It is an absolute delight to have a good season of Pretty Cure again. You and Idol Precure♪, the previous entry in the franchise, was the weakest season since Tropical-Rouge! Precure, and generally failed to live up to its direct predecessors, Soaring Sky! Precure and Wonderful Precure!. But Star Detective Precure! is a return to form, drawing from elements of prior franchise entries as well as classic magical girl series and mystery fiction.

The latter is probably the piece that's both the most clever and needs the most explanation; in all honesty, there's a good chance that this is all thrown in for older viewers, since most children in the intended audience won't necessarily be familiar with all of the references. Anna and Mikuru are both named after Edogawa Ranpo's series detectives, Kogoro Akechi and Yoshio Kobayashi. Akechi is the main detective, while Kobayashi is his sidekick. One of their nemeses is The Fiend with Twenty Faces, on whom Phantom Thief Nijee is based. The rest of the Phantom Thieves' Guild is also based on famous antagonists from detective fiction: Ageseine is Arsène Lupin and Goemon is Goemon Ishikawa, a real-life bandit leader who has become the subject of many fictional retellings. These references really ground the story in its chosen theme and genre, while also tacitly reassuring older viewers that perhaps the writers know what they're doing.

Equally fun and interesting are the callbacks to older magical girl titles. While Cures Answer and Mystique's transformation brings to mind those in Witchy Precure!, complete with the mild yuri-baiting, their position as detectives fighting phantom thieves is very much in keeping with both classic manga mysteries like Detective Conan and earlier magical girls who are phantom thieves, like Phantom Thief Jeanne and Saint Tail. It's much more typical in the genre for the magical girls to be phantom thieves on a mission, so having our two main Cures be fighting them is an interesting twist – and it's made even more interesting by the addition in episode eleven of Cure Arcana Shadow, a former CUREtto Detective turned phantom thief. Like Jeanne and Saint Tail, Cure Arcana Shadow uses her thief skills to call attention to something unsavory – she steals a replica in order to expose a museum director's scam. This raises questions about both what it means to be in the right and why she's with the Guild in the first place. Did she feel she could work better on the inside? Or does she know something about the CUREtto Agency that Anna, Mikuru, and fairy inventor Jett don't?

Establishing this sort of mystery at the end of a cour is a very good plan, as it gives the series an overarching plot beyond the usual monster-fighting while leaning into the theme as a whole. Anna and Mikuru aren't stupid and are out there doing their best, but they're more Harriet the Spy than Akechi Kogoro, names notwithstanding. Jett, their ostensible mentor, doesn't know much more than they do, and the one person who might, Pochitan, has regressed to infancy upon traveling backwards through time. Cure Arcana Shadow may be their best hope for some real information about the greater situation they find themselves in, but she's also not particularly trustworthy, given that she's apparently switched sides. It's the sort of narrative construct that was absent (or at least not followed through on) in the previous season.

The basic structure of each episode is that the girls are hired to solve a mystery, which turns out to be related to the Phantom Thieves' Guild trying to steal a Makoto Jewel. The mystery is generally solved before the fight, as the “unmasking” scene leads to the thief in question summoning the monster of the season, a hanninda. This feels like a natural way to blend both the magical girl and the mystery elements, because it doesn't limit the girls' intelligence to when they're transformed. They're not just detectives, and neither are their reasoning and observation skills tied to their magical girl personas. Yes, Jett has engineered tools for them to use, but that's not out of the ordinary for the genre. It makes both Anna and Mikuru feel more well-rounded, and it also helps Anna to cope in a world where technology is significantly lower than what she's used to. They're detectives and magical girls, not detective magical girls.

The time travel aspect is one that works very well. By choosing 1999, the series has given itself space to explore and establish franchise elements. For example, it's these Cures and Jett who create the Pretty Holic makeup brand that's featured in the series since Tropical Rouge, retroactively implying that it existed in 2004's Futari wa Pretty Cure, even though it wasn't shown. The date also means that there are no smartphones and limited internet, so there are no shortcuts for the detectives to use. Of course, there are also some potentially awkward elements, like the sneaking suspicion that Mikuru may be Anna's mom; it would suspend my disbelief a touch too far if that turned out to be the case and Anna had no idea. (And when I take it way too far and think that maybe Jett is her dad, I have to tell myself very firmly to stop that right now. Although it would be interesting to have a half-human, half-fairy Cure…) I do wish the art leaned into late 90s fashion a bit more, but Ageseine's OG gyaru look is still a fun detail, as is the couple who seem to pop up in a lot of episodes as nameless recurring characters.

Transformation scenes are particularly fun this time around. Answer and Mystique's partnered transformation takes care to show the details of their costumes and the layers of dress with hand-sweeps to create each one of them, and there's a sense of joy to the entire thing. Arcana Shadow's transformation is stunning and similarly detailed, but with a more mature feel, as befits her character. The use of big band-style music during these scenes is a bit of a callback to the Golden Age of Mystery, which was the between-the-(world)-wars period, and is a nice change in what we more typically get.

Star Detective Precure! is a welcome return to form for the franchise. The mysteries may not be difficult, but that works for the intended audience, and they still make use of some decent clues, such as the orientation of a portrait being different depending on whether or not shoes are worn in the house in a given culture. I don't love the concave eyes, but art is otherwise bright and enjoyable, and for the most part, it and the animation are in good form. The ending theme dance is a blast and makes excellent use of the fact that Arcana Shadow isn't really part of the team by separating her from the other two girls regularly as part of the choreography. All in all, these are twelve very good episodes. Even if you were disappointed by You and Idol, be sure to check Star Detective out.