My name is Yoake Tamao, I’m in my second year at middle school, and I love animals! Ordinary friendly pets, goofy little critters, amazingly weird creatures, big scary beasts: I love them all, every last one! And I think I’ve found the strangest one of all; I’ve seen and read about all sorts of animals, but I’ve never heard of a fish who can swim through the air like water, never mind talk just like a person!

The fish says her name is Baba, and she’s looking for her friends? They all lived together in a place called the Life Stage Observatory, but then some monsters attacked it and she ended up here? I don’t really understand what’s going on, but I know every corner of Shinjuhi Town, so leave it to me~

Wait, what’s this? People called Team Missing have turned a spider into a gigantic messed-up monster, and it’s ripping the town apart! What a horrible thing to do! The people panicking in the streets, the plants being uprooted and shredded, the animals cowering behind the walls, the spider forced to destroy its home; I’ll protect them all, every last one!

…And with that a microphone fell into my hand! My feelings of love for all life have given me the power to transform into a Pretty Cure?! I’m going to find Baba’s friends, protect Shinjuhi Town, restore the Life Stage Observatory, and see so many new animals! I can’t wait!

In search of the ten Mythical Fossils, a remarkable journey through Earth’s history is about to begin! In all times, in all places, in all forms, in all colours! Thrive, Earth Live Pretty Cure!

Characters:

Shinjuhi Town:

Yoake Tamao is a middle school second year who loves finding things out. She belongs to the Nature Club, and spends her free time traipsing around the woods sketching wild birds and making notes about insect migration patterns. She’s a cheerful girl who loves making new friends, but she gets excited so easily she often gets in way over her head. Her theme colour is pink, and she transforms into Cure Chorus, the protector of insects.

Fueda Shinobu is a middle school second year who loves getting her hands dirty. She belongs to the History Club, and spends her free time going around town investigating stonework and searching for fossils. She’s an intelligent girl who’s good at figuring out how things work, but she gets frustrated easily if she can’t find the patterns she’s looking for. Her theme colour is yellow, and she transforms into Cure Wild, the protector of animals.

Akeboshi Kaname is a middle school third year who loves making beautiful things. She belongs to the Biology Club, and spends her free time tending her flower garden and choosing the most fashionable clothes. She’s an elegant girl who cares deeply about everyone around her, but she’s not good at dealing with things that disrupt her routine. Her theme colour is green, and she transforms into Cure Arbour, the protector of plants.

Inochi Chinami is a high school first year who used to love to travel. She had all these dreams of becoming a citizen of the world, and when reality crushed those dreams she fell into a deep pit of apathy. Deep down, still, she longed to fly. When fate gave her a second chance, she seized it with an intensity that surprised even her. Since then, she’s thrown her full self into everything she does. Her theme colour is purple, and she transforms into Cure Soar, the protector of birds.

Life Stage Observatory:

Baba is a young fish who evolved into a more intelligent form with the help of Cure Azure. She’s boisterous and a little bit annoying, and she likes to pretend she’s less affected by the destruction of her home than she is. She likes going on adventures and eating weird food, and operates a lot of the Cures’ later powerups. She has a curesona called Cure Eruption, though she’s only able to transform in her dreams.

Abe is an adorable giant cicada who grew up in the Life Stage Observatory. He’s pretty shy and mumbles a lot, and he’s super excited to observe the daily life of animals he normally sees from a distance. He doesn’t go out adventuring much, instead staying in Shinjuhi Town and telling the Cures fascinating facts about the time they’re visiting through the Fossil Capsule. He wears a little pair of glasses for no discernible reason.

The Mythical Fossils are ten fossils who kept the Life Stage Observatory running before Team Missing took it over. They were scattered across Earth’s history, and the Cures have to travel through time, collect them, and use their power to save the Observatory. Once collected, the Mythical Fossils are put in the Fossil Capsule. The Cures use the Capsule’s convenient display to talk to, play with, and mediate between the Fossils.

Cure Azure was the previous guardian of the Life Stage Observatory, a human girl who lived there with her best friend and helped the Mythical Fossils cultivate life. She was last seen during Team Missing’s attack on the Observatory, fighting off an army of Missingno while its inhabitants fled to Earth. Baba is certain that she’s out there somewhere, fighting the good fight, and all the new Cures have to do is find her and they can all go home.

