This review contains spoilers for the reviewed material. This is your only warning.

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“This world was not made for us. But I understand now that it’s the only one we have.”

For most here in the west, the history of Toei‘s forays into the magical girl genre begins with Sailor Moon, a monstrously successful franchise that is widely beloved to this day. If they know a little more, it ends with Pretty Cure, another monstrously successful franchise that is widely beloved to this day. Those with a still more slightly expansive knowledge of the company’s history might also be aware of Ojomajo Doremi, a marginally less successful franchise that is still beloved enough that it spawned a sort of distant sequel film, Looking for Magical Doremi, as recently as 2020, a full fifteen years after its original conclusion. Those who particularly care about the genre might point out that they’ve made all sorts of magical girl anime over the years, including Himitsu no Akko-chan, one of the very first. Regardless, all of these anime get their flowers from those in the know, and none could rightly be called overlooked by anyone with a decent knowledge of the medium.

But the same is not true for every magical girl series they’ve made.

The year is 2006. Futari wa Pretty Cure has just ended its second and final proper season. Alongside Splash Star, a reboot of the Precure IP, Toei launches a second action-oriented magical girl offering; Flower Princess Blaze!!

Time and the language barrier have rendered this decision obscure and puzzling, but in the moment, it must’ve made sense. Splash Star was the “safe bet”, essentially a retuning of the original Pretty Cure concept. Blaze was the wildcard; stranger, more experimental, and airing a bit later in the day. (Perhaps aiming for a slightly older audience–the 10-14 demo, perhaps–than Pretty Cure and its predecessor Doremi did.)

Splash Star has proven divisive over the longview of history, but in the moment, it absolutely crushed its younger sibling in terms of popularity and sales. Flower Princess Blaze did not do badly; it pulled decent ratings and sold decent amounts of tie-in merchandise. But it was nowhere near as successful as Precure, and “decent” only goes so far. That is perhaps why, when its second “season” concluded in late 2008, the IP was shelved.

(Technically, when airing, the show was split into two “seasons” which aired back-to-back with only a short break between them, Flower Princess Blaze and Flower Princess Blaze!!–yes, the exclamation points are the only difference in title–but the distinction is minimal, and the few later releases of the series haven’t made it, applying the second title to the series on the whole and treating its combined 126 episodes as a single, sprawling saga. The only place I’m aware of that still draws a line between the two is Wikipedia.)

To this end, Toei evidently decided their grand experiment had failed, and cut back to just one girls’ anime. Pretty Cure soldiered on and continued to be insanely popular, but its shadowy younger sister disappeared like a thief in the night, never to be heard from again.

Despite this, Flower Princess Blaze has proven to be quietly influential, with a diverse array of artists and industry figures both within the anime medium and without citing it as an inspiration. Puella Magi Madoka Magica‘s soul gems were taken directly from this series in all but name. And not one but two Pretty Cure seasons–Heartcatch and Happiness Charge–would later make fairly obvious homages to some of its villains.

Even outside the specific lineage of Toei magical girl anime, there are nods in works separated by space, time, and even medium; Steven Universe‘s Gem Homeworld draws on the Midnight Kingdom for architectural inspiration, Wish Upon the Pleiades xeroxes its finale outright, Anime-Gataris features the show’s real-life director as an in-show character. Most recently, and perhaps most famously, My Dress-Up Darling licensed the name and worked actual footage from the series into its own plot, giving lead girl Marin a fixation on secondary villain (and fan favorite) Black Robelia, (rendered “Lobelia” in that show’s official subs) whom she cosplays in several episodes.

And yet, in spite of the shadow it casts over the past 15 years of the magical girl genre, the series remains fairly obscure, especially in the west. Well, I’m not naïve enough to think I can change that on my own, but perhaps this, combined with the renewed interest from MDUD’s cameos, can help a little bit. Today, we dive into one of the strangest magical girl sagas of all time. Wilted flowers and shattered crystals. A hundred worlds in peril and the six girls who’ll save them. Midnight cities and a battle at the end of the universe. This is Flower Princess Blaze.

It starts out so simply. We follow two girls; one of them, Mirai Tengeji / Princess Daisy (Sakura Tange), cast in the then-young but already-typical mold of the upbeat, peppy lead magical girl. She has her foibles (the most obvious of which being her comically rough manner of speaking), but she is certainly what we’d now recognize as the most “typical” of Blaze‘s characters. With a minimal amount of tweaking, she’d fit right in with any given Pretty Cure season.

But she’s not the real main character, not really. Much of the show instead centers on her rival–then friend, then rival, then friend again–Shion Nikaido / Princess Lily (Rumi Shishido). Some context: it’s established before too long that the Midnight Kingdom, the requisite baddies-of-the-week, both a group and the physical place they hail from, form when ordinary people fall into despair, that word that translated anime love to use as a catch-all for negative emotional states. That’s not a background detail; each and every episode features someone, whether it’s a minor one-off character or one far more important, joining the Midnight Kingdom. Sometimes they’re rescued by episode’s end, but it’s far from a sure thing. As such, even early on, Flower Princess Blaze operates with a level of intensity and tension very rare for children’s anime.

