Pretty Cure-verse Strategy Guide

How to be OP in Pretty Cure

Local Scale Threat:

Note: Toei scaling can be rather....wonky (much like Dragon Ball Super, Saint Seiya Omega or the 90s SM Anime) but I'll scale as best I can.

This is roughly the tier of most Minibosses, monsters of the week, and Pretty Cure before their final developments.

These vary greatly in strength, with most being at least town to city level and massively hypersonic but one particularly elite league of mooks called the Dust Devils are in the continental range for being able to life-wipe the Earth and for keeping up with Heartcatch Pretty Cure including Cure Marine who can outpace the flash of light from a camera. So the limit for this tier is Continental and FTL.

In terms of abilities the minibosses and the monsters of the week have a vast variety of abilities. Monsters of the week generally have possession abilities allowing them to possess common objects and gain abilities based on that object.

Minibosses usually have some permutation of energy-draining, mind hax, and disguise power. Sealing is also fairly common as is dimensional travel.

So obviously you are going to want to use a living being, as opposed to say a robot, for this tier otherwise a monster of the week can just possess your counter. But in terms of what strategies are actually effective:

Purification is good, it's what pretty cure uses to stop the average monster of the week, forcing them to flee. In general forcing enemy forces are easier then expected and requires only some good manipulation abilities or just brute force overpowering them, either being a good strategy really.

This brings me to my first counter selection

Rolling Bubbles from Powerpuff Girls Z. 

Bubbles along with the other two PPGZ accidentally split the moon by flying too fast, suggesting the three should be high end multi-continental. She's got numerous relativistic to FTL feats of flying to the moon and back quickly. 

Rolling Bubbles could comically punch an enemy miniboss or monster of the week and make them run away from her sheer strength. If they did try to fight, Bubbles could trap them with her bubble wand which even traps intangibles which would likely work as a form of sealing against them.

Rolling Bubbles also possess, unique of the PPGZ the ability to talk to animals. Bubbles would be able to know when one of her opponents disguised is there as animals would be able to notice their presence. Rolling Bubbles also uniquely has a purification ability, creating a mist that blocks her position, which is also useful, but purifies anything that it hits which would work on the zakenna.

If she can summon Dynamo Bubbles that would be especially helpful as Dynamo Bubbles can travel through dimensions meaning even dimensional bfr would work. 

That said you could argue Rolling Bubbles would get overwhelmed by raw numbers and a more subtle approach would be needed. In which cast I would suggest using

Queen Chrysalis from My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.

Queen Chrysalis while not as strong as Dust Devils should still be fairly high in this tier's power hierarchy as she scales to the Mane 6. One of those, Rainbow Dash created a massive sonic rainboom as a filly, calced in the teratons or country level range. Another, Twilight Sparkle Pre-Alicorn scaled to weaker unicorns whose magic could reach the moon at speeds just over lightspeed.

Chrysalis is an adept manipulator paired with her shapeshifting capacities, would allow her to play with the lower intelligence of a lot of this tier. In combat if she has too she has brainwashing which no one on this tier would be able to resist, or she can use that as a surprise attack and she can bind by shooting webbing from her mouth.

The Pretty Cure world is also a happy world full of love, which Chrysalis consumes to get stronger, suggesting she could probably reach the power of the top of this tier in power if not vastly stronger relatively quickly.

The one threat for Chrysalis is being attacked quickly and again overwhelmed. For the ideal counter to this tier in my opinion, I would suggest

Shiny Chariot from Little Witch Academia

Shiny Chariot scales to relativistic from being vastly faster to the relativistic flight speed of weaker witches. She also was powerful enough to leave a scar on the moon and scales to weaker witches surviving collisions at relativistic speeds, showing that in raw power she would be comparable to the tier.

Shiny Chariot is an amazing performer, able to captivate an audience, meaning she would likely be able to intimidate and impress the tier with her big flashy displays of magic. Her speciality is illusory magic, which she could use to great effect, making them think she's a place she isn't, making them think their abilities worked when they didn't, etc.

Shiny Chariot can keep up even with the fastest characters in the tier with her pre-cognition and can telekinetically keep her opponents from getting in range. More then that: she has the most broken ability in Pretty Cure: metamagic, the ability manipulate magic. Shiny Chariot can absorb magic, able to turn anyone on this tier save random monsters into normal civilians by absorbing their magic. 

