakira up there! i also liked it a lot and was kinda shocked to see people dislike it, maybe thats just on myanimelist though, you can never really trust peoples opinions over there. I think some of the complaints i can kinda get, the biggest one seems to be the fight scenes, its true there wasn't as many physical attacks and a lot of it devolved into just using their lasso thing to bind the enemies with, however i do seem to recall there still being some cool fights here and there(and i liked Aois giant ice fists) its definitely better then a lot of people think i would say, for me i wasn't too disappointed since while i do love some good fight scenes, the characters are even more important to me. and the villians in that season were great, even the ones that weren't as developed like the 2 that are seen more towards the end are still fun villian characters and with the way that the one villian would show up in his car, something about it gave me Ikuhara vibes(one of my favourite directors) in some of those later episodes like the disturbing episode where the world loses all its colour and everyone including the precure are emotionless. so yeah for me personally kirakira is probably up there as well and i really liked the characters, maybe some of them still could have been developed more but they were all fun characters honestly. 

I don't know if i have a "best" precure series either, there are usually some strengths and weaknesses ive found in each of them, like smile precure was super fun to watch but its got some episodes that just feel like weaker versions of yes 5! episodes and overall the girls don't have as much depth to them as the yes 5 girls, also the villians are so much weaker in that season(although the initial 3 bad guys are really fun, especially marjorina, also was not expecting her sexy younger form in some episodes LOL)

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i was disappointed in joker cause on the surface level he should be interesting, hes a total creep with some of the stuff he says but it feels like they really didn't do enough with him to make him remotely interesting unfortunately, not quite sure how to word it might have to chew on that more. but then for all the negative things i could say about smile precure, the thing is, its got some great animation, fun fights, fun characters(Cure Peace has some of my favourite precure episodes and easily carries the show for me, making it probably up there for precure series)
the thing with smile precure is despite my dissapointment over the potential it had and how sadly underdeveloped the green and blue cure are(we never get a green cure and then we finally get one and shes one of the least interesting cures ever argggh) every episode of it with its fairytale theme was really consistently fun and i couldn't help but enjoy it a lot 
oh also cure sunny is awesome, shes arguably not super interesting either but im a sucker for characters with an osakan dialect, her VA did a great job.
also that episode with the giant robot!!!

put some of that in spoilers just in case, but i don't think anything i said was really too spoilery, just mentioned some specific episodes i liked and being disappointed with one of the villians in it.

i guess smile isn't on streaming services, probably just glitter force unfortunately, and from what ive heard that version removes several episodes entirely while also changing a lot of things, including the endings. im not a big fan of 3d, i was sad when the precure endings changed from 2d to 3d, but usually the precure 3d endings actually look pretty good or at least okay. in smiles in particular i think they looked pretty good for 3d from what i recall, but then in glitterforce they replaced those perfectly good endings with garbage ones for some reason. oh but one thing that bugs me about go princess, its a great precure series but i really didn't like the way the 3d looked in that one, it was super creepy/uncanny valley with the characters faces/smiles, no clue what the heck went wrong there. i think the 2nd ending in particular was quite egregious with the weird smiles. hated that ED so much XD

im sad to hear tropical rouge is apparently bad, but for some reason i don't believe it. maybe im just in denial. i think im just looking forward to that one for the mermaid theme so hopefully ill still like it. so far i don't think there is a season i dislike, the closest might be futari wa precure max heart, cause i felt like it didn't really need another 50 episodes, at the same time i dunno if more nagisa and honoka is something i would complain about now, ill have to rewatch it again sometime, theres a lot of things in those first two series i appreciate because of how different it is from later series, but at the same time when i first watched it i was still not used to the episodic format with the monsters of the weak and whatnot, and i do think that later series did improve on some things(though i do miss certain things that are gone from later precure series too, for one i like that in futari wa being a precure was seen as something getting in the way of honoka and nagisas daily lives and they weren't exactly thrilled about having to put their lives on the line to fight evil, which makes sense. there was also a lot of fighting over stupid things that happened between the 2, which made sense and made them feel more human/real, in that way the newer series feel more lighthearted and cartoony/"anime" whereas some of the older ones feel a bit more dramatic and heavy at times for better or worse.)

