Forum - View topicREVIEW: You and Idol Precure♪ Episodes 37-49 Anime Review
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darkchibi07
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Yeah, I have pretty much similar thoughts as the review. You and Idol Precure is probably one of the most mediocre season this franchise has to offer. It's especially disappointing where there are elements that could have been cool and meaningful, but nothing came out of it. Meroron's arc has probably one of the best subplots that came out this, but overall this series may ended up easily forgotten.
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FireChick
 Subscriber Posts: 2760 Location: United States |
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This was pretty much my biggest issue with Tropical Rouge Pretty Cure several years back. It felt to me like it was trying way too hard to sandblast away any hint of drama or nuance that could have benefited its story and characters and was afraid to be anything except super zany hyper and sugary. Not to mention Manatsu and her constant screaming got on every single nerve I had. Sad to know IdolPre fell into this trap too. |
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EmeraldSaucer
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Not going to go relitigate the ways You and Idol failed to capitalize on what should have been an easy layup of a theme, other than to say that this batch of episodes did nothing to improve things on that front from last time. Will instead say that I think one of the show's biggest failings was that it peaked way too early and had nothing to follow through with. It was plain to see from online chatter how invested people were with the Heart Kirari Lock storyline, drawn in by a combination of the novelty of a cure's power source being sinister and self-destructive, the tragedy of how it dissolved Uta and Purirun's relationship, and the intrigue of what Meroron gave up in exchange for power and to keep a hold of her relationship with Purirun. But then the issue of Purirun's memory loss and connection to Uta was resolved in only four episodes, Meroron's story held out for a little bit longer (though neutered by the status quo more or less going back to normal instantly), and then we were left with nineteen more episodes with such plots as "we're advertising a real life concert, we won't show our idols performing though", "Uta gets a random power-up that will barely ever show up again to advertise the movie", and "Kokoro watches somebody else dance". It was no surprise when that initial spring of enthusiasm dried up
And I am generally not one to complain about lack of "plot" in Precure, I go into it expecting cute monster-of-the-week stories that add in little ways to an overall theme or further inform us about our cures (which You and Idol was hit or miss on; pour one out for background filler Kokoro and Purirun). Likewise, while I don't think Precure has ever had particularly good main villains (except for Gaou, who was handled excellently and efficiently), I don't typically consider that a huge deal. Like the Witch of Procrastination for example was nothing special, but her relationship to Cure Oasis was a nice touch and she added just enough (while actually being physically present in the show) to say she did her job of being a foil to Tropical Rouge's message of "go out there and do your best one step at a time" But man, Darkine was just a really terrible villain, basically zero presence in the story until the very last second. Where the show had to rush her in to clunkily explain what she even is conceptually to Uta because the show had failed to hint at anything substantial (the closest we get being the stories of Meroron and Jogi, but those don't really inform us of why Darkine is doing what she is doing). And due to the show's own wishy-washiness surrounding its thematic core, sticking to broad platitudes about oshikatsu, in the limited time she has Darkine is also unable to serve as a proper thematic foil - see Go Princess for an example of actually doing "villain who represents negative emotion up against heroes who represent positive emotion" effectively. It all makes the meandering of You and Idol's second half sting even harder, because with hindsight we know that could have been spent doing literally anything to build up to Darkine and Kurakuland But I think the biggest victim of the weak second half is the ending, which without hyperbole I will say is probably the worst in the franchise structurally, desperately needing an episode of its own to breathe (something easily done by chopping off any one of those superfluous episodes). The A part of episode 49 was unusually long, resulting in the back half of the episode having to try (and inevitably fail) to do everything it wanted to accomplish: establish what the new status quo is for our heroes, Kirakiland, and Darkine now that the conflict is resolved; come up with a scenario in which our next lead cure can make a cameo appearance; resolve the lingering plot thread of Uta's kinda weirdly handled crush on Kaito and the impact Uta has had on him as a performer; have our idol group actually perform the concert they had been building up to for the two prior episodes; have our requisite Precure farewell scene; and skip forward five or so years in the future to see what everybody is up to now. That's six different bullet points they had to try and cram into less than eight minutes of television, an absolutely horrible idea that resulted in none of it landing like it should, the last sour note of a cascading series of bad decisions regarding the series composition You and Idol pretty easily slots in at the bottom of my personal ranking, a depressingly mediocre show that at just about every juncture played things as boringly safe as they possibly could |
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YagamiBlackstone255
Posts: 467 |
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I was the one who said the final episode of You And Idol had Answer do Blues Clues levels of detective work. I was quoted in a major industry article. AWESOME.