Team Missing:

Missingno are bizarre monsters, made by taking an ordinary animal and corrupting them so that they have an odd number of legs, or the wrong kind of eyes, or something equally horrible. One of Pretty Cure’s tasks is healing the poor creatures and helping them get home.

Xena is one of Team Missing’s generals, a ferocious warrior who gained ultimate power when she got corrupted and believes only the strong should survive. Her corruption is the most unpredictable of the generals’; she has some new weird weapon every time she fights the Cures.

Larry is one of Team Missing’s generals, a scientist who performs many experiments with the corruption, when he’s not complaining about literally everything. He’s the one behind all the upgrades the Missingno receive over the course of the war.

Acacia is one of Team Missing’s generals, a strategist who comes up with most of the plans Team Missing uses to find the Mythical Fossils and battle Pretty Cure. Her motives are pretty mysterious, but she seems devoted to the very concept of corruption.

Madam Vega is the leader of Team Missing. She spends most of her time offscreen, and even when she shows up to berate her minions she’s always wearing a mask. Her true identity, and the reason she’s so set on spreading corruption throughout Earth’s history, are unknown.

OLDEN is a being, or a force, or a machine. Everything about it is super unclear, but it seems to be the source of the corruption, and Madam Vega cares for it dearly and wants to see it grow.

Story:

The series opens at the Life Stage Observatory, an extratemporal science lab that watches over all of Earth’s evolutionary history. It’s mainly populated by weird extinct talking animals, but among the sarcastic feathery dinosaurs and the very angry trilobites, there is a human boy and girl. They’re playing with Abe and Baba, and it’s clear that the four of them are great friends.

Then a horde of Missingno crash through the walls, and everything turns horrible. Amidst the chaos, the four are set up. The boy is dragged beneath the scrum, the girl transforms into Cure Azure and leaps in to rescue him, and Abe pulls Baba out of the danger zone and towards the evacuation pods. As much to stop her from charging after her friends, he pushes her into an escape pod, tells her he’ll meet her somewhere safe, and shoots her out into history.

Cut to Shinjuhi Town, a pretty small town surrounded by a lot of forests, and Yoake Tamao, who sees something zip through the sky, but it’s so faint she just assumes she imagined it. She’s brought back to reality when she overhears a bunch of small boys chattering and chuckling as they play mean tricks on a caterpillar. She stomps over and yells at them, and when they bring up that it’s just a bug she says that it’s as alive as they are, and that every last living creature has the right to live happily. Suitably chastened, the boys leave, and Tamao returns the caterpillar to a nearby tree. She makes some notes in her notebook of animal observations, jots down the time, and realises she has to be at school in five minutes.

Tamao hurtles across Shinjuhi, dashing across streets, cutting down alleys, and climbing over fences. Her route takes her a little off the beaten path, and while she’s running behind an empty building, she spots Baba out of the corner of her eye. She breaks, turns around, and yeah! That’s a fish swimming through the air! School completely forgotten, Tamao whips out her notebook and approaches the undiscovered fish.

One barrage of incessant questions, some ineffective posturing, and a token explanation of why no one can know Baba exists later, Tamao has promised to help Baba find her friends. Tamao knows every little corner of Shinjuhi, and the two of them leave no stone unturned on their quest/tour. Apart from a stone with one weirdly round edge that Tamao stuffed into her bookbag, their search produces no results. The girls are dejectedly trying to plan their next move when something blows up in the market square and the sound of screaming fills the air.

Neither of them have the greatest survival instincts, so they run and swim towards the gigantic glitchy spider that’s tearing up the town. Xena is also there, cackling very convenient exposition about the Mythical Fossil Team Missing detected in this town and encouraging the Missingno to wreck the whole place. Tamao sees the boys who were bullying the caterpillar being menaced by the Missingno, and throws her bookbag at it. The bookbag is absorbed into the corruption, but the Missingno is distracted long enough for the boys to run for cover.

Xena asks Tamao why someone so weak is risking everything to protect those even weaker than her. One of the boys asks why she’s protecting them now. Tamao’s answer, to both of them, is that they are alive, and all living things deserve to live happily. No matter how strange they are, no matter how rude they are, no matter how scary they are, they deserve to live in peace. And so, Tamao will protect all of them, every last one!

And inside the corruption, something begins to shine. The stone Tamao picked up earlier flies out of the Missingno towards her, but when it reaches her hands, it breaks apart, revealing a microphone. Baba yells something about the Voices of All Life having answered Tamao’s desire in the form of a Live Microphone, and with the words “Mic on! Pretty Cure Voice Resonate!” Tamao transforms into “Bustling life, singing in the reeds! Cure Chorus!”

