Despite its gigantic stature in Japan, the Pretty Cure franchise of vaguely-related magical girl shows has not taken off in the U.S., with only two of the thirteen series being available. Of those two, only one, Futari wa Pretty Cure, often just known as Pretty Cure, is available uncut and in its original language. This 2004 show isn't the best of the batch, which may help to explain why the franchise as a whole hasn't met with success, but it definitely lays the groundwork for the magical girl juggernaut as it plays with the themes and tropes of the genre to give us a story that evens out to average but has some stand-out moments along the way.

Futari wa Pretty Cure, which translates to “We Are Pretty Cure,” follows Nagisa and Honoka, two eighth graders at Verone Academy, a private school that is technically coed but splits all classes by gender. Nagisa is an athletic, generally enthusiastic girl, champion of the lacrosse team and definitely less interested in academics than she should be. By contrast, Honoka is the apparent brains of the operation, a quiet, gently-bred young lady who heads up the Science Club. Although in the same class, Honoka and Nagisa really only know each other by sight, which makes them being chosen by Mepple and Mipple, two interdimensional tamagotchi/plushy/cell phone hybrids from The Field of Light, kind of awkward. This is largely because the Pretty Cures have to work much more closely with each other than most magical girls – to transform and attack, they must be holding hands. While this does link to the 2001 series Prétear, where magical girl Himeno had to awkwardly “merge” with her male helpers in order to transform, it is distinctly different from the more traditional magical girl stories whose demographic Precure is chasing. It requires that the girls actually have some sort of bond if they're going to really fight their best, as evidenced by their fight in episode eight. This puts much more pressure on Nagisa and Honoka in their regular lives, making their day-to-day world just as important as their fighting one.

That's one of the aspects that this show handles fairly well. Over the course of the forty-nine episodes, we do see Honoka and Nagisa really bonding and becoming good friends, and, more unusually, we see their separate friend groups merging as well. In terms of showing how middle school cliques are needlessly exclusive, this is one of the more interesting and less forceful ways to do it, and the daily life sections of the show actually feel more organic and developed than their adventures as Pretty Cure. We also get to know their families fairly well, with Nagisa coming from a highly functional nuclear family, which is relatively unusual in anime, and Honoka clearly desperately loved by her often-absent parents – in one highly unusual scene, they both hug and kiss her when she meets them at the airport. Honoka is mostly taken care of by her grandmother, but even this takes things in a different direction than usual, with strong implications that Granny may have been Cure White (or at least had the chance to) back when she was a child during World War Two.

Sadly the plot as a whole does not really pan out. The series is episodic (although clearly linear) and there's almost never a real sense of danger from the villains, a series of lesser bad guys working for the evil Jyaku-King. The most effective member of that team is Kiriya, a thirteen-year-old minion of the Darkness who slowly comes to change his views thanks to Honoka; had this been better developed, it could have been a very powerful storyline. That's sadly what can be said of most of the show – with more development of specific elements, this could have been so much more. Nagisa's romantic sub-plot with third-year soccer star Fuji-P feels useless to the show because of its underdevelopment and there's no explanation of why the bad guys can always tell who Cure Black and Cure White are in real life, something that is most decidedly not the norm in magical girl stories and would have been interesting to explore. This is compounded by the fact that Mipple and Mepple are two of the more annoying mascot characters to ever grace the screen, although they are far out-annoyed by Pollun, a third mascot who comes in at the halfway point. Pollun is a clear Chibi-Usa ripoff as well, right down to how he serves as a power-up for the Pretty Cures – when he gets emotional, he screams and glows gold, which is reminiscent of Chibi-Usa in Sailor Moon R and later in Sailor Moon Super S how she uses “Twinkle Yell” to reinforce Sailor Moon's attack. All three characters are likely to be less annoying if you have a higher tolerance than I do for the cutesy affectation of ending all sentences with “mipo,” “mepo,” or “popo.” Despite this, the final episode does have some emotional heft as the girls complete their mission as the Pretty Cures, as well as in the resolution of the Kiriya plot thread.

It is, of course, a possibility that the romance subplots are so underdeveloped because of an increased fan focus on Nagisa and Honoka as a couple. In all honesty, that would have felt like a more credible romance, and as the series goes on, we see a drastic increase in the number of shots of them holding tightly to each others' hands. Granted, this is what they have to do in order to “pass” their transformation to each other and to attack, but it has a building yuri tension to it as well. Theirs is the central relationship, and in that sense, Futari wa Pretty Cure really does work.

Regretfully the quality of the streaming video is very poor. Sound quality and picture can perhaps best be compared to a VHS, although there is a dramatic increase around episode thirteen. The subtitles suffer a bit from mistranslations as well, with flowers that are clearly daffodils labeled as “dandelions” and a parrot called a cockatoo. The theme songs remain the same throughout (although the visuals change for the closer when we switch bad guys), but that's actually all right, because they are both ridiculously catchy. A couple of episodes also have quite nice insert songs, so it really is a shame that the sound quality isn't better. Animation feels pretty standard throughout, with the exception of Honoka's hair nearly every time she fights as Cure White – that tends to look much better, as do the fight scenes in general.

If you're a fan of classic magical girls, back when they really were meant for little girls, it is worth checking out the original Pretty Cure. Although it isn't as good as some of the later series – and it will be interesting to see how Glitter Force (formerly Smile Precure!) does – there's still a lot to enjoy and some interesting plays on how previous magical girl shows did things. In some ways it's almost worth it just for Nagisa's family thinking she's having a mental breakdown because they hear her talking to Mepple and Pollun, because that's a level of family involvement/reality that we don't typically get to see in these shows. Overall, however, this is an entertaining, if not particularly amazing, genre show, not necessarily likely to appeal to those who don't already like magical girls, but worth it to those who are committed to the genre.