Ranked #1944

Yes! Precure 5

Nozomi Yumehara is a girl without a dream or goal for the future. She's clumsy and is good at neither sports nor academics. Until now she's just been drifting through her life without a care in the world. That all changes when she suddenly meets Coco, a fairy prince from the destroyed Palmier Kingdom, and now she decides that she will become Pretty Cure to fight evil and help revive the Palmier Kingdom.

Yes5 greatly changes the formula for the Pretty Cure franchise. It's the first season to give the individual Cure's the ability to transform without each other and have their own attacks for defeating the Monster's of the Week. Changing Pretty Cure from a duo to a five-person team also obviously increases the number of important characters and makes the team dynamic and character interactions for this season completely different from the previous two.

The basic plot for the show is very simple, the girls must find the 55 Pinkies and put them into the Dream Collet and they can then make whatever wish they want. Pretty Cure wishes to use the Dream Collet to revive the Palmier Kingdom while Nightmare, the evil organization of the season, want it to grant their leader Despariah's wish of eternal youth and immortality. However, the show treats gathering the Pinkies sort of as a side-plot, Yes5 is much more focused on it's characters and their development and interactions with each other. Something unfortunate is the actual designs and transformations of Pretty Cure. The outfits are pretty plain and the transformations equally so, probably the worst in the franchise.

Being the main focus of the show the Cure's in Yes5 have more development and personality than the Cure's from previous seasons. As do the fairies who can change into human forms. Nozomi, Cure Dream, starts out as a silly girl with her head in the clouds who doesn't know what she wants to do in life, over the course of the show she becomes a great leader and an inspiration to all of her friends. Rin, Cure Rouge, plays the straight-man of the group and is a typical "tomboy with a girly side to her" with Rin you see her developing friendship with Karen and the rest of the Cure's. Urara, Cure Lemonade, is the youngest of the group but already working as an idol and her cheerful demeanor belies the fact that she lost her mother at a young age. Komachi, Cure Mint, struggles to find passion in her life and to find her own voice. Karen, Cure Aqua, is a lonely girl who until becoming Pretty Cure never had a friend aside from Komachi. All of the girls also struggle with their dreams for the future, while unlike Nozomi they have their own passions and talents they're all still unsure of what they really want to to do with their lives.
The fairies in the show are Coco, who disguises himself as a teacher at the school the girls attend. Being a prince of the Palmier Kingdom Coco is constantly looking out for the happiness and safety of the girls. Nuts, the second prince, is tortured by the fact that he was tricked by Nightmare into allowing the Palmier Kingdom to be destroyed in the first place. He closes himself off to others and only gradually opens up more across the show.

Yes5, unlike pretty much every other season in the franchise, also has a much bigger focus on romance. Unlike most seasons where some Cure's would just have a little crush on some guy and it wouldn't go anywhere the romantic relationships in Yes5 actually develop and lead somewhere. Coco, despite his best efforts, falls for Nozomi but is tormented by the fact that when this is all over he'll have to return to the Palmier Kingdom and leave her. Nozomi more than reciprocates his feelings and has the same problems with their inevitable seperation. Komachi similarly falls in love with Nuts and agonizes much the way Nozomi does, unlike her though Komachi has a much harder time just telling Nuts about her feelings.

The two biggest themes in the show are "Hope vs. Despair" and finding ones dream for the future. With the Hope vs. Despair theme we see this throughout the story with the fairies and Pretty Cure never giving up hope that they can succeed and revive the Palmier Kingdom. The villains simply wish for them to accept their inevitable failure and drown in despair. Finding ones dream for the future also comes into play throughout the season as the girls individual character arcs develop and they eventually find out what they want to do with their lives.

