Anime: Futari wa Precure Max Heart

The second installment in the PreCure franchise starts off completely unsure of where to go. Of course they establish some semblance of a reason to bring the girls back together, the premise is at best a thinly veiled excuse, and at worst a childish attempt at recreating the first season's success. For this reason, the 30 or so episodes are just drudging through the same boring "monster of the day" plot that made the first season as filled with filler episodes as it was. The later episodes get more exciting as the plot comes to its climax, however that doesn't help the fact that this is a children's show, and is created to be little more than that.

As we continue through the series the girls have little major development to their personalities and relationships, instead opting to piggyback on the developments from the initial series. This series' new protagonist, Hikari, offers the audience a new, third girl to watch the same transformation and attack sequence of, every episode, for 46 episodes. Granted, this was likely a smart move, since that makes gives each an entire 2 minutes they only have to animate and voice act for 2 or 3 times. Add in the OP, ED, and a 30 second Preview, and a 25 minute episode becomes only 19 and a half.

Now, this isn't to say the series is entirely bad. Granted the series gets a rough start, the latter episodes are by and large "okay". The monster of the day formula gets beyond repetitive and at times even seems inappropriate, however, the actual episode plots are quite nice, touching on subjects such as first love, being able to support family members without being a pain, and supporting friends making a large life decision without letting your own feelings go to the wayside. The last few episodes also ramp-up the anti when they begin to deal with concepts like coping with losing, and how even when someone's gone, as long as they're not forgotten, those feelings are what's important.

If I were rating only the latter half of this show I may consider rating is a 5, as a sort of "this is at minimum what anime should be", however for the purposes of review and due to just how drudgingly slow the first portion of this series are - setting a rather difficult slope to overcome, I can't bare to rate the series as more than a 4. There's certainly a lot of good things to take from this series, but, as I mentioned earlier, it's a kid's show with little ambition to go elsewhere with its time.