Ok seriously speaking, Star Detective definitely had WAY MORE effort put into the detective work, even if it was still a simple mystery kids in the audience could solve themselves and this is awesome to me. |
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RobbiRobb
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As much as it pains me to admit, I think this final cour truly solidifies Kimi to Idol Precure as probably the weakest Precure season for me. To be fair, I have yet to see all of them, but I've seen roughly half of them now, and this has been the most disappointing. Not to say it's terrible per se—I love Precure—but a 6/10 in comparison to an average 8/10 sits pretty low on my list.
Still, there were a lot of things that have been bothering me throughout this season that only got worse toward the end. My biggest gripe overall is the lack of new songs. I've said it before, and I'll gladly repeat myself: an idol anime doesn't need a new song every episode. I am very well aware that this is hard on the production, especially if you have to produce four cours, not one. But like, come on. We didn't have a single new song in those last twelve episodes. Everything was reused from earlier that season. Even Uta's power-up reused her song and just made it a simple remix. I can't even tell you the difference from the original. I only know it's credited differently. Speaking of Uta's power-up, that has to be one of the laziest power-ups ever. Only a recolor, and not even everyone got one? That would have been the perfect chance to give everyone a new song and a new outfit. Such a missed opportunity, which is honestly a shame, because there was so much potential in the story as a whole. And I'm not talking about all the dark sides of the idol industry, which is often used as a counterargument. There are a lot of ways the idol industry could have been approached, at least in some form. Why did they not have the bad guys be a rivaling idol agency that makes use of the bad tricks in the industry? That would have set them up way better for an actual idol storyline. But instead, we got a bunch of empty filler episodes that didn't help with the main plotline at all. Not that there was one until, like, the last few episodes. Which was such a weird choice. We started collecting the Kirarun Ribbons in episode one, and then they never came up until episode 40 or so. They were always there, collected in some kind of form, but nobody ever talked about them. And then we suddenly had them all; they were used to revive KirakiLand, and whoosh, they were irrelevant again. It feels weirdly at odds with other Precure collectibles. But at the same time, it felt weirdly fitting. Not that that is a compliment. Because the ending as a whole felt drawn out at first and then super rushed once it actually happened. Why did they wait so long to begin with the big fight? Did they have to make the handful of fillers beforehand? Couldn't they have just... paced the finale better? And why did they reveal the big backstory of Darkiine in, like, the last episode? That was something that should have been a motivator to keep on fighting and keep on getting stronger at some point in the middle. This should have been the catalyst for a power-up. Not the end of the show. It's just so weirdly paced, and so many weird choices have been made that could have seemingly easily been avoided. This also includes the Heart Garden. That cute little gimmick that Cure Kiss brought out at some point. After the last cour, it had just started to appear. And I still can't believe it was used because they ran out of ideas. Not because it was taking too much time to animate. Which would have been understandable; we are still dealing with a show that has been constantly producing episodes for more than 20 years. But instead we got this. And no, I'm not making this up. This was actually confirmed in an interview. See the relevant wiki page with the interview. In the end, the story more or less fell flat for me, and I don't think I'll ever get back to it. There were some cool ideas and some characters I liked, especially Kokoro, even though she was turned into a catchphrase machine by the end. I never really warmed up to Meroron, even after her big arc. I get what it did for her and how other people enjoyed the way she changed, but it just wasn't for me. Doesn't mean she's a bad character, though. But now that KimiPri has ended, it's time for some detective work, which seems to be off to a much better start than KimiPri's end. |
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Princess_Irene
ANN Associate Editor
 Posts: 2808 Location: The castle beyond the Goblin City |
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You were, and thank you for saying it! I was going to go with Scooby-Doo and you gave me something better to use for the intended age group. 