It helps that she can be flying around the whole time, while flight is actually rare at this tier, blastinig them from far outside their range. The Shiny Arc would also heal any wounds she got, meaning outside of a serious blow that would be hard to achieve, nothing would actually put her at risk.

Planetary Scale Threat:

Most Pretty Cure reach here by the end of their series, and this is how strong most final villains are. The Pretty Cure villains are often embodiments of an abstract concept that is a negative force humanity must face; wrath and sadness, despair and isolation, etc. But Pretty Cure, maidens of beautiful hearts, shall prevail against them!

This tier has numerous planetary to large planetary feats. Heartcatch PreCure even outside their final fight, defeated Baron Salamander who could destroy a planet. Go! Princess PreCure defeated Dyspear who could move the whole Earth. KiraKira PreCure defeated Elisio who reality warped and destroyed the whole Earth before the team recreated the Earth. Yes PreCureMovie Villain Shadow created multiple dimensions that could contain their own moons. Smile PreCure defeated Emperor Pierrot who grew much larger then the Earth. Happiness PreCure battled rogue god Red and even overcame him, who could move large planets with his telekinesis. 

The strongest level of this tier is stellar level where Maho PreCure defeated Chaos God Deusmast who absorbed an entire star into it's being. So the power limit at this level is Star Level at least for both stats.

In terms of stats, this tier is generally in the FTL range from Heartcatch PreCure and Fresh PreCure outpacing the light of cameras with the fastest being Happiness Charge PreCure who contended with Red, capable of moving hundreds if not thousands of times the speed of light.

However Hugtto PreCure also have a special combination attack called "All for You" drawing on the power of previous generations of PreCure to shoot a beam that can launch an enemy into another galaxy at trillions of times the speed of light before creating a heart energy pulse bigger then the entire galaxy. Anyone at this tier is going to be at threat of that, since under that speed limit there's no dodging it outside of aim dodging and there's no taking it with raw durability.

The abilities of this tier are just insane. 

There's also forms of element manipulation including freezing. There's purification and reflecting attacks back along with basic energy projection and forcefields. Both Maho and KiraKira PreCure have transmutation with Maho PreCure possibly having existence erasure. Suite PreCure enemy Noise has petrification on a country wide scale, able to turn whole kingdoms to stone. Dyspear has planetary scale telekinesis while Red has large planetary scale telekinesis. Dyspear can kill everything on a planet just by moving. Elisio has planetary scale existence erasure while Chaos God Deusmast has at least stellar scale absorption having absorbed the star it was sealed within.

Cure Moonlight, legendary Heartcatch Precure can break spacetime. Hugtto PreCure is able to restore the normal flow of time on a planetary scale while both Dyspear and George Kurai's group having planetary scale time manipulation including time travel and complete time stop. Both Cure Passion and Cure Twinkle have inter-dimensional teleportation while Deusmast can create dimensional rips and Dyspear can manipulate dimensions on a planetary scale.

In terms of non-physical hax, both Suite and Princess PreCure can induce sleep in enemies, Rogue God Red and other Happiness Charge villains can manipulate souls on a planetary scale while Insidious Intellect Moebius can control the minds of beings on a multitude of worlds (though PreCure's minds broke his mind in turn). Cure Amour can manipulate the memories of other beings, erasing or restoring them at will.

There's also random other abilities. Noise, Red and Dyspear all have sealing abilities while Pierrot, Red, and Elision all have planetary scale reality-warping abilities. Finally the most broken ability on this tier in my opinion. Cure Happy's faith in a happy ending is so great that she can manipulate the plot itself to force a happy ending meaning you basically can't pick a villain since she will simply manipulate the plot to make it so the good guys win or at least stalemate by causing them to become friends. And of course any ability a Pretty Cure villain has shown, the Pretty Cure have generally shown resistance too. Time Stop didn't work. They can hit intangible enemies as if they were made of matter. Moebius trying to warp their brains only broke his mind in turn. 

Any standard strategy you could think of, the tier has a counter. Range? Deusmast can attack on an interstellar range, All for You hits on an inter-galactic range, and there's dimensional manipulation. Manipulate? Cure Amour is an advantage android with a superintellect. Stealth? KiraKira Pretty Cure have enhanced senses to know where people at all times. Skill? All Pretty Cure are naturally master martial artists. Try to come up with any plan at all? Deusmast chaos manipulation could cause some random thing to mess it up.

