The girls you watched save the world in middle school are now paying rent and fighting the kind of monsters that don't announce themselves with sparkles. This isn't nostalgia service disguised as storytelling, it's what happens when magical girl shows actually follow their characters into the life that comes after the finale. You watch Nozomi figure out whether "never giving up" works when you're exhausted from your actual job, and that hits different than any transformation sequence ever could.

Years after her middle school days, when she met the fairy Coco from the Palmier Kingdom and fought powerful enemies as Cure Dream, Nozomi Yumehara is an adult working as a teacher. She and her friends are busy with jobs, family, friends and love, along with the stresses that come with grown-up life. When Nozomi finds she cannot help one of her students reach her dreams, she thinks back to the days when she could transform, though her transformation item vanished from the box where she kept it long ago. A chance meeting brings her and Rin back together with the other four Cures, and mysterious beings called Shadows appear and prey on people. Produced to mark twenty years of Precure, the 12-episode sequel revisits the now grown-up heroines of Futari wa Precure: Splash Star, Yes! Precure 5 and Yes! Precure 5 GoGo!, blending magical girl action and fantasy with drama and slice of life.