Delicious Party Precure

Episode 25

So did Narcistoru miss the mark, or was he actively trying to create a very friendly, helpful robot that also steals Recipipi? The issue is probably more that the marble we saw at the end of last week's episode turned out to be a delicioustone, a tool of the CooKingdom, so there may only be so much evil that it can fuel. Phantom Spiritoru, Narcistoru's robot minion, can therefore only be so bad before he course corrects, as we see when he helps Ran and Kokone. Yes, he still kidnaps the…skewer Recipipi? But he also spends his time cheering his Motto Ubau-zo on and seems to be a pretty nice guy who just so happens to be working for the wrong team.

This episode feels very uneven. While it's absolutely important to know that Narcistoru's powering Spiritoru with a delicioustone and what weaknesses that may lead to, it also seems like things are kind of all over the place with the camping trip, Yui's onigiri metaphor, and no one getting much character development. I can't help but notice that Yui is the one suffering the most from that last thing; everyone else has had episodes or mini-arcs devoted to building them into more solid characters, but Yui's still mostly stuck in the cute catchphrase phase. She's kind, she loves to eat, she's oblivious to Takumi's crush on her…and that's about it. This would be less striking if such care hadn't been taken with Kokone and Amane, and even Ran and Takumi have had the chance to shine. But Yui's still mostly just “the pink leader one,” and that's a problem. It is in line with what we saw in Tropical-Rouge! Pretty Cure, because Manatsu was also the least developed of the team, but it somehow feels more egregious here.

Despite that, there are still some good moments here, and the reveal that Narcistoru has the delicioustone is very important, because it raises concerns about where Secretoru got it in the first place. Is it related to Cinnamon? Possibly; we've been assuming that Takumi has Cinnamon's delicioustone, but maybe that's not the case. Was there a traitor among the good guys? I'm leaning more towards that explanation over the stone just falling into Secretoru's hands or being the relic of a dead knight, which I'd expect out of a darker Precure series like Healin' Good Pretty Cure but not Delicious Party Pretty Cure. (Although Spiritoru is likely a sub-villain like Batetemoda in Healin' Good; he probably only exists to raise questions about the stone.) And he does create a more powerful Motto Ubau-zo, because it really takes some serious teamwork by all five fighters to take the pot/wrench combo out, including a more powerful kilocalorie punch from Precious. Her fighting strength does feel kind of random in how the number of kilocalories changes without her having to really do anything but call them out, but perhaps that's simply the way it works rather than being tied to any specific character development.

In the camping section of the story, the focus seems to be on just relaxing and having fun, and this works a bit better for Amane than anyone else, mostly because she's afraid of ghosts but not evil robots, which is a pretty entertaining place to draw the line. The whole skewer thing is mildly confusing, but I think that the idea is that a grilled skewer has a combination of many foods, so its Recipipi covers any of those foods cooked on a grill. That does seem to contradict the oden Recipipi, who was apparently only in charge of oden and not all soups and stews with its ingredients, but that's just another indication that this isn't the show's best episode. Still, it's far from being actually bad, and everyone's allowed a blip now and then. Hopefully we'll be back to form next week.

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Delicious Party♡Precure is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.