HEALIN' GOOD♥PRECURE

DESCRIPTION

CAST

ANIME ActionFutari wa Precure
ANIME ComedyKirakira☆Precure a la Mode
ANIME FantasySmile Precure!
ANIME FantasyHappinessCharge Precure!
ANIME ActionMahoutsukai Precure!
ANIME ActionHeartcatch Precure!
ANIME ActionFutari wa Precure: Splash☆Star
ANIME ActionYes! Precure 5
ANIME ActionSuite Precure♪
ANIME ActionHUGtto! Precure
ANIME ActionGo! Princess Precure
ANIME FantasyDokidoki! Precure
ANIME ActionFresh Precure!
ANIME AdventureStar☆Twinkle Precure
MOVIE AdventurePrecure Miracle Leap: Minna to no Fushigi na Ichinichi
MANGA ActionHealin' Good♥Precure
MOVIE ActionHealin' Good♥Precure: Yume no Machi de Kyun! Tto GoGo! Dai Henshin!!
ANIME ActionTropical-Rouge! Precure
ANIME ActionDelicious Party♡Precure
SPECIAL Mahou ShoujoWatashi dake no Okosama Lunch
ANIME ActionHirogaru Sky! Precure
MOVIE ActionPrecure All Stars F
MOVIE ActionTropical-Rouge! Precure: Yuki no Princess to Kiseki no Yubiwa!
ANIME FantasyWonderful Precure!
ANIME Mahou ShoujoKimi to Idol Precure♪

REVIEWS

• 

  Juliko25

  90/100
  One of the best Pretty Cure seasons ever, even if it couldn't do what it wanted because of the pandemic.

  In the years after magical girl anime came to be, magical girls were pretty popular. Tons of them popped up over the past several decades, abundant with all kinds of creative, crazy ideas that the writers managed to make work. But since the mid-2000s, less and less magical girl anime started coming out because of the genre stagnating, even in Japan. Many magical girl shows that got released after that lacked creativity, were just poorly executed, relied too much on trying to copy Madoka Magica's success without taking into account what made that show work, tried to be too dark for their own good, or never took advantage of their formulas to show great characters. Most are just flat-out dismissed as Sailor Moon rip-offs without even being given a second glance. Even the Pretty Cure franchise, with its massive popularity, could suffer from this at times depending on the season. I myself have only seen a few seasons of it, with Heartcatch still being my favorite because it tried to break those trends, but the franchise is infamous for being rather clingy to its formula, rehashing it over and over again. If you really think about it, Pretty Cure is the only classic-style magical girl series left. I dropped out of Pretty Cure in 2016 due to other obligations and because of certain events that drove me away from the fandom as a whole, and none of the other seasons after Go Princess really appealed to me.

  Then Healin Good Pretty Cure showed up and proceeded to steal my heart in the absolute best ways possible. I have to say: Man! I haven't been this blown away by a Pretty Cure season since Heartcatch! Granted, I still like the latter better, but seriously, Healin Good is great!

  But before I devolve into my gush fest, I'll just get the story out of the way: A young girl named Nodoka Hanadera just moved to a new town with her family. After spending years stuck in the hospital due to a crippling illness, she's finally cured and is ready for a fresh new start in life. But on her first day there, a mysterious monster attacks, and she encounters several cute, tiny talking animals, who say they're from a magical place called the Healing Garden. They're in trouble because the Byogens, a mysterious syndicate, decimated their world and have plans to infect the Earth as well, but need the help of superheroes called Pretty Cure to stop them, as they're powerless on their own. Nodoka, alongside three other girls, Chiyu, Hinata, and Asumi, wind up becoming the magical girls known as Pretty Cure. Their mission is to fight the Byogens and make sure they don't revive their king, who could very easily destroy everything the people of Earth and the citizens of the Healing Garden hold dear.

  Now, the timing for this series is rather...creepily coincidental. A magical girl anime with a heavy emphasis on health, nature, and environmentalism, with the bad guys literally being sentient diseases/viruses just so happened to come out during a literal plague that's still running amok across the world. Yeah, no thanks, COVID-19. Although, to be fair, the people at Toei obviously had no way of knowing that a pandemic was going to happen, and they already had their plans for the series laid out, so it wouldn't have been possible for them to change everything completely. Hell, Healin Good even got delayed for a couple months because of the pandemic, which resulted in a lot of Toei's plans for the series getting cut, even down to the number of episodes it has. But even with that, Healin Good Pretty Cure is still a great show for what it is. Now, not everyone will agree, as every Pretty Cure fan has their own favorite and least favorite series, and that's okay!