At the climax of the series’ first major arc, Shion, learns that her own sister (and former comrade) Neon, (Houko Kuwashima) joined the Kingdom’s ranks after abandoning her position as the Flower Princess Hydrangea.

The revelation that Neon and Black Robelia are the same person remains one of the show’s most iconic twists, eventually fully elucidated in flashback, as does the ensuing scene. Hints peppered throughout the show’s first cour that Shion and Neon are not blood related come to a head here, where Robelia lays out her motivations plainly. People look down on them for their familial situation, she feels like a burden on her parents, she basically flat-out says she wants to die. She’s sick of the world and wants to burn it to the ground. (Her heartbreak over teenage crush Soma probably didn’t help either. Although I think some reads of the character over-emphasize that point.) But this scene is illustrative for another reason; in most magical girl anime, at least those aimed at a young audience, this is not a point of view that would be given any serious credence. There’d be a rebuttal, Shion would assure Neon that people really do love her, something.

But earlier in the episode, Mirai tried that on Shion, and the two had a (comparatively rare for the genre) mahou-on-mahou scuffle. It’s perhaps for that reason that Black Robelia’s speech is so effective that Shion actually defects too. Her flower crystal goes black, and the Midnight Kingdom gains another soldier. This sets up a pattern that recurs three more times over the remainder of the anime, until Mirai is eventually the only Flower Princess still standing. (Not for nothing is Flower Princess Blaze one of the few magical girl anime I can name where the bad guys are also given henshin sequences.)

One of the reasons that the late-series development of all the Princesses eventually shaking off this evil influence feels so well-earned is that we know why they felt this way to begin with. It’s the old adage; no man is an island. Or, well, no little girl in this case.

There’s a lot of good in this show, and much I haven’t mentioned (the other three Flower Princesses; Anemone, Azalea, and Rose, all get solid character arcs as well.) But that’s not to say the series is flawless. Something that Dress-Up Darling lightly pokes fun at when discussing the show is that it’s 126 episodes long. By the standards of the day, that probably didn’t seem unreasonable. For many modern anime fans, however, it’s untenably long, not helped here by the fact that Blaze is a victim of the same spotty visual consistency as any anime of that length. (Plenty of episodes look great, but plenty of others look…well, less than great.) It’s also the only magical girl anime I’ve ever seen with a form of Dragonball Z‘s fight length problem. There are a few encounters in the series that take up entire episodes or even several episodes in a row, and while that certainly does make them feel suitably epic, it can make a few stretches of the show feel oddly empty, too.

Not helping matters is the fact that the show’s main big bad, The Wilt Princess Spiderlily (Minami Takayama), does not appear at all until episode 60. She does not appear in person until almost 20 episodes later, in episode 78. There is a fair amount of running around, here. Adding to this is that while the defection of one of the Flower Princesses to the Midnight Kingdom is shocking the first time, it does become a bit predictable by the time Rose, the last of them, falls to the darkness. Although Blaze doing the whole “adding magical girls to the team as the show goes on” bit in reverse is certainly not something I’ve seen before or since, and Mirai’s few episodes totally alone are suitably harrowing.

This all said, even in its less substantial stretches, there’s a lot to appreciate. The surreal atmosphere of the Midnight Kingdom itself, which our protagonists eventually visit–as well as the surrounding Land of Sadness–is just wonderful. In the second half of the series, Mirai and the remaining princesses leap across a good dozen different worlds when the Earth itself becomes too inundated with negative magic for them to stay.

At show’s end, The Princesses are eventually turned back to the side of good, in some of the show’s best episodes. There is of course a magical doodad, the Miracle Seed, which they assemble. Reunited, they’re faced with a choice. Spiderlily lays it out for them plain; they can destroy her with the artifact and end the threat of the Midnight Kingdom forever, but if they do, they’ll be sent back in time. From our perspective, just before the very first episode. Their memories will not stay, and they’ll forget all the times they’ve had together. A square-one reset, like the whole thing never happened.

Of course, none of them hesitate, and we are treated to a shockingly rough scene where Spiderlily dissolves into red smoke as the girls’ memories are literally ripped from their heads. Time rewinds, and for 5 of the last episode’s final 15 minutes it really does seem like we just watched the entire series be undone in an instant. We soon learn one person does remember, Mirai, whose companion is the only one who seems to have survived the time reset. The exchange that follows, as Mirai breaks into tears and her fairy tries to comfort her, is one of the most eerily prescient in animation history, given the series’ obscurity. Especially the mention to the now ex-magical girl that even if no one else remembers their adventures, they still happened. Forgetting does not undo the work they’ve done.

