SP Professional is also over so here's my 2 cents on the sequel:
Yumeiro Patissiere SP Professional takes place 2 years after the first series. Ichigo returns to Japan to find Team Ichigo essentially disbanding. Hanabusa and Andou have decided to leave St. Marie Academy to pursue their own dreams while Makoto has skipped a grade ahead of Ichigo.
While the show does focus more on the shoujo genre aspect of the show, the development of Makoto and Ichigo's relationship is extremely shallow. The plot for SP is overall straightforward. Henri wants to create St. Marie Gardens and shops around the world for people to enjoy. If you ask me, Henri still sounds like an antagonist overall (world domination of sweets in this case
). He puts a "new" Team Ichigo in charge of the St. Marie Garden in Japan consisting of Johnny McBeal (who is apparently Miya's cousin), Makoto, Ichigo, and Lemon. So far so good. Everything proceeds at the pace of the first season until 2 things happen. The first is the realization that the show is only 13 episodes long and the second is they decide to waste a third of the series on the spirits world for development between Chocolat and Kashi. While this gives quite the in depth development between the two, the overall relevance to the story is zero, and thus essentially filler. The remaining two thirds of the series involved Team Ichigo helping out the former members of St. Marie Academy, particularly Andou and Tennouji, both of which were having trouble with their respective shops.
If you ask me, Yumeiro's character development is still its strongest point. With the exception of Makoto's and Ichigo's relationship, we definitely got to see more of the old cast as well as a few of the new ones. However, the plot lacked focus and is really what hit the show hard in comparison to the first. It lacked the same "coming of age" type feel the prequel had and made the series intense and thus worthwhile watching. While SP is by no means terrible, the sequel is definitely a let down after the surprisingly successful prequel to the extent that it retreated back to square one. From what it seems, the show ran out of material to cover and thus SP was more of an epilogue to the prequel if anything at all.
Animation has not improved coming from Studio Pierrot and I had expected better considering they can definitely do a few solid animation pieces as seen in Bleach. Art wise, the character designs could have been better. The original Team Ichigo had essentially not changed in the 2 year skip. Their faces look as if they were still in middle school while everyone else, such as Tennouji and Natsume at least looked as if they grew up a little. While this was meant to be a implicit theme is another issue.
Music was probably the biggest step up that properly matched the change in themes of the show. The original series was definitely a show targeted more at kids as a "coming of age" show and thus the little moe OP and ED themes whereas the sequel tried to play on the shoujo theme more and thus a more shoujo-esque OP and ED video and theme. There were a number of things being hinted at in the OP video, but it seemed as if they were never expanded on.
Enjoyment? I can say for sure that I did not enjoy this as much as the first season. Every week I had hoped the show would get back on track, but it seemed that the more I hoped, the more derailed it became. While the final few episodes felt more like the original Yumeiro, the fact that Miya was the "final antagonist" was not as promising as Henri in the first series, and not to mention that Ichigo had a goal of surpassing her grandmother's strawberry tart. Here, there wasn't really a goal that Ichigo had, but more of an assignment.
Overall, while the show currently implies a third season, I hope they leave some room before its production. If anything, the show has either caught up to the manga or the entire second season was filler to begin with. I had definitely expected more from Yumeiro SP and I'm unfortunately disappointed. The final scene between Makoto and Ichigo, while nice, didn't feel like it was placed properly. It definitely felt and seemed as if it was shoved in there so that fans would be "happy" that there was some development in their relationship. Unfortunately, coming from someone who has seen many other shoujo shows, that stunt isn't going to work.
Preliminary Score: 7/10
Final Score: 7/10