I was really impressed with Star Detective's first episode (especially the Edogawa Ranpo references in the Cures' last names), so here's hoping it'll continue strong. |
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YagamiBlackstone255
Posts: 467 |
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OMG I AM SO HONORED. aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah all low caps to convey screaming aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah. I hope if the canadian dub does continue they do Arthur Conan Doyle last names lol. |
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Moses34
Posts: 13 |
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Dusted off my account for this, because I care about it a lot.
Unfortunately EmeraldSaucer typed everything I was going to with 90% accuracy haha, so I'll talk about another angle instead: the idol stuff. I'm a MASSIVE idol fan, been so for over two decades. You can imagine I was beyond excited for an idol themed season. I'm going to give it the benefit of the doubt, and assume as they were all big VAs, it was hard to make new songs all the time. But oh my god. We got like, nothing. I was expecting a power-up song for Uta, but they just added chants and rearranged it for her red dress. We didn't get a finale song or anything like that. Like RobbiRobb said, it's not NECESSARY, but it would've been nice. It felt like the show forgot its own theme, and the idol theme was only mentioned sometimes. I routinely forgot they even had an idol club at school. I forgot they even had those CDs sold during Q1. That's a HUGE problem. That's like forgetting Detective Precure are detectives! I was so excited for Meroron's "arc", only for it to essentially end at the start of the next episode. They touch upon it again some episodes later, and that gets resolved before that episode even ends. Huh??? This isn't the level of quality Pretty Cure is known for. Not just that, but they totally missed the opportunity of having ZukyunKiss as real rivals, before joining the team. That would've been so good! It's one of the classic idol tropes! As a Precure fan, I'm disappointed. As an idol fan, I'm sad. Given how Precure doesn't really reuse themes, they just totally blew the one shot 
The good thing is that the movie is absolutely AMAZING.
It wasn't written by the main writer, which is probably why. I watched that in theaters, but I don't know if it's available overseas. I super super super loved it, and it knocked a few tears out of me. THAT movie understands what the show should've been. It especially understands what idols are. If any of you that were disappointed with Kimi to Idol get the chance to watch it, I super recommend it. |
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Cardcaptor Takato
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I feel like my biggest disappointment was how incidental it felt like the idol aspect was to everything. Like I don't expect them to deal with the darker aspects of the idol industry either but it just felt like they were using the idol aspect as an aesthetic. Like they could have made the motif anything else and it wouldn't have effected the plot of You and Idol that much. One positive I will give the show is I do like they remembered to bring back the secondary characters pretty regularly and we got to spend a lot of time with Uta's classmates as I feel like a lot more recent Precure shows tend to focus on only the core group and episode of the week characters so it was nice to see their school friends show up as a regular part of the show.
