I thoroughly enjoyed the first season of Futari wa Precure. It had two charismatic main characters, funny and cute sidekicks, some likeable villains, and I even like Porun who everyone finds super annoying. I mean, I get you, but I am considering getting a plushie of him whenever it is that I can go to Japan again. However, I was left with no choice to side with most opinions I read: Futari wa Precure Max Heart is an inferior sequel.
The season presents us with the new character Hikari, who is the life of the queen of the Garden of Light. The queen lost her identity in the finale of the previous season and split into several fragments which must be collected to get her back. In the meantime, we are introduced to an array of new villains as well as an enigmatic young boy who all end up in the mansion used by the previous cast of bad guys as well as the current tenants, the two comic relief Zakenna.
Hikari meets Porun and they become soulmates just like Nagisa, Honoka and their companions. This takes a few episodes, but she eventually becomes Shiny Luminous. You can see that she is not considered a Cure and honestly, I would rank her more in the mascot category. She acts as support to the other two characters and whenever she gets to act by herself, it is only to stop the bad guys temporarily for Cure Black and White to finish them.
This pretty much sums up her dynamic in and out of action for the entire series, but I honestly found Hikari a character with a huge potential. In the first few episodes, we see her confused as to what is the place she just popped up in and why is she there. However, she ends up as the supposed cousin to takoyaki place owner and friend of the cast Akane, enrolling in school and in about 10 episodes she is a regular girl, just like that. I would have liked for that sense of confusion to be explored for a little longer, but I guess the series explains it as the queen teaching her about the things around her.
I also found it a shame that as the series progressed, the Heartiels (the queen’s wills) got less and less screentime, mostly reduced to a few minutes of introduction, appearing randomly in the middle of one episode, and returning to the piece of merchandise they call a home. You may have noticed by now, but I like cute characters even – and especially – when they get annoyingly funny. Lulun is the exception here as she did not have that much depth as a character and was given about the same screentime as Porun in the previous season, therefore I enjoyed her presence.
This leaves us with about 70% of the time being occupied with our main characters Nagisa and Honoka and their predicaments… which is basically the same as the previous season. We get the science competition again, Fujipi-senpai’s birthday again, a trip to the countryside again, and at some point, I felt like I watched enough episodes of lacrosse tournaments to make up a sports anime off its own.
One thing I have to say is that when the series hit the spot, it did it well. There are some very sweet moments, and I particularly liked the episodes that focused more on a sort of slice-of-life story such as Hikari’s meeting with a boy who ran away from home and writing a piece about a dango store that is about to close due to the old age of the owner. Unfortunately, the fights with the villains were always quite bland and predictable, despite the amusing action scenes the series has accustomed us to, and this continued all the way to the underwhelming ending.
Overall, I did enjoy the series enough not to drop it, but I admit it was a bit challenging to get myself to keep watching at some points. It did not taint my desire to continue exploring the Precure franchise as I have already watched enough to know each series has their own strong points and is different enough from each other. I would recommend Futari wa Precure Max Heart to those who loved the first season enough to see more of Nagisa and Honoka doing pretty much the same thing. 