The company of Nightmare was a pretty different antagonist for Pretty Cure at the time. Being an evil business essentially they aren't as threatening and the scale isn't as big with them as it was with the Dark Zone or Dark Fall from previous seasons but because they were so different in their setup and goal it was refreshing.
The individual villains of Nightmare are kind of a mixed bag. There are some great ones, some okay ones, and some crap ones. Girinma, Arachnea, and Gamao, the three minions originally serving under Bunbee, are crap. Just boring villains and nothing to write home about.
Later on the stronger Hadenya and Bloody get introduced, they're both quite a bit better than the previous three. Hadenya has more flair and personality to her and her fights are generally a little better than others too. Bloody is even better, being a more serious and threatening villain the few episodes with him as the adversary are great.
But the actually great villains in the show are Kawarino and Bunbee. Bunbee initially seems like the boss of the organization but is essentially just "middle-management" and while remaining a credible threat to Pretty Cure throughout the show gets less and less respect from his colleagues as time goes on and becomes more of a comedy-relief villain. Kawarino is the opposite. Very evil and creepy, Kawarino is Despariah's right-hand man, he cares nothing for his comrades and has no qualms about sending them on suicide missions or transforming them into mindless monsters. As a sort of counterpart to the happier romance in Nozomi and Coco's lives he is also clearly and deeply in love with Despariah.
The main villain of the series is Despariah, the only female main villain from Pretty Cure. Like many main villains in Pretty Cure she is the exact opposite of the leader Nozomi, Nozomi is hope and Despariah is obviously despair. Whereas Pretty Cure seek to use the Dream Collet unselfishly to help the Palmier Kingdom Despariah only cares for herself and wants to be the only happy person in the world while everyone else is trapped in sadness and despair. The biggest problem with Despariah is that she doesn't have much presence in the show, barely appearing or doing anything herself until near the end. It makes the final fight with her feel like an almost unnecessary addendum and lacks the emotion and impact it should have.
The Monster's of the Week in Yes5 are the Kowaina. A dull concept and physical designs put them, in my opinion, as the worst from any season. Only Bloody uses them in an interesting way.
Another problem with the villains is that they never team-up even though there's no logical reason for them not to. They have good chemistry when talking and meeting together so it's kind of a letdown that we never see them fight together.

The action in Yes5, well to put it plainly it sucks. Like every season there are a couple of good fights but not as much as there should be. A combination of poor animation quality and a stiff art-style make a lot of fights just not look good even if the action is okay.

The music is great, Yes5 probably has one of the best soundtracks in Pretty Cure. The opening and endings however are just okay and nothing really special. Like Splash Star before it Yes5 uses some music from the previous seasons so every now and then you'll hear music from Futari Wa, Max Heart, and Splash Star playing.

The build-up to the finale is pretty poor. It just suddenly sort of starts and the episodes don't really flow well together. Once in the actual finale it's great though. The themes of the show are displayed excellently and it gets really emotional as Pretty Cure face their darkest hour. It's a really dramatic finale, as it should be. However the last episode is "uneven" so to speak. It sort of tries to do too much and despite having a lot of good points it and the fight with Despariah leave much to be desired. The ending is bittersweet, but much more sweet, and the epilogue is perfectly fitting for the show.

So Yes5 takes Pretty Cure in a new direction and still does some things that no other season has done making it a perfectly good and highly enjoyable show. read more

Yes Pre­cure 5 is not as lazy as Splash Star, although an 18 year old cat on Ketam­ine can’t even reach the pin­nacle of lazi­ness the pro­duc­tion staff on Splash Star achieved. At the very least, Yes Pre­cure 5 at least tries to do some­thing mildly dif­fer­ent from the ori­ginal. The main char­ac­ter has a dif­fer­ent per­son­al­ity at the very least (even if orange-haired friend in this ver­sion is pretty much a car­bon copy of the same girl from the ori­ginal Pre­cure). There’s also 5 Pre­cures instead of 2. Even the magical pet looks slightly dif­fer­ent, and is really a trans­form­ing bishie, Fruits Bas­ket style. Otherwise, they’ve kept most of the rest of the standard Precure scen­ario. Pre­cures have to stop evil organ­isa­tion of dreadful vil­lains from an altern­ate world, using the powah of friend­ship, all while col­lect­ing these magical saus­ages or whatever ran­dom arte­fact it is they have to travel across the coun­try to find. That’s not neces­sar­ily a bad thing, because powah of friend­ship to defeat bad­dies is a decent for­mula. How­ever, it appears that’s about the point the pro­duc­tion staff decided to call it a day.