I also agree with Darkrine being the weakest part of the show but I did love the Team Chokkiri villains a lot and Chokkirine was my favorite. I also loved Meroron's arc and in general I think the first half got off to a strong start but by the time of the second half it felt like they were just running on autopilot. Kokoro was definitely my favorite of the main trio. Ironically even if Kaito also felt underdeveloped I felt like his arc was the strongest of the second half and I liked how he tried to save his friend/totally not boyfriend and his big moment in the show. |
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IronWish
 Posts: 232 Location: Ukraine |
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Ok, in defense of Heart Garden, it's inclusion did somewhat improved quality of fights, at least it felt this way to me. While overall fights are still bland, as sadly is expected from modern Precure series, most of them started to have at least one animation cut or piece of action choreography which made me go "oh, that looked really nice". Overall, while I agree with pretty much all of the criticisms in both review and the discussion thread, I ended with more positive outlook on You and Idol than most people here. Yeah, it struggled to commit to any of its ideas, but at least it had ideas, unlike some other entries (looking at you, Delicious Party). Meroron stuff was consistently great, I especially liked that even after her arc was resolved it still took an ongoing effort to deal with her deep seated issues. Cause usually it's easy to go "and now we are all friends with no caveats" route. A bit surprised that it was Nana who managed to broke Meroron's walls, since it seemed like first half of the season did the groundwork for Meroron-Kokoro connection. Speaking of, Nana had surprisingly a lot going on for a non lead/colead blue cure, to the extent I wish some of this stuff would be shared with Kokoro instead, who ended up being somewhat overlooked. But I'm ok with Purirun not heaving anything to do besides memory loss plot, she's perfect as she is! My biggest gripe is with idol stuff, specifically lack of it, especially in music department. Why go all this length with fan club and Tanaka as a manager to barely do any idoling in the end? Also, for the love of god, Uta, learn the second song, you are killing me with singing EVERYTHING to the same melody. While we are at it, could anyone in the show learn the second song? At least for powerups and different team attacks, it's not like you even need to make a full song for these. I would be ok with Darkine hanging out in the background of the story, if not for her hyped up supposed connection with Meroron, which in the end amounted to nothing. On the upside, team Chokkiri was a riot, I loved their office comedy dynamic. Glad we slowly but surely moving towards fully fledged boy cure with no asterisks attached (Tsubasa was almost there, but he's also a magical bird, so that's a bit of a cope out). It was such a pleasant surprise that stage play boy cures had a proper fight, cause I expected this to be just "wink-wink, look at this boy-band, who could they possibly be". On the downside I really hoped for Kaito to join the final fight in his cure form. In general, it was a below the average Precure season which just happened to run right after two particularly strong ones, while also being mogged by Princession Orchestra airing right alongside it (although that one is currently at risk of completely falling apart at least in the visual department, so don't quote me on it), so I think it somewhat soured people's impression. |
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Lord Starfish
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That was baffling to me on so many levels. For starters, it seemed to be a solution to a problem that I don't think anyone really had? Precure has had repeat fight locations before. I mean while watching this series I was also going through Yes 5 Go Go, which I think had like a good five or ten episodes where they just fight outside of Natts House, and while that season might be widely considered not particularly great, I don't think "too many fights take place in the same location" is an issue I've ever heard anyone have with it. And like... They can't think of new unique fight settings...... So let's just set every fight in the same non-location???? How is that a solution. I don't mind using the same location every now and then, but every single time? That is obnoxious. They saw a problem in a thing that I'd argue was actually fine, and in their attempt at "fixing" it they made it a problem. Did Japan just not share the western fandom's hatred for Delicious Party's Delicious Field or something? Can I also say that watching this show while at the same time watching Go Go... made it very hard for me to even understand the common mindset of Go Go being one of the worst seasons? Like, I will fully admit that it was a series that went nowhere and took the long road to get there, that it was very apparent that Yes 5 was written as a single year-long show with a clear-cut ending, and that Go Go basically just faffed about for most of its runtime only to end in more or less the same place again... But on an episode-to-episode basis it was so much more enjoyable than Idol, though? Honestly despite its near-total lack of an overarching plot, I'd rank it at least somewhere among the mid-tier seasons. Meanwhile Idol? It's dead last. Not even close. It's the only Precure series so far that I've actively disliked. (Mind you, I've yet to see some of the other more controversial seasons such as DokiDoki or Happinesscharge. I have seen Delicious Party though. That was hella better than this.) |
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Moses34
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I'll die on the hill that Delicious Party was actually great. I don't understand the western fandom's hatred for it at all, the field was admittedly boring and pretty bad for fights, but it wasn't like the worst thing ever. Bringing it back for the rest of Kimi to Idol was pointless when the second half mostly resulted in instantly playing the stock footage.