So what actually works? Not much :P 

But in terms of viable tactics, anti-magic is still very strong. Attacking people in isolation is a lot better then trying to take them on all at once, so dimensional bfr or other abilities that let you fight one on one would be good. Dream Manipulation is actually really good. While some Cures can manipulate dreams, it still seems to be strong as it allows you to fight people in their dreams basically one on one as opposed to massive numbers at once.

Also while there's a lot of hax resistance, there's not a huge amount of defensive hax outside of Noise's regen, and various proactive forms of offensive hax (warping to a different dimension for instance), meaning getting lots of attacks in is really probably the best strategy. Things that multiply attacks like duplication, summoning or danmaku are all probably good strategies to get attacks through.

Also another good idea is taking on a nonthreatening appearence. Cures are all young girls who tend to judge things by appearance and most PreCure villains are arrogant. Things in the Pretty Cure universe tend to very visual in their display of powers so something that doesn't seem much a threat at first would probably be able to get in the first strike or hax just because the tier's fighters wouldn't take the threat seriously enough at first.

This brings me to my first counter, someone who very much does not seem that threatening, that being

Courage the Cowardly Dog from Courage the Cowardly Dog.

Courage is strong enough to lift a star seemingly in his defense of the mother Starmaker, and was able to break the sun just by screaming consistent with his number of low stellar feats. He was also able to run from the surface of the Sun to the center at relativistic speeds, and was able to pilot spaceships moving thousands of times the speed of light showing he would have the reflexes to keep up with the tier.

Courage at base appearance appears to be a rather scared pink dog which would prompt any of the tier's fighters he came across to not think he was a threat. It helps that Courage can be rather manipulative if he wants to be, as a licensed therapist having convinced numerous villains to switch sides such as the Shadow. 

Courage can physically interact with the intangible enemies of the verse as he was able to physically affect ghosts and even physically fix the ozone layer. He's also able to keep up with the verse in skill as he was able to fight a master martial artist in one to one hand to paw combat, showing that he would able to get into a physical confrontation with anyone on this tier.

When fighting against one of the PreCure villains, Courage can use his own hypnosis, or can trap any of his opponents in cyberspace or in a painting, both of which Courage can enter with immersion and only Cure Passion or Cure Twinkle (both of which are weaker then him) can get out of. Most mind hax in the verse wouldn't work either as Courage was able to resist the mental sway of mind haxy Flan and the God Bone. 

In a physical confrontation Courage can regen from most things someone on the verse, can do to him, able to survive without his head, reduced to a skeleton, to a pile of ash etc. In fact it many even help him as he can put his own head on someone else's body to control them giving him the myriad hax of the Pretty Cure verse. Courage can also astral project and go into peoples dreams where he could fight anyone in the verse one on one, and give him the advantage of not having to fight so many at once.

Really Courage's big advantage is that he's so versatile that he can compete with the vast variety of abilities the Pretty Cure verse has. And while Pretty Cure villains are adept at forcing people to give up, Courage has a powerful will when someone he cares for is endangered that allows him to push through his own fear. 

Courage's only real threat is getting hit by a straight on All for You or one of the verse's stronger haxes. For a character that would do better against these specifically you could use

Black Alice from DC Comics.

Black Alice only really has one power, and that's the ability to absorb any magic used against her, even working on beings like Doctor Fate, the Phantom Strange and the Spectre. Given the sheer amount of magic used by Pretty Cure characters, she would likely become extremely strong quickly, especially if All for You is tried against her.

How well Black Alice would do is entirely determined by what order she fights people in. If she fights one of the more magic-based fighters first, she should quickly snowball to levels the verse can't control, though if she goes against a more physical cure she might get punched and die first. She could go really well or really poorly and it's hard to say which.

For a more consistent counter however I would pick

Luke Skywalker from Star Wars

As a godly level force user, perhaps stronger then any ever, Luke's force abilities is enough to control even the stars making up the galaxy and his speed is easily faster then that of light, and capable of reacting in nanoseconds. 

Remember back in my Magicka strategy guide when I said Jedi are the best counter to a Magicka Wizard? Well this is basically that on the highest possible end.

While the verse has a lot of psychic abilities, Luke's simply outclasses them on all possible ends.

Moebius can control multiple planets? Luke's force powers extend across the galaxy. Various PreCure villains can create illusions? Luke can create illusions on whole planets. Deusmast can affect on an inter-stellar scale? Luke can affect on a galactic. Noise exists as long as sadness exists across Earth? Luke can alter the emotions of a whole planet. 