 
Fresh is definitely one of the better ones too id say, i really enjoyed it a lot and im a sucker for a villian turned good arc and setsunas arc was awesome.some really fun episodes too, it really did feel like a breath of fresh air as they tried some new things with it.

the other one i hear is bad is delicious party, so im a bit worried about that one not being great since its also one of the few remaining series that i haven't watched that doesn't look/sound remotely interesting to me so far. i think people are also kinda mixed on star twinkle precure but at least i can keep my expectations a bit lower.

I think with Dokidoki a lot of people didn't like mana and consider her to be a mary sue, and also cure sword for some reason, or

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aguri who does perhaps come off as a bit of an asshole at first XD. or maybe the way the show focuses on mana and regina so much but then takes regina out of the second half up until the end of the show, replacing her with aguri. personally while i was a bit sad by that shift in the second half, I really enjoyed doki doki a lot, I think its got some fun characters and villians(also one of the villians is voiced by the voice of Luffy!) and i really like Regina as a character.

it was cool to have a precure series that was more plot focused, and i think that also might have inspired happiness charge a bit with its direction feeling a bit more focused, which was another one of my favourites i think. oh also the regina x mana stuff in doki doki might be the most blatantly yuri the series has ever been, well other then mahoutsukai and cure chocolate/macaron in kira kira.

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Happiness charge has the precure killer, who i thought was a pretty dang cool and disturbing precure villian giving he basically puts them in these coffins in this other dimension if i recall. Himes guilt over opening the box and feeling responsible for everyone having to fight as precure and then cure fortune being upset with her and causing her to have to admit to the others what happened was a really interesting arc and it had some nice development with fortune realising it wasn't all himes fault and ultimately forgiving her after seeing how hard shes working to set things right. episodes like that were fantastic IMO. also while i agree blue is really lame/pathetic i almost find it funny just how incompetent/pathetic he is. hes supposed to be some sort of god but hes super irresponsible and largely responsible for whats happening yet has to have these girls fight on his behalf. and then his edgy brother isn't much better, but i still loved those final fights between megumi and red and whatnot. and the stuff with megumi and seiji was also interesting and yeah i dunno, while happiness charge has its flaws i just can't see it as a bad precure series, i get some of the things people don't like about it(there was also a fair amount of dissapointment about the precures across the world not being utilised more, whereas i just thought it was cool when we did get an episode or 2 focused on them, like the one where they help out the precure from hawaii)

whoops i typed to much again. the TLDR version is, I disagree with a lot of opinions, these are mostly things ive heard people say on youtube videos and the myanimelist episode discussions and whatnot, so take it with a grain of salt. for Happiness charge, i can see why people dislike it but i still disagree, same with Kirakira, i like a lot of precure series despite its flaws since usually there are a lot of other things it does right to make up for it. something like smile is interesting because looking at it critically you would think i wouldn't like it that much, but inspite of having some big negative points in certain areas for me, i think its got a lot of really fun episodes, and it ended up being maybe one of the most enjoyable precure series for me even. somehow so far there hasn't  been a single precure series i outright disliked, and im hoping ill still like tropical rouge since its got the whole mermaid theme. 

with that being said, i hope they add the rest of the precure series up on streaming platforms soon, and if you haven't seen splash star yet, you should check it out, id say its one of the best, its got some great characters and the battles are amazing, probably one of my favourite endings to a precure series too up their with mahoutsukai and kirakiras. takes about episode 7 though to start getting really good, first villian is kinda whatever but they get better after that. design wise saki and mai might look a lot like honoka and nagisa from futari wa, and they do have some surface level similarities, but they are quite different from them ultimately. its definitely one of the strongest precure series id say.

This is fun. For what it's worth I think Delicious Dinner party is okay. It starts out strong and does a lot of good stuff it just had some problems at the end. I actually think it's above average for last few years of Precure, which have been mostly bad. If you like mermaids I'm happy to report the mermaid character in Tropical Rogue, Laura, is a hoot. She is a great character. The problem is the show would rather be about a mermaid girl making human friends and going to school, forming a club, etc, than being a magical girl series. There's nothing wrong with being slice of life, the problem is a solid slice of life story keeps taking intermissions to do Precure stuff that the series clearly doesn't give a shit about and is phoning in. But, because of those few wasted minutes of Precure stuff, most of it stock footage, the slice of life plot rarely reaches a truly good ending, the interruption wastes time and kills the flow of the story. It's so bad in one episode the general makes a monster out of a half eaten breakfast roll. That's how little anyone cares.