Outside of the field, DeliPa was amazing. The theme of food as a connection between people led to many emotional episodes, and it's a stark contrast to Kimi to Idol not following its theme at all. I always felt like a lot of the western hate for DeliPa came from expecting a different show and not wanting to understand what was delivered. Whereas pretty much everyone agrees on what problems Kimi to Idol has since they're so blatant.
Go Go is bad because it's pointless. Everything it does is a worse version of the previous season. It's also a completely different kind of "bad" than some of the other Precure seasons, which are bad because of writing or due to only focusing on one girl (the Sentai Red syndrome). So even though it's one of the worst you can still wring some enjoyment out of it simply because it's the Yes5 cast and it has that going for it. But even with that, oftentimes they'll revert their entire development from Yes5 just to do it worse, like they got plot amnesia or something. Except for Urara who gets some amazing episodes and well-deserved love. The new villains are horribly boring and have no substance to them, and the episodes don't particularly do anything interesting. Coming off of Yes 5 which is one of the best, their attempt at double dipping is straight up disrespectful in its execution. It's like the Q3 of Kimi to Idol but the entire show. |
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EmeraldSaucer
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Very much agree with this. People can think Delicious Party is boring or whatever, but its ideas are very clear and very prominent throughout. It was about food, and specifically the sharing of food, as a communal activity (in contrast to PreAla's focus on food as more individualistic in the way sweets baking is an outlet for someone's passion). Where most of the cast (sorry Amane) explored some facet of that fairly well, whether it was Yui inheriting her grandmother's philosophy on food and life, Ran sharing her love for food through CureSta, or Kokone being the inheritor of a luxurious restaurant but having to learn to come out of her shell to express herself. And I won't harp on it any more than I have before, but just compare that to You and Idol where Kokoro isn't even allowed to dance and the epilogue can't even be bothered to remember that's something she was formally introduced doing |
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YagamiBlackstone255
Posts: 467 |
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What are you talking about? Delicious Party had very good, very underrated fights! I think the deciding factor with Delicious Party is the SUBS. People who can speak Japanese on their own all agree it is great but the Crunchyroll subs have to be some of the worst ever done in the industry. Many Delicious Party haters are simply fans from the west that didn't get any of the nuances from the Japanese version. We need either better subs or a dub that conveys all of the themes properly. |
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Lord Starfish
Posts: 185 |
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A common problem with Toei shows in particular. Toei hires their own translators and they're, uh... almost never any good. Weirdly the non-simulcast seasons seem less affected by this. Splash Star in particular I think was very well translated, the occasional typo notwithstanding, and what I've seen of GoPri so far has also been mostly solid. But everything from Healin' Good on, aka everything that actually got simulcasts? I mean, I have issues with the fan offerings there too, but the official subs are poor enough to where I would absolutely say people sailing the seven seas get a better experience. ...Although with how pun-heavy the franchise is, some level of jank in the translation is all but unavoidable.
See, you say that, but there have been several other seasons with really strong casts that nonetheless did not manage to keep my interest the whole way through. Hirogaru Sky and its plunge into utter mediocrity in its last third immediately comes to mind, as well as Mirai Days being a sequel starring characters I absolutely adored the first time around, yet their sequel season just left me feeling "Well that sure was a thing that happened." And yet, even coming up on nearly 100 episodes, I never hit that point of feeling tired of the Yes 5 crew, and the series hardly ever failed to put a smile on my face. It's weird, really; I agree that its plot is basically non-existent, its character development for anyone not named Urara, Kurumi or Syrup is just "Hey, let's take what we did last time and do it again!", and by the time the show wrapped up we were basically back at the exact same point we'd been at in episode 49... Yet its random one-off episodes were genuinely enjoyable throughout? I think it had consistently strong directing, and was one of the better seasons I've seen from an action perspective? To me it simply wasn't a "bad show that I could wring some enjoyment out of", it was rather a "show that logically shouldn't work yet somehow it still manages to be consistently charming as heck". |
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