Nodoka, Chiyu and Hinata attempt to improve their teamwork in the twelfth episode of Healin’ Good ♡ PreCure with a boot camp. A new threat also appears.
PreCure meeting
After barely managing to scrape by against the Megabyogen in the previous episode, Rabirin, Pegitan and Nyatoran decide that Nodoka, Chiyu and Hinata need to improve their teamwork. They come up with the “PreCure Team Building Master Plan”, which is just a boot camp. The boot camp doesn’t seem to achieve the result the fairies hope for though.
Further complicating the situation is the appearance of a new enemy.
Batetemouda
Episode 12 adds one more character to the enemy forces: Batetemouda. He is pretty keen to get out there and do King Byogen’s bidding. No prizes for guessing that he plays the role of main villain for this episode, but I’ll get to that in due course.
What the girls expect from boot camp
Returning focus to Nodoka and the others for the moment, they have some pretty amusing ideas about what they will be doing during boot camp. Kind of a shame that we won’t get to see the girls in the outfits they imagine – especially Hinata’s Chinese dress – but oh well. Of course, the whole point of the boot camp is to build their teamwork.
Nodoka doing a pretty good impression of a character from an Afro manga (something like Laid-Back Camp or Puella Magi Tamura Homura)
Saying that the boot camp has mixed results would be very generous. Instead, I’ll be honest and say that things do not work out as Rabirin hopes. She and the others worry that they may just end up pushing the girls apart. We all know that the bond between Nodoka, Chiyu and Hinata isn’t as shallow as that, though.
All the tension gone
I still absolutely adore the dynamic between Nodoka, Chiyu and Hinata, and this episode just affirms that they have great chemistry together. They may not be entirely in sync, but there is a lot of love there.
Batetemouda’s first Megabyogen
All right, time for some action. This is where PreCure first meet Batetemouda, and he doesn’t take the same approach to battle as the other Byogen generals. No, instead, he jumps right into the fray alongside the Megabyogen.
Fontaine and Sparkle attack Batetemouda
I appreciate a villain who is willing to fight directly, mostly because that generally means we see an increase of the hand-to-hand combat. Batetemouda is no slouch when it comes to fighting, even managing to repel both Fontaine and Sparkle when they attack together.
Always nice to see Cure Grace channelling Hibiki Tachibana’s spirit
The theme of the boot camp from earlier was “unspoken understanding”, and of course, PreCure demonstrate exactly that as they fight. Whilst I can’t really say much for the Megabyogen, the fight against Batetemouda was good here.
After the fight concludes, Batetemouda hints that there may be more new enemies showing up soon. Hmm… could this all potentially lead up to a new Cure? Not that there have really been any major candidates for that just yet. Honestly, if Healin’ Good ♡ PreCure bucks the trend and just sticks with three PreCure throughout the season, I’d be fine with that.
Though that won’t be more merchandise to sell, so I’m just going to go ahead and assume there will be a fourth Cure eventually. Oh, and if any leaks have happened to spoil that, I don’t want to know.
This episode reused quite a bit of footage from the previous one. Hard to say whether it was always planned out that way or the current circumstances of the world are to blame, but the episode did do what it set out to do. Besides, all the new stuff was great. The boot camp had plenty of funny moments, and Batetemouda’s first fight was good.
Nodoka, Chiyu and Hinata have had it pretty rough for the past couple of episodes, and it seems that things might just be getting to be too much for Hinata. That’s for the next episode, though.
Rory Muses 