There’s a fight, and Tamao wins, purifying the spider and sending it back to its web. Xena yells that she’ll remember this, and Tamao and Baba celebrate. Baba says that with the power of Pretty Cure, Tamao can fight all the Missingno and save the Life Stage Observatory! Tamao is about to ask questions, but then she realises that she was supposed to be at school like three hours ago.

An episode break and a long detention later, Tamao finally has the chance to ask Baba a ton more questions. Among other things, she learns about the Mythical Fossils, and remembers that Xena mentioned that there was one in town. She convinces Fueda Shinobu, the school’s expert in all things palaeontological, to help her find the fossils. There’s all sorts of hijinks, and a fight with Team Missing, and by the end of it Shinobu has become “Raucous life, charging across the plains! Cure Wild!” She instantly takes to weird science magic, and is already sketching up war plans by the end of the episode.

In the third episode, Tamao and Shinobu get on the wrong side of Akeboshi Kaname when their quest to find a secret place to talk magic leads to them accidentally breaking some of a big tree at their school’s branches. They’re shanghaied into fetching and carrying for the Biology Club, but they have to sneak off to fight Team Missing. Kaname follows them, and ends up running into Baba. The two don’t exactly get along, but when a Missingno attacks Kaname still tries to protect Baba. She becomes “Flourishing life, blooming in the forests! Cure Arbour!” and defeats the Missingno. Kaname doesn’t slot into the crew quite as well as the others, but she’s willing to give it a try.

After a filler episode or two, Team Missing finally digs up the Mythical Fossil that landed in Shinjuhi Town, the Sail Fossil. Pretty Cure takes possession of it after a fight, and the spirit of the Fossil (who can talk to Pretty Cure through their Live Microphones) informs them that there’s something from the Life Stage Observatory in the woods outside of town. On the suspicion that it’s another Mythical Fossil, the girls go after it. Instead of a Fossil, though, they find Abe, and a vaguely tabletesque device called the Fossil Capsule.

Abe explains that the Mythical Fossils have been scattered across time, and to restore the Life Stage Observatory the girls will need to collect them all and put them in the capsule. Fortunately, with the power of the Sail Fossil, Abe can use the Fossil Capsule to create portals that will take the girls to the times and places where the Mythical Fossils are. But the girls have to be careful; Team Missing is also looking for the Fossils, and if they collect them all they will use the power of the Life Stage Observatory to corrupt the history of the world.

(The token All-Stars movie happens around this time. The cast of Earth Live Pretty Cure is joined by Star Twinkle Pretty Cure and Hugtto Pretty Cure, and all three teams protect a mysterious scientist named Alice from a jerk who calls himself an Ace.)

With the status quo set up, the series goes into the standard Pretty Cure formula. One of the girls will deal with a problem in her personal life, the whole group will try to solve it, Team Missing will attack when they’re almost done, and once the Missingno is purified the episode will wrap up, and Tamao will discuss an interesting animal after the episode preview. Every so often, the girls will go on a field trip into the past to collect a Fossil. Tamao will try to note down absolutely everything she can, Shinobu will geek out over the extinct animals, Kaname will attempt to keep them on task, Baba will interrogate the local wildlife about Cure Azure, Team Missing will try to get the Fossil, Pretty Cure will fix the Missingno, and they’ll come home, exhausted and happy, with another Fossil for the Capsule.

Most of the inter-episode plot is carried by Team Missing, who spend a scene every episode in the corrupted Life Stage Observatory, trying to find the Fossils and bickering over ways to defeat Pretty Cure. Whenever their arguments go too far, Madam Vega will appear out of the darkness, chastise them, say something cryptic about OLDEN, and disappear again. All of Team Missing respects and even fears her, a little, and her presence inevitably leads to them doing something productive.

The rest of the plot relates to Inochi Chinami, a friend of Tamao’s older brother who spends her days philosophising on the futility of life. When she was younger, her dreams were crushed, and she’s still kind of climbing out of the crater. However, during an episode when her class gets sent back in time by Team Missing, when everyone else is panicking she gets excited. She gets her classmates organised, sends out teams to find the portal, and generally has the time of her life exploring this new land. This is the first step in a character arc that ends with her snatching a Mythical Fossil right out of Larry’s hands and becoming “Boundless life, rising through the skies! Cure Soar!” She realises that she never stopped wanting to fly, and joins up with Pretty Cure to do all the things she once dreamed of.