  Let's talk about the technical stuff, starting with the animation as I normally do. Now, I've only seen several Pretty Cure seasons, with each one having a different approach to their animation. Some seasons bring out all the colors and all the dynamic character animation, both in the slice-of-life scenes and in the action scenes, while others tone them down to focus on the backgrounds, the CGI, and the flashy beam attacks. While Healin Good might not have as much expression and dynamicism as something like Heartcatch, its animation still does a perfectly fine job at what it needs to do. The background art is slightly muted, typical for Pretty Cure, the action, the hand-to-hand combat, and attack animations are always stellar to watch, and it's not as heavy on the CGI this time around. It also helps that the character designs are more simplistic for the girls this time around, what with the girls in their normal forms having regular hair colors, having less embellishments on their Cure forms, and I love how they incorporate doctor coats into the transformation sequences, along with other heavy usages of medical imagery, like Hinata's family owning a vet clinic. That said, I do think the monster designs are rather stupid looking. Not as stupid as the Akanbes in Smile Pretty Cure, but I wish the creators had done more with their monster designs.

  The soundtrack is where things normally get sketchy. I mean, I liked the opening and ending songs for Healin Good, as they're all well sung and the CGI dancing sequences for them are top notch. But Toei has had this tendency to reuse music from previous series in other ones when it makes no sense for them to do so, especially battle BGMs, which feels lazy to me. Having not seen much of the Precure shows that came out immediately before Healin Good, I can't exactly comment on that one, as I don't know if HG actually reused previous series' music, but I will say that Healin Good's soundtrack is definitely one of the better ones. Light piano tunes, heavy metal during the fights, jazzy saxophone numbers, triumphant trumpets, every piece of music fits the show and its atmosphere when needed. Shiho Terada definitely deserves more love as a composer, and I hope she gets more work. She got recruited to do the music for Tropical Rouge coming next, so I can't wait to hear what she does for that!...though knowing Toei, they'll probably make her reuse music from this series.

  The characters are a mixed bag, but when I say that, I don't mean that the main characters are poorly written. In fact, the main Precure girls are actually the best part of this entire show. One other thing Pretty Cure as a franchise tends to have problems with is its characterization, particularly giving everyone unequal amounts of focus and development even when it's not needed. For example, Doki Doki Pretty Cure was infamous for shilling its main character while refusing to give others meaningful screentime and development. This trend has unfortunately continued for other seasons, like Hugtto and Star Twinkle. Thankfully, from what I've seen, the Healin Good girls and the animal mascots all have their fair share of focus, development, and growth as characters, and even when some don't necessarily have whole arcs, they're all immediately likeable from the start and the entire series focuses on portraying them as sweet, down to earth girls with their own colorful personalities, strengths, weaknesses, and character flaws when they're not fighting monsters, making them feel much more like people you'd see on the street rather than cutesy over-the-top caricatures. It also helps that Healin Good eschewed simply introducing new characters willy-nilly and kept the focus solely on the girls, the mascots, and their immediate families and friends, and even here the series delivers, portraying them all impeccably and never going for cheap, easy ways to resolve their problems. Granted, some may take issue with the way one character is randomly introduced in a rather Deus Ex Machina-esque way, but the show does make up for that by having said character actually overcome issues that arise from said introduction (And getting some fairly cute comedy out of it, too!). Basically, all the characters are wonderfully fleshed out.

  ...Except for most of the villains. I say most because one of them gets more development than the others, and is actually one of the better villains in the show because he has a direct connection with one of the protags and is the reason she's in this fight in the first place, making her reasons for fighting feel much more personal and giving it more stakes rather than fighting him because he's evil. You'll know who I'm talking about. That being said, other than him, the other villains...aren't that great. They're not as one-note as the villains of Mahou Tsukai Precure, but the big bad is mainly hidden throughout the show and the other two don't really change much throughout the entire show, with the only female among them being little more than a haughty sycophant who can't even hold her own against the Pretty Cure, even with multiple power-ups. This is one reason Healin Good hasn't quite beaten Heartcatch as my favorite Pretty Cure series, because Heartcatch actually put in the effort to give its villains much more depth, personality, and chances to shine. Basically, Healin Good has great protagonists but gave its villains the shaft save for one.

  (Update, 2/15/2021: Okay, apparently there's an interview with the HealPre staff that mentions that they had intended to make the villains sympathetic and give them more depth, but with COVID-19 going around, they figured doing that would be in bad taste so they decided to nix the idea, along with being forced to ax a bit of Hinata's character development. Can't really say I blame them for that first one)

