Review: Pretear

Pretear is an old classic romance Anime, similiar to Sailor Moon. Pretear starts off like all those Magical Girl Anime do: Himeno is a normal teenage girl (why is it never fully grown, developed women?) who ends up meeting Hayate (the main male protagonist) whilst walking/running down the street.

Their first meeting is a little awkward, with them bumping into eachother. Name calling ensues, and they start fighting a bit (always a good sign!). Later that day, she meets Hayate again, along with the other main protagonist, Sasame, and their friends, the Leafe Knights. They explain to her, that she is what they call, “Pretear“. The Pretear is a being with the power to merge with any of the Leafe Knights, and wield their Elemental powers to stop evil (the main evil being the Princess of Disaster).

So, you end up getting 7 Leafe Knights, 2 annoying Step Sisters, a rich stepmother, an air-head father, all fit into a 12 part Anime series. That’s the first thing wrong with Pretear. The Anime is far too short. 12 episodes isn’t enough time for character depth and plot progression with even 1/4 of those characters. Each episode, Himeno gets to merge with one of the Leafe Knights – gaining a different dress to fight each baddie!

That leads me to my next complaint. The fight scenes were really bad in Pretear. Not like Rurouni Kenshin fights, or Bleach fights, nope. More like “hey, you, I’m gonna use this attack that I never learned, let alone practiced, and kill you in 1 hit! hyaaaa!”. Yup. It was that bad.

It’s ok though, Pretear‘s one redeeming feature is the excess amount of sad, and romantic moments. They’re splattered everywhere. Which is ok, if you’re into that (I’m not – but my girlfriend loves Pretear). The ending in particular, is surprisingly good, given the lack of plot, progression, character depth, etc., and has a not-so-surprising twist. But that’s ok. Not everyone can come up with an original twist in an Anime!

Lastly, I’d like to address the voice acting, which is, put nicely, so bad you’ll end up needing tissues to plug up the blood from your ears. Chris Patton is an “OK” voice actor, but the main character, Hayate, was voiced by Illici Guardiola. He has a really bad accent – like he has trouble pronouncing a 2 syllable word. You know the kind, those people that drag their tongues while speaking. Yeah, he sounds really, really bad.

Animation: 3/10
The animation was ok up close, but as you got further away, the characters were so badly drawn it looked outright ugly.

Story: 3/10
Wait, what? There was a story? I thought it was just 10 episodes of trying on new clothes, then the last 2 episodes consisting of fighting the bad guy (or in this case, girl).

Music: 6/10
Nothing new. Meh.

Overall: 4/10

The Good:
There really wasn’t much. I guess the ending was the only thing you could classify as anything other then crap, which was what most the Anime was.

The Bad:
There is just so many things wrong with the Anime that I can’t be bothered listing them all.

You can Watch Pretear English Dubbed Online <– by clicking that link, and you can decide for yourself.

Here’s some images for everyone:

What did you think of Pretear? Have you seen it? Do you want to see it? Post your replies below!