Delicious Party Pretty Cure

After the colossal disappointment that was Tropical Rouge Pretty Cure, once Delicious Party Pretty Cure was announced, I was like "PLEASE let this be good! PLEASE let this be better than Tropical Rouge!!!" Thankfully, to my relief, Delicious Party did go out of its way to address a lot of issues that TroPri had, though even as it is now, DeliPre still has a lot of issues of its own. The CooKingdom is the origin place of all cuisines from all around the world. However, because of a theft incident involving the sinister Bundoru Gang, a group of elusive phantom thieves, the kingdom's prized treasure,the Recipe-Bon, is gone. Three fairies of the CooKingdom must venture to Earth and meet three girls in order to reclaim the Recipe-bon from those phantom thieves. When they cross paths with Yui Nagomi in the town of Oishina City, they grant the little easy-going, vegetable-loving girl the power to become a Pretty Cure to combat the bandits, with her friends Kokone Fuwa, Ran Hanamichi, and Amane Kasai joining her in their cause. Together, they must defeat the Bundoru Gang and make sure food in general doesn't get erased out of existence. I'll get the positives out of the way first, because there's a lot that DeliPre manages to do right that Tropical Rouge just flat-out didn't. In Tropical Rouge, the main narrative was that the villains stole people's energy and motivation and gave it to their leader, and the way it was presented there gave the series no real sense of tension. All it really resulted in doing was making people lazy, and as a result, the battles were about as boring as eating lunch, and there was literally no real conflict save for the very end. DeliPre addressed this in that its villains basically want to either steal food, make it taste bad, or make it disappear completely, which is shown to have very serious implications and consequences, especially if you think about it on a grander scale. They basically want to make people starve to death by erasing food completely, which makes for a far more compelling, palpable, and serious threat than just making people lazy. Granted, this is a children's show, so we know that everything's inherently going to be all hunky-dory at the end of every episode, but that doesn't change the fact that the villains' schemes here, if left unchecked, are inherently more threatening and compelling than TroPri's could ever hope to be. It also helps that DeliPre actively spent quite a bit of time fleshing out its main plot, even if it didn't do so all the time. Again, TroPri had such a thin plot that it resulted in a lot of useless filler episodes that could have easily been used for other, more important things, like fleshing out any character that's not Manatsu or Laura. DeliPre remedies this issue by having several episodes dedicated to trying to figure out just what's going on, who stole the Recipe-Bon, and other things related to its plot, particularly in regards to several side characters, even if not all of those episodes manage to hit the mark. Points for trying! Speaking of characters, another issue TroPri had was that it not only gave so much screentime to Manatsu and Laura, it did so at the expense of the other Cures, who didn't even get relevant character arcs until over halfway into the series' run, with several not even getting so much as whole arcs. Poor Sango/Cure Coral. She deserved so much better. Plus, it didn't even try to flesh out or develop Manatsu beyond having her be an overexcited five-year-old who had too much sugar. DeliPre, while not doing it as well as other series, manages to flesh out not only the other Cures, but other side characters as well, giving them all their time to shine and compelling character arcs that actually make them feel more interesting than at first glance. Kokone and Ran especially wound up being more well-developed than I initially thought, with Kokone in particular being the most fleshed out of the cast, IMHO. The villains manage to do their job and are genuinely more threatening than the TroPri villains ever were, but barring Gentlu, their backstories could have used more fleshing out, and the resolution to Narcisstoru and Secretoru's plotlines seemed kind of...half-baked. But overall, the cast is much better this season. ...Though the producers might have gone overboard with trying to remedy TroPri's mistakes, because in their attempts to flesh out the other Cures and even some of the side characters, they completely dropped the ball on giving that same treatment to their main character: Yui. Not gonna lie, Yui literally has nothing to her beyond worshipping her grandma and her dumb catchphrase "Deliciousmile!" Any development she eventually gets is relegated to the finale, rather than having it naturally occur across the entire series or a lot earlier, and because she's basically spent the whole series relegated to the sidelines, any attempts to flesh her out come too little, too late for it to really have any real weight to her character. To be fair, I found Yui to be a lot less annoying than Manatsu from TroPri, but while TroPri had the problem of giving Manatsu a lot of screentime and not using it to flesh her out as a character beyond her one main personality trait, Yui has the opposite problem—she was constantly put on the back-burner in favor of the other Cures, and as a result, she comes off as bland and woefully underutilized. Even her friendship with Takumi doesn't get fleshed out enough. Speaking of Takumi, for all the show's posturing about him being a Tuxedo Mask-like figure for the Cures and helping them out, he was hardly ever relevant half the time, and was often excluded from the group except for when the girls could benefit from involving him in an activity outside of fighting. The series really should have made him more involved with the girls and the plot, and like Yui, a lot of his important character moments were shoehorned into the finale rather than having it happen across the entire series. On the flip side, you have Kome-Kome, one of the mascots, who the series tries to claim is more important than she actually is, and even gave her a lot of cool powers and focus episodes, but not only does her whole aging from a human baby to a teenage girl thing feel needlessly tacked on, but any development Kome-Kome gets doesn't really go anywhere, especially when all it results in is her being a MacGuffin for the Cures' power-up. But mismanaged and underutilized characters aren't DeliPre's only problem. For God's sake, would it seriously kill anyone to NOT talk about JUST food for more than two seconds?! Seriously, I know food is the series' big theme and all, but it seems like every single thing in the characters' lives revolve around food and only food! They literally never talk about anything outside of food or show interest in anything besides food! It borders on being almost creepy in how obsessed these people are with food. People can have more than one interest, even if some aren't as strong as others! For example, Heartcatch Pretty Cure's big theme was fashion and flowers, but the characters in that show did have varied interests and lives outside of those two things, which gave them a lot of depth and additional layers to their personalities! Furthermore, later episodes in the show seemed to just either shoehorn in new elements that came out of nowhere or just flat-out pulled them out of their ass, with literally no foreshadowing or build-up whatsoever, along with falling apart at the finale and making no effort to resolve things in a meaningful manner. So while Delicious Party Pretty Cure tried its hardest to rectify the mistakes Tropical Rouge Pretty Cure made, it's still plagued with plenty of its own issues, preventing it from being one of the better Pretty Cure series. But that doesn't mean there isn't anything to like about it, and is still a fairly cute show regardless. I am looking forward to Hirogaru Sky Pretty Cure after this, so you can rest assured I'll be watching that for sure, especially since it seems to be trying to break a lot of Pretty Cure conventions right out of the gate.