Delicious Party Precure

Episode 1

I may have made a mistake watching this before breakfast. As we should expect from a food-themed Pretty Cure show, Delicious Party♡Precure is definitely going all in on the food images, and the town it's set in is a foodie dream; it even has dedicated restaurant streets sorted by cuisine. This show could make broccoli look good, and I hate few vegetables more than broccoli. So yeah, don't go into this hungry, because when even the Recipipi (food fairies) look tasty, you're definitely going to want a snack midway through.

Impressive dedication to its theme aside, there's a lot to be excited about with this new entry into the Pretty Cure franchise. It's already doing a few things differently that could make the show stand out from its predecessors: the addition of a narrator, a potentially mixed gender team, and the mere fact that Rosemary hasn't been sent to Earth with the express purpose of finding Pretty Cures are all striking features. In fact, Rosemary seems to barely know anything about the Pretty Cures; when onigiri fox fairy ※Kome-※Kome initiates Yui's transformation into Cure Precious, they're visibly shocked that a Pretty Cure might still exist; they seem to have thought that the Legendary Pretty Cure was some sort of one-off superheroine. That may mean that their cover up line of “It's a secret!” is more to hide the fact that they don't know anything than them saying that they're not allowed to tell. The poor guy seems totally out of their depth, setting them up as a less confident version of Laura from Tropical- Rouge Pretty Cure – especially since the fairies they brought with are more like Kururun in that they can't speak human language.

But probably the best part of this episode is Yui herself. Even before she transforms into Cure Precious, she's a force to be reckoned with. Athletic, cheery, and perpetually hungry, Yui's equally at home in her family's restaurant and helping out the soccer club, and even if she's only doing the latter for the onigiri, she doesn't hesitate to jump in and help even before she's asked. While I could see that backfiring on her at some point, here it not only allows her to save a baby whose stroller has taken off down a shockingly steep hill, it also lets her become Cure Precious, because she's not about to be stopped by Rosemary putting up a barrier to make sure that the villains can't hurt the town and its people during their fight. No, Yui just charges right on in, because there's an omurice fairy to be saved and she's not going to just stand back and let Rosemary fight alone.

Of course, as we see earlier in the episode, it's in Yui's best interest to save the fairy even without her sense of justice. As she's walking home from school (in a school uniform I vastly prefer to last season's), the street she's turned down is full of shuttered restaurants. It's clearly the Latin American cuisine street, which is important to notice, because we get a clear shot of a taco shop and then later see that the bad guys have stolen the taco fairy, implying that the eateries have closed because their fairies are gone. Since we see first-hand how that robs a dish of its deliciousness when the omurice fairy is kidnapped, defeating the villains isn't just important for people who eat food, it's vital to the livelihood of the town itself. Why the bad guys are trapping recipipi in the Recipe-Bon book isn't clear yet, but they definitely need to be stopped.

All in all, this is a very promising start to the series. Yui is already awesome even before she transforms, there are some fun details, like the relatively subtle traditional Japanese clothing elements of her Cure Precious dress and the crossed out “B” on the monsters, a nod to the fact that “bon” means

“good” in French and the corrupted fairies are “not good,” and the fact that Precious' name comes from the precious memories of the first time Yui saw an onigiri recipipi, making it less random than it at first seems. And yes, I admit that I'm excited by the possibility that Yui's friend Takumi could be a Pretty Cure simply because it would be justice for Cure Waffle, who absolutely should have been a thing in Kira Kira Pretty Cure a la Mode. So grab your fork, toast with milk (I really hope those goblets of milk are a Wedding Peach reference), and dig in – this party is definitely looking delicious so far.

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Delicious Party♡Precure is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.