With four Cures and an early-season powerup, Abe calculates that they should be able to retake the Life Stage Observatory. They don’t have all the Fossils yet – he can’t detect the Helix and Dome Fossils at all, which is mildly troubling – but if they take out Team Missing now, they’ll no longer have to race to the Fossils. A few episodes after Cure Soar joins the team, around the midpoint of the season, Pretty Cure gears up and invades the Life Stage Observatory.

At first, they do pretty well. Team Missing haven’t tried to fortify the Observatory or anything, so they’re mostly smashing through hastily constructed Missingno and beating up generals they caught off guard. They move towards the heart of the Observatory, where its inhabitants once watched the evolution of life on a thousand screens. They’re getting pretty close when they run into Madam Vega. The Cures have never met her before, so they just prepare for the ninth miniboss of the day, but Baba realises who she is seconds before the Live Microphone drops into Madam Vega’s hand.

One glitchy transformation sequence later, “Glorious life, magnificent beneath the oceans! Cure Azure!” wipes the floor with her successors and nearly feeds them to OLDEN before they get their deus-ex-machina mid-season attack and stun her long enough to make a break for it. On their way out of the Observatory, they spot the Helix and Dome Fossils. The girls make it out alive, but nothing will ever be the same.

The second half of the season has a somewhat different structure. The girls must now defend their Mythical Fossils from Team Missing, and get strong enough to retrieve the last two Fossils and destroy OLDEN. Team Missing, on the other hand, now knows that Pretty Cure poses a serious threat to them, and they start bringing out the big guns. Xena corrupts her body even more, creating weapons that can attack Pretty Cure from outside of time, Larry creates Missingno that don’t need to be based off animals, thus negating the power of Pretty Cure’s purification attacks, and Acacia gets very, very sneaky. This is still a Pretty Cure series, so the tone never quite goes dark, but there’s a sense of dread over the back half that some of the girls (Chinami) deal better with than others (Kaname).

The second half of the season also has more multi-episode story arcs, as well as plot threads that continue from episode to episode. There’s an arc that has the girls trying to convince Red, Abe’s silent senior (and possible older brother?) to give them their late-season power-up through a series of trials. There’s a thread about Baba’s curesona; she creates it as she tries to comprehend Cure Azure’s betrayal, but it only exists as some sketches on paper until Acacia tries to attack the girls in their dreams and Baba saves them as “Defiant life, yelling atop the volcano! Cure Eruption!”

(The series movie airs around this time. I don’t have any ideas for it, except for that the climax involves Kaname and Honey having a swordfight for the fate of the world.)

One of the last episodes before the finale involves Shinobu’s little sister Cyan finding a wounded Missingno and befriending it, even trying to hide it from Pretty Cure once they catch wind of it. Since it doesn’t seem hostile, the girls decide to leave it in an uninhabited part of the past, where it can roam free to its non-heart’s content before its inherent corruption causes it to collapse in on itself. The realisation that even the artificial Missingno are alive in their own way leads Tamao to decide that they must stop OLDEN before it’s fed any more of its own creations.

The finale, as is Pretty Cure tradition, takes several episodes to play out, is much darker than the rest of the series, and is absolutely epic. Highlights include OLDEN beginning to corrupt Earth’s history from the beginning of life, causing Shinjuhi Town and the world around it to mutate in horrible ways; the reveal that the intelligence at the heart of OLDEN is what’s left of Evan, the fourth member of Abe and Baba and Cure Azure’s group; a ten-minute-long final showdown with Cure Azure that ends with her going back to the side of good, only for Acacia to unleash OLDEN anyway; and all five Cures, backed up by the Mythical Fossils and aided by Xena and Larry, performing the final laser that destroys OLDEN once and for all. In the aftermath, the surviving generals surrender themselves into custody, the Mythical Fossils begin restoring the Life Stage Observatory, and Cure Azure places what’s left of Evan in a tube of healing fluid, hoping to someday save him.

In the last episode, Chinami is a lackadaisical world traveller, Kaname is at university studying Plant Science, Shinobu is helping out with local archaeological digs, Tamao has made volumes upon volumes of logs of the animals around Shinjuhi, Abe is leading important research at the Life Stage Observatory, Baba has become a gigantic badass dragon, and Cure Azure and Evan live together somewhere unremarkable, cared-for and happy.