Having watched Pretty Cure All Stars DX 2: The Light of Hope – Protect the Rainbow Jewel!, it lacks a lot of what made the prior movie so entertaining.

As any Dynamic Pro or Super Sentai fan will tell you, the appeal of a franchise crossover is that you get to see all of your favorite characters team up and show how awesome they all are. Precure All Stars DX 2 gets the former right, but falters when it comes to the latter.

There’s a number of problems with it, but I’m going to focus on the fight scenes in particular, as I think its faults are indicative of the rest of the movie’s problems.

The first Pretty Cure All Stars DX wherein the two Cures are about to knock some monster the hell out.

In the first All Stars DX film which featured characters up to Fresh Pretty Cure, each of of the different Cure teams are able to showcase what makes them distinct. In a single fight sequence, you get to see that the originals, Cure Black and Cure White, prefer direct physical combat, while the team from Splash Star utilizes primarily powerful force fields and the girls of Yes! Pretty Cure 5 fight mainly with elemental projectiles. Not only are they animated very well, but their methods and rhythms contrast with each other and show how when together they can complement each others’ abilities. This is nowhere near as present in the second movie, where at the very best all we get to see are fight sequences with half as much storytelling and less creative animation.

This scene from the second movie actually indicates their strength quite well, but this is more the exception than the rule.

I know what you might be thinking. “It’s just a cash-in movie that’s designed to part kids from their money.” And you’re right about that aspect, but that still doesn’t take away from the fact that the first movie was so good at conveying the characters’ personalities and styles through the way they fight, and Pretty Cure as a franchise is famous for having incredibly high-quality action scenes when the budget permits.

If a third Precure All Stars DX does indeed come out, I hope that it’ll take more from the original attempt than its follow-up.