Of course, both within the show and without, it turns out that people do remember. There’s a brief timeskip to the following day, and Mirai’s interactions with Shion are cold until she lets slip a small detail from their now-past lives. At this, Shion’s demeanor changes in an instant, and the two break into happy tears. The montage that follows weaves some adorably fluffy nonsense about how the strength of one’s heart means that true friends never forget each other. It’s a sweet, and surprisingly simple, end to one of the wildest rides in mahou shoujo history.

After its conclusion, the Flower Princess Blaze IP, as mentioned, was shelved. Enigmatic director Ryusei Nakao (no relation to the voice actor of the same name) had an apparently acrimonious (sources differ) break with Toei over this fact and dropped out of the industry entirely. It’s unfortunate, since Nakao’s distinct style does lend an unreal air to the show, especially with regard to the surreal liminality of the Land of Sadness episodes. Most other staff on the project went on to other things, largely much more successful than FPB had been. (Some, including character designer Yoshihiko Umakoshi, already known for his work on Doremi, would even work on later Pretty Cure seasons. Heartcatch in his case) Even with regard to the director, if he was only going to make one project, this is a hell of a legacy to leave.

Flower Princess Blaze has had a particularly bizarre half-life, not just for its genre but anime in general. Comparable in some respects to other non-Sailor Moon, non-Precure magical girl anime of the time period and slightly before. The main difference of course, is that there aren’t any fingerprints from Cosmic Baton Girl Comet-san or such on Steven Universe and whatnot. FPB’s legacy is paradoxical; forgotten by most but embedded into the very DNA of many far more successful anime.

There is one famous example, in particular.

I have heard it claimed that Homura Akemi is directly patterned after Shion. (The show’s TVTropes page once called her an “expy,” site slang for a copycat character, until some roving Madoka fan removed the line, and to be fair, not without reason.) There are definitely parallels to be drawn between Shion’s quest to save her sister and Homura’s to save Madoka. There are important differences here, though (for one thing, Shion is only subjected to a time loop once, and it’s along with everyone else. Shion also fails pretty early on but unambiguously succeeds once she becomes the first Princess to return to the side of good. A very different structure than Homura’s story), and it’s important to not confuse influence with rote copying, but it’s hard not to see at least a faint resemblance. One can definitely see many traces of Flower Princess in Madoka in terms of mood and atmosphere as well, and the bizarre “Deep Wilt” creatures that the Princesses encounter later in their adventures are almost certainly one inspiration for the Witches. It’s an askew influence, and not purely 1 to 1, as some other anime bloggers with too much time on their hands have previously argued, but it is definitely there, and it continues to be a source of contention.

I would say that if Flower Princess Blaze really did inspire even some part of Madoka Magica (and it seems unlikely, all told, that it didn’t), that casts its shadow even wider, including to relatively recent fare like Wonder Egg Priority and Blue Reflection Ray.

But to an extent, the ongoing debate over its impact muddles a simpler truth. Even if FPB had inspired absolutely nothing, it would still be a damn good show. I said earlier that Flower Princess Blaze is obscure, and that’s true in the grand scheme of things, but it’s never really gone away either. In the late 2000s and very early ’10s, it made messageboard rounds as a stock “hidden gem you have to see” recommendation, alongside anime such as RahXephon and Read or Die. (It helped that it was given an excellent fansub treatment by one-off group Mid-Nite Subs in 2010.) It’s managed to stick around in some corners of the internet, both domestically and abroad.

It’s a decent fanart magnet to this very day, and if you stick your ears to the walls of those anime forums that are still around, it’s said you can still hear Shion / Neon shippers (hmm) fighting with Shion / Soma shippers (also hmm). This is to say nothing of the aforementioned cameos in Dress-Up Darling, which have reignited fan interest even further. (It’s worth noting that because of the MDUD dub, Mirai, Shion and Neon are the only three Princesses to have official English voice actresses; Luci Christian, Monica Rial and the ever-underrated Jamie Marchi respectively.)

Maybe, to cheesily echo Robelia’s famous quote moments before she returned to her true form, this world just wasn’t made for Flower Princess Blaze. But it’s become a part of it anyway, and its impact on anime–as a medium and an artform–is an inarguable good. That counts for a lot.

Until we meet again, Princesses burning bright with hope.

“Lustrous flowers bloom bright from dark soil. I believe that we, too, will live on in a way.”

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Like what you’re reading? Unfortunately, the anime you just read about does not exist, and this post constitutes an April Fool’s prank of truly stupid proportions. Seriously, you have no idea how long it took to write all this and make it feel semi-believable, and that’s with me fudging a few details, like its alleged air-hour. Anyway, if you want to see me write in terms this grandiloquently pretentious about actual, real anime, (such as My Dress-Up Darling, where Flower Princess Blaze originated and which I covered week by week). Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders. I don’t plan to do this again next year, but no promises. I figure, if you can’t laugh at yourself once in a while, what’s the point of even having a job this silly? PS: The joke is not that this anime doesn’t exist. It’s that I just made you read a fanfic formatted like a review.