[4Tran]

Originally Posted by Daniel Lind

You've gotta be joking.
There's five Episode Ones in that show.
There's painfully pointless villain act in that show.
There's dumber than dumb characters in that show.
There's numerous blatant rehashes of plots from older productions in that show.
Absolutely misused motif, absolutely horrible finale that's so template and generic it might as well not have any dialogue, and it also simultaneously rips off MULTIPLE previous Precure works.
Did I mention they were changing what Miracle Jewel's purpose was between episodes like no big deal?
Characters have no arcs or meaningful interactions whatsoever.
Outside of a handful of good original episodes Smile is the absolute low of the franchise and a hackjob.
Animation cuts corners? Check out the episode in which battles are comprised of reused OP animation. Beamspam prevails over fistcuffs so there's rarely things to look at either.

Sometimes I wonder if people who dislike Doki just aren't willing to see Smile go.

I haven't watched all of Smile yet, but what I saw of it was fun, entertaining and pretty high quality. It's certainly better than what I could stand of Suite, and it has a much better first episode than Dokidoki. You're the first person I've come across who has been so critical of Smile.

Originally Posted by Laevatein

[SNIP] but Sword definitely seems like an age-appropriate version of Homura.

Cure Sword is basically mini-Cure Moonlight, right down to having similar colors.

Originally Posted by Sol Falling

Half of the reason I managed to stick through with Suite for so long was the ED themes...and I gotta admit, Doki Doki's ED seems more than good enough to accomplish the same thing as well (despite both of those series' unattractive character designs.

Dokidoki's 3D character models for the ED are very nice - the nicest of all the Precures by quite a bit. In fact, they might look better than the 2D versions. It's the one part of the episode that I have no complaints about at all. Sure, it's not as good overall as Tomorrow Song, but what is?

Originally Posted by Sol Falling

That's kind of bizarre, really, now that I think about it.). I hope Doki Doki won't be too heavy-handed with the het romance agenda, though, as I've been mostly spared from it in all the seasons I've watched so far.

You can pretty much bet on that. There's a rule that there won't be any meaningful romances in Precure.