  But even with that, Healin Good's writing, while not perfect, is top notch. I feel it's the most consistent series in the Pretty Cure franchise with how it knows what it wants to be, what its themes are, and never trying to do more or less than it wants to do, or biting off more than it can chew, something other Precure shows have done to their detriment (coughcoughHappinessChargeandMahouTsukaicoughcough). I never found myself outright disappointed with any episode nor its execution or writing except for just two, and even they weren't necessarily bad episodes. One of those episodes did have the problem of trying to combine two storylines rather than just focusing on one and getting the proper mileage out of it (It's the one called "Gloomy Natasha!" Speaking of that, the show never did explain why Hinata and her friend Eriko referred to each other by English names/nicknames. Seriously, what is up with that?!), but other than that, I found Healin Good to be fairly consistent, which is especially notable because various other seasons' quality tends to fluctuate wildly, or wind up making some weird writing decisions that detriment parts of, or the rest of the show. Healin Good has remained fairly consistent and down-to-earth all throughout its run, though not without a few bumps in the road. Still, it deserves praise for sticking to its guns and just being an overall fun, heartwarming, touching children's show that deserves way more love than it gets! If you're new to Pretty Cure and wanted to start on one of the seasons, definitely give this one a try!

  At this point, I've managed to finish eight Pretty Cure series, and I'm halfway through with Mahou Tsukai at the moment, so once I finish that, it'll come to nine that I've seen. And yes, I do plan on watching Tropical Rouge when it airs. So here I present my personal ranking of Pretty Cure seasons, in the order of the ones I liked the least at the bottom to my favorite ones at the top. IMHO, Healin Good is now my second favorite season, knocking Go Princess down to number three. Even with the criticisms I mentioned above, it's a wonderful series with mostly amazing characters, and I really recommend it if you like the kind of children series that really try to tell an excellent story that takes both itself and its target audience seriously.

  1. Heartcatch Pretty Cure
  2. Healin Good Pretty Cure
  3. Go! Princess Pretty Cure
  4. Suite Pretty Cure
  5. Futari wa Pretty Cure Splash Star
  6. Smile Pretty Cure
  7. Doki Doki Pretty Cure
  8. Mahou Tsukai Pretty Cure
  9. Happiness Charge Pretty Cure
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• 

  Furiza

  80/100
  A strong Precure series, with one of the best leads and a great antagonist

  When I started Healin' Good, I started with relatively low expectations, given the conditions in which this series was produced and the not great opinions I read about it. Well, it obviously has its flaws, but my opinion of the series is absolutely positive.

  The chemistry between the three protagonists is very good, especially in the first episodes. Later, Asumi was introduced: I don't dislike her as a character, but, besides the the fact that her introduction was far too sudden, I think she brought little to the series, especially outside the episodes dedicated to her. I would have preferred the series to remain focused on this trio of Cure and fairies, plus Latte.

  

  Her presence, I fear, has negatively affected Hinata; Chiyu and Nodoka have always had dedicated episodes, but she, after the initial part, received less and less focus and, in fact, one of the cancelled episodes is officially confirmed to be Hinata-related. Despite the fact that her arc has not been treated in the best way, I find her very likeable, capable of enriching the series with her personality and the dynamics she has with the other girls and Nyatoran, whom I appreciated for the same reasons as her partner.

  

  Chiyu is the one I like the least of the trio, but I still think she's absolutely good. I liked the relationship she has with Pegitan and her dual arc, focusing on both high jumping and working as a hotelier; not focusing too much on the fact that Blue Cure is academically smart is a good thing.

  

  Nodoka has been my favourite since the first episodes. Unlike other Cures, her growth is strongly connected to her own past, which is explored as much as possible (within the limits of Precure), even psychologically. It is a very strong and unique story. In fact, this experience gave a clear origin to her kindness (an element also present in her name from Cure), which led her to become for other people what her parents and doctors were for her for all those years. Part of her kindness also has a selfish component, such as when she wanted to help the elderly, because she did not want to believe her promises were false and end up like them; moreover, she continually affirms her willingness to fight to live, despite repeatedly acknowledging the pain that living by nature entails. Episode 42 and her refusal to help Daruizen, asserting her individuality and freedom from an absolutely toxic relationship, is her absolute peak and one of Precure's best moments. The relationship with Rabirin, especially in that episode, is also very cute.

  

  All the antagonists are entertaining thanks to their personalities; in terms of complexity, however, Shindoine is the blandest, while Guaiwaru and Batetemoda are a little better in this respect. The best is definitely Daruizen, and I'm glad he wasn't redeemed and died. The episodes with him and Nodoka are some of the most interesting in the series (6, 28 and 42 above all); the idea behind the relationship between them is very incredible and strong. Daruizen is a virus, a parasite that has made Nodoka's life terrible and continues to do so, exerting constant pressure on her psychologically and physically and whose only purpose is to survive by harming others, and this is what makes him an incredible antagonist and one that must not be forgiven and saved.

  

  The physical fights are present, but this series never excels in animations, with rare exceptions (episode 9 I think?), and in certain episodes the level is really low (episode 41). I like the character designs, among the Cure in particular Sparkle and among the villains Daruizen and Shindoine.

  In summary, very interesting series with one of the best leaders, a great antagonist, a more than good cast, but with some frailties, accentuated by its difficult production.

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