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I did really like Mahou Precure. It is a lot of fun. I really enjoyed that the supporting cast got to be reach and nuanced. Too often in Precure if you're not a lead (aka a toy we can sell) you get a one note personality, maybe a catch phrase and that's it. You are there to fall in pies and scream and nothing else. So I appreciate it so much when we get better. I actually liked the action in Kira Kira because it was different and was still well executed. I don't care if they're not punching and kicking if the scenes are still creative. It's still better than a lot of seasons that just rely on power-ups because there are toys to be sold. I also agree even if the action was bad, which it isn't, the story and characters are more than worth it.

TamazingRandom: Have you ever seen the live action 90's Sailor Moon? I think I might like it now that I like toku. lol, also another thing about sentai over Kamen Rider so far in ways, is that they usually have some cute female characters. So that would bode well for me and Sailor Moon I think.

I'm not sure I'd have the time to ever catch up on Precure or dive in. But it really is a strong popular series. I liked Heartcatch a lot, since it was in the same animation style as Casshern Sins. Sadly I thought Saint Seiya Omega was pretty bad...

Inyouchuu Lover since ~2005~

I love the live action Sailor Moon, I apologize if you already answered this, but have you ever seen Sailor Moon before? I want to start there before I say anything else.

Yeah we talked about it. I stopped after Sailor Moon SuperS since Sailors looks and sounds pretty bad. lol

Inyouchuu Lover since ~2005~

Okay, then you would definitely like Pretty Guardian, the live action. It's a really well told story with great performances. Though sadly you can tell it was capped by the budget in a few places.

dang do people really not like the final season, sailor stars? I thought it was great! its also a nice conclusion to the series, the ending is great. and the first arc, while short, i thought was really good as it follows up on some stuff from the previous season. as for the live action i need to watch that too, i hear really good things about it so ive been meaning to check it out for awhile now. what was your favourite season of sailor moon Eschelon V? for me it would probably be R, and then SuperS might be tied with Stars, and then Super might actually be my least favourite overall? the first season has that crazy ending to it.

• also the slice of life stuff was a much bigger part of some of the earlier precure seasons, and personally i thought it helped develop some of the characters more and make it feel a bit more grounded, like of course these girls still have lives outside of just fighting evil all the time. so im hoping ill really enjoy the bigger focus on the slice of life moments in tropical rouge, and i guess that will ultimately come down to how much i like the characters. with that being said the current precure series ive been watching, hugtto, seems like it has really good characters already and while i don't want to set my expectations too high i can't help but think if it can keep up the current level of quality it could end up being one of the best precure series so far.

• star detective has been fun, im not sure if maybe it will get worse in the second half, as i feel like a lot of series tend to potentially get either better or worse in the second half(and i do think sometimes some series could benefit from a slightly shorter run time, as 50 episodes is a lot!) but one thing i already appreciate about it is how the simple little mysteries in each episode are so far at least actually solvable by the audience using logic instead of just having the answer be something that you never could have figured out because they never gave you clues to work with (that newer sherlock show with benedict humberbatch or whatever his name is again) I really hated that sherlock show because it was not a good mystery show at all, since it uses that stupid "mystery box" style of writing(which basically just lets the writers pull whatever they want out of their ass, whenever they want, and thats a big problem for me in a show thats supposed to be about solving mysteries/cases, the audience should be able to try and figure out what happened beforehand, and the writer should be able to set up the proper logic for some audience members to plausibly reach that conclusion while maybe throwing in some red herrings along the way to throw them off track, and yet with the way Sherlock was written it just came off as the writer being very condescending and arrogant, trying to make the audience feel/look stupid, and i absolutely hated it for that. felt downright insulting to the audiences intelligence.), and while i don't want to go off on a tangent about it now(whoops somewhat too late, i went back and added a bunch of specifications about why i hate that style of writing at least), I just find it funny that star detective precure is a much better written mystery show, despite being written for kids and not having amazing writing, it at least respects the audiences intelligence and gives them a chance to logically figure out what happened and how before revealing the answer. compared to this show that was so popular when it came out and was supposed to be like a sherlock holmes thing, yet completely failed to capture what usually makes stuff like murder mystery shows interesting in the first place. anyways the fact that even a simple show like star detective precure got that right where sherlock couldn't, is really funny to me and im glad they took the route they did, and was pleasantly surprised, and hopefully they continue in that direction of having fun little mysteries to figure out in each episode with multiple suspects who might have "stolen thing x" but of course one of them is one of the phantom villians in disguise, but the fact you still get to figure out who did it on your own like an actual detective show is awesome, i was worried the whole detective theme would end up feeling more tacked on then anything.