"We’ve changed the for­mula enough from the ori­ginal, now lets use the rest of our budget to hire some strip­pers! Anim­a­tion? Script writ­ing? Fuck that, give it to the intern. Actu­ally no, scratch that, give it to the mon­keys in Toei’s basement."

The writ­ing in this is hor­rendous to quite extraordin­ary levels. What par­tic­u­larly bugged me was how stu­pid it assumed its audi­ence was. Yes, I know the audience are girls with only one digit in their age, but the ori­ginal Pre­cure didn’t talk down to them this much. If we see a shot with a bunch of super excited girls hoard­ing around the stu­dent coun­cil pres­id­ent, it’s pretty obvi­ous that’s she’s pop­u­lar. We don’t need our brain­dead main char­ac­ter and her carbon-copy-from-original-Precure-friend point­ing out to the audi­ence how pop­u­lar she is.

There are other instances where they simply stop try­ing to give char­ac­ters reasons for what they do. I know a reg­u­lar occur­rence in Pre­cure is how shit the vil­lains are, but it’s some­thing I’m going to rag on yet again. When someone fires a weak beam at you that totally misses, what sort of excuse is that to then run away? Or the vil­lain catch­ing one of the magical muffins the Pre­cures are try­ing to hoard, then giv­ing it back to them for no adequately explored reason. And this guy was appar­ently the leader of the vil­lain­ous group. I’m guess­ing the aptitude test for enter­ing this vil­lain­ous group involves a high-hanging banana and a stick, and if they get the banana in under a minute then they’re not allowed join the group.

Even worse than the writ­ing is the anim­a­tion. This is a frig­gen Pre­cure series! These things rely on a com­bin­a­tion of advert­ising toys and pretty visu­als. This series got the advert­ising toys aspect down, for bet­ter or for worse. Well, no, just for worse. But the visu­als are awful. An large amount of this series is incredibly lazy pan­ning shots. You know, the ones where the char­ac­ters don’t actu­ally do any move­ment of their body. They’re just held up on a stick and waved about by one of the base­ment mon­keys at Toei just below the bot­tom of the screen. The back­grounds were prob­ably going for that water­col­our look from the likes of Honey and Clover and Nodame Can­tabile, but instead just looks like child­ish scribbles.

But you know what’s the worst part of all? The very reason I decided to watch these blas­ted Pre­cure series in the first place? The bitchin’ trans­form­a­tion sequences, that even Splash Star man­aged to get off their back­sides and pro­ducing some­thing visu­ally spec­tac­u­lar for. Yes Pre­cure 5’s trans­form­a­tion sequences aren’t bitchin’ in the slight­est. I was look­ing for­ward to the pro­spect of 5 dif­fer­ent trans­form­a­tion sequences for each Pre­cure. What nor­mally character­ises a Pre­cure bitchin’ trans­form­a­tion sequence is how the cos­tume bil­lows out ins some sort of crazy way, com­bines with epic music and swoop­ing cam­era angles.

Yes Pre­cure 5’s didn’t bother with some­thing as cool as swoop­ing cam­eras, instead simply opt­ing to pan down to the next seg­ment of the char­ac­ters body that would spout new cloth­ing. Worse still, each Pre­cure would go through this same pro­cess with little vari­ation. The one inter­est­ing bit of trans­form­ing was Cure Lemonade’s swirly hair-pieces, but even that trans­form­a­tion sequence has the same unin­spired music the rest of them had. Plus, it cycles through each and every trans­form­a­tion sequence in the epis­ode, so by the time we had all 5 Pre­cures, we had to sit through that same lame trans­form­a­tion sequence 5 fuck­ing times. You think it’s all over BUT NO! Then they all have to go through their sig­na­ture moves, all of which look the same and have the same damn music all over again.

You know you’re a shit Pre­cure if you don’t even have good trans­form­a­tion sequences. read more