Yumeiro Patissiere Series Review

I want some sweets now, dammit.

After being confounded by some technical difficulties with streaming yesterday, I got to watch the final episode of the surprisingly delightful Yumeiro Patissiere today. And, all in all, I enjoyed this show quite a bit. This isn’t exactly shocking – after all, at the mid-point I said it was pretty good, and I’ve commented on it in some posts since attesting to it’s continued quality, so it would’ve taken quite the trainwreck to mess it up at this point.

As I’ve stressed before, Ichigo’s personal growth was a strong point for the show. I also felt that showing her still messing some things up toward the end helped make it a bit more realistic that someone could suddenly burst onto the scene and perform so well overall, although I was irritated that she messed up with the crusts and burnt them in her second-to-last match. It just stretched credulity that they would then pick her to go up against someone such as Francois given that she was unable to beat her on a less intense level. But I suppose I can’t fault the show too much, as it is the nature of the beast for that to have happened.

Another thing I found jarring was evil!Henri-sensei, even if it was mitigated by the fact that he then stated he had to play the role of the bad guy in order to allow Ichigo to bring her game up a level. Really? Breaking Mari’s heart was that necessary? I also fail to see how knocking her out of the game a whole match before she would’ve been against Ichigo enables Ichigo to improve herself. It was pretty sloppy plotting and, honestly, made Henri-sensei look really bad, regardless of how justified he felt his actions were.

And one final criticism for the final arc – Team Francois’s outfits are so insane. And apparently none of them have belly-buttons. But more importantly, they seem like the most retarded cooking outfits ever; it makes so much sense to have your torso and boobs exposed when around hot stoves and ovens! Wow, so smart! It was a really weird choice, too, given how it seemed to be the first time anyone actually had boobs, period.

Anyway, Ichigo beats out Francois to win with her improved version of her grandmother’s strawberry tart, which was wholly expected. I now wish I could get my hands on the damn thing to try eating it, though. What was surprising was that we got the time-leap for the next series at the end of this episode, and it seems a fairly forgone conclusion that Ichigo and Makoto get together… thus clearing the way for fujoshi to finally feel like the show is giving them an opening with Andoh and Hanabusa. I’m personally feeling a bit leery, though, as having Makoto and Ichigo fully cognizant of liking each other prior to the new season’s start means that we don’t really see how they get from tsundere-Makoto and starry-eyed-for-Henri-sensei-Ichigo to the two mutually agreeing to hold off on saying anything to each other until after they’ve finished their training. I’ve also kind of enjoyed the fact that any romantic stuff was pretty low-key throughout YP itself… It does seem to be pretty rare in shoujo to have such a thing.

I’ll be commenting on the new season in another post later; more info came about it in the episode preview at the end of episode fifty, and some of it is significantly different from the info that was out there originally about Yumeiro Patissiere SP Professional, so I’d like to clear things up a bit. However, for now I’m more interested in focusing on the first series.

I really liked Yumeiro Patissiere. It was a very solid shoujo show, and was a surprise hit for me. Its pretty shocking to me that its already been a year since I started watching this; a lot happened to me over the past year, but this was pretty much a constant for me, and an enjoyable one at that. For folks who enjoy shoujo, I highly recommend checking Yumeiro Patissiere out. I can also recommend it to those of you who have children who can read, as it is entirely appropriate for all ages, as well as being a fun show a kid could very easily get into. The production values were good, the storytelling was good, and the characters themselves were extremely dynamic. Well-worth the time to watch.