If he got into a melee for some reason, Luke would easily be able to compete with anyone in the verse, but most likely he could simply manipulate them via mind hax and his raw manipulative ability. Not only does Luke not look threatening, he can actively cloak his presence with Alter and Force Stealth. He can project to fight them across time and space and dimensions where they can't actually harm him. He'd see everything they were gonna do ahead of time with aura sensing, precognition and telepathy. Via force space, Luke can space time bfr, which counters even hypothetically Cure Passion and Cure Twinkle who can't teleport through time.

More notably, many of the Pretty Cure rely on their merchandise transformation devices and items to cast spells which Luke can telekinetically take or shatter.

But what about Deusmast's chaos manipulation? Luke is in harmony with the force, the harmonious order that moves the universe. Not even Deusmast Chaos Manipulation would be able to affect him. 

Looking at Luke's abilities and traits, it really is basically just a grab-bag of the abilities needed to counter the Pretty Cure's tier here. 

Universal Scale Threat:

The strongest Pretty Cure here. Splash Star PreCure fought against Goyan who survived the Big Bang that created the universe, planned on reducing the universe to nothing and possibly destroys everything in the universe save for Earth against Splash Star PreCure (it's vague). However even stronger then them are the original generation, legendary first generation PreCure Cure Black, Cure White and Shiny Luminous. 

The Queen of Light who could stabilize the universe praised Cure Black and Cure White's ability as above hers even at the halfway point of their season. Cure Black and Cure White defeated Dark King after absorbing the power of creation where he was casually breaking down space and time with his presence, and then got several power ups after that. Dark King was also able to threaten all the worlds requiring his energy to have speeds in the range of quadrillions of times the speed of light, which Cure Black and Cure were able to match before powering up several times further.

However all Pretty Cure have this potential, as shown in the All-Stars movies where the friendship between cures allow them to rise in power to the point that they can fight beings Cure Black and Cure White struggle with, the group of Pretty Cure together being able to defeat villains that individually they cannot. As DokiDoki Pretty Cure put it "Any girl with powerful enough emotion to protect others can become a Pretty Cure! And that power rivals our universe's Big Bang!" The power of love and friendship allows Pretty Cure to power up to a level far beyond their norm. 

This has allowed them to fight the powerful crossover movie villains like Fusion, the amalgam of all pretty cure monsters of the week so far, who could absorb any power used against him or Shadow, the non-physical threat that can imprison people in crystal, or Miden who can erase the memories of people and gain their abilities as a result and gained the powers of most Pretty Cure up to that point. 

This verse has basically the same level of hax as last tier but concentrated in the hands of fewer people which arguably makes it less dangerous as it's a bit easier to overwhelm. Most of the same weaknesses of last tier still apply. So who would I pick for counter? Well my first counter is actually another Toei character, that being

Son Goku from Dragon Ball Super

Goku at the beginning of Dragon Ball Super was able to fight against Suppressed Beerus, their fight creating shockwaves that threatened the whole of the Dragon Ball Universe, moving even to other world at quadrillions of times the speed of light. Goku then absorbed this god ki into his base form, stacking his transformations onto this God Ki and would proceed to grow thousands, and likely millions of times stronger, suggesting he would be stronger and faster then anyone in the verse.

Goku can overwhelm his enemies with ki blasts from outside most of their range, even using homing Kamehameha that hone in on their position. He can use Instant Transmission to trap them in other dimensions, which most people on this tier would still have no real counter too.

Against non-physical villains like Shadow, Goku not only has learned the Mafuba technique which could seal them, but Goku can also use the Genki Dama, which considering how many happy positive energy fairy dimensions there are in Pretty Cure, would hypothetically allow Goku to absorb a lot more willing ki then he normally would be able too.

While a few pretty cure villains can stop time, Goku was able to overpower Hit's Time Stop (not to mention can just blitz), and while Miden can wipe memories, Goku's ultra instinct doesn't care about Goku's conscious mind, fighting off pure instinct. Dark King might be able to use existence erasure with the power of destruction, but Goku has survived the Hakai which erases both body and soul.

Goku was also able to attain Pretty Cure's level of martial skill when he was their age, being able to copy Roshi's kamehameha just by seeing it, and by now he's far more experienced and could use simple combat tricks like the Solar Flare to daze any of the PreCure he had to fight or disable their limbs with pressure point combat.

Even if Fusion was able to absorb Goku's ki, Goku