Well I should never say never, maybe I'll check out Sailors sometime. I just don't know how I feel about a big new cast. For SuperS, I like Chibiusa, but I'm not sure if she was main character caliber and all the other girls took a backseat. I know a lot of people love S for Neptune and Uranus who were amazing, but yeah I think I'm team R myself for my favorite. Had the coolest villains and was a big improvement on season 1 I think pacing wise and all.

Inyouchuu Lover since ~2005~

Well I should never say never, maybe I'll check out Sailors sometime. I just don't know how I feel about a big new cast. For SuperS, I like Chibiusa, but I'm not sure if she was main character caliber and all the other girls took a backseat. I know a lot of people love S for Neptune and Uranus who were amazing, but yeah I think I'm team R myself for my favorite. Had the coolest villains and was a big improvement on season 1 I think pacing wise and all.

thats understandable, i went into SuperS knowing it seemed to be a lot of peoples least favourite but I ended up liking it a lot, I think for me

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seeing the dynamic between Usagi and Chibi Usa as mother and daughter fighting side by side was really sweet. I also really liked the badguys in that season, with fisheye being really funny and tiger-whats his name and what not, those 3 were interesting, i found it disturbing the way they would violate peoples dreams by pulling the dream mirror out of their chest and forcibly looking into their dreams while the poor women or men screamed in a strangely suggestive way lol. like id say it was a pretty dark season for that. the way they were written it seems like they had some pretty toxic ideas of how relationships worked as they never had any good role models in their life growing up. Despite Ikuhara probably not having as much involvement with SuperS and leaving by stars, in a lot of ways SuperS and Stars sometimes felt to me the most like something from that director out of all the sailor moon series. also the ending to SuperS where Usagi jumps off the building to save Chibi Usa made for quite a dramatic and exciting finale. also while it would have been nice to have more episodes focused on the other girls we already had plenty of episodes at that point so i was okay with seeing the focus shift a bit personally.

S definitely has some good moments, but i like the villians in R more,

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and i found that arc with the villians coming from the future and whatnot interesting. Not to mention Chibi Usas evil future counterpart, Black Lady! Neptune and Uranus are great though, but I was pretty disappointed that we barely got to see any of sailor saturn, also the whole season built up to the stuff with her being some world destroying threat which was cool and all but then the ending felt so anticlimactic with Usagi just going into that thing and coming out, no big battle against an evil satun or nothing dang it. so yeah just wish we got more of sailor saturn in general cause out of all the sailor moon characters i feel like shes the one we get the least of usually, and at least i seem to recall her getting a bit more screen time in that final season, also it does some interesting things and really does feel like a proper conclusion to the series as a whole, the final episodes are awesome and i really do recommend watching it. its also the shortest season with only 36 episodes I think? the first arc is about 6 episodes if i recall and then the rest is the final arc, very solid season IMO! As for the cast, i don't think its much bigger? its mostly focused on the main characters, sure theres the 3 new guys but you still get to see more episodes with the main 5 girls still being the main focus and the 3 guys hanging out with them as well, the episodes are honestly pretty strong still from what i remember and they do a good job building up the new characters(who have a lot of plot relevance for being there) while not taking away time or attention from the other characters. I think from what i recall theres not as much of a focus on Chibi Usa and Mamoru/tuxedo mask, so maybe that kinda helps.