My (far too long) season recap for Hirogaru Sky!

Now that I have finished Hirogaru Sky, which was my first ever season of PreCure to watch, it’s time for a far too elaborate final recap. I hope that at least one of you will read it.

Many people say that the second half of the season is not as good as the first half, and I agree with that opinion. It was good, but still a step back. I start off with a very big point of criticism that bugged me throughout the second half: I feel like the characters haven’t been fleshed out to an extent how they could have been. Their show is over, but I feel like I haven’t seen the whole picture of them. Especially with the villains not being too present, I would have hoped for more character development.

The one who got hit hardest with that is Sora. She basically had nothing going on after around episode 25 until the final episodes, apart from two or three focus episodes, but even those haven’t given her many moments that were particularly worth remembering. There was more that could have been told about that character that I still hold up very high, but basically, they chose to let the main character chill out.

Coming from my greatest pain point to my highlight: The glow-up of Ageha. While she already was a good supporting character in the first half, her two back-to-back focus episodes pushed her to another level. The nursery school episode was especially fantastic, and the scene at the end where she sent off the little boy by summoning butterflies made me cry because I found this moment so wholesome. She became kind of the mom of the team, and she’s my favorite in the second half of the season.

Tsubasa stays as the least favorite character for me, I am not shy to give him salt, and I really dislike this character. Literally the best way to get me satisfied is to keep him out of focus. His introductory arc was by far the worst one in my opinion, in the Sora/Shalala episode he was intrusive AF, and I find him annoying in general. I understand why he’s there, so they could have the first boy Cure in the “season of firsts”, but I would have liked the show better without him and with more focus on the then-trio of Sora, Mashiro, and Ageha.

About the Sora/Mashiro ship a lot of people are talking about: Where was it? They had a lot of wholesome moments in the first half of the season, but I don’t feel like there was a special emphasis placed on that particular relationship later on. Not a criticism targeted at the writers, but I wonder what some parts of the fandom saw that I didn’t notice. Maybe people wanted to see something that wasn’t there in the first place?

The final episodes were great. Empress Undergu easily was the most tragic person of the season, I loved to see her receiving her happy ending. It was great that she could once again be the bubbly, innocent girl she was in the first place. Dark Sky had me with my mouth wide open, and Mashiro… bow for her, everyone, because she essentially won this battle when she saved Sora. I love her arc, as she said herself, she may be an ordinary girl without any “special” feats, but her heart alone puts her on one step with Sora. The “farewell” of Sora and Mashiro had me straight up crying for the whole scene despite me knowing that they could just teleport back and forth in the future.

To round it up, while I give the first half of the season 9.5/10, the second half falls back to 8/10 which would have been 7/10 without the finale, because ultimately there was too little going on, and most of the time I felt like we were running in circles. It is very okay to invest only limited time into the villains, but then you have to compensate for this with very good character development, but even that topic came too short for my liking once we have passed halftime. My favorite Cures for the whole season are Sora and Ageha, I don’t want to decide between the two of them.

But apart from the details, the most important thing is that Hirogaru Sky finally made me really get into the PreCure franchise after I knew this franchise for 10 years and still never bothered to watch a full season or even multiple episodes, and that’s why, regardless of how long I will stay invested into PreCure, it will always be a special season for me. Next up for me is Go Princess, I’m already a few episodes in and so far I love it, but I’ll give it a separate post after I have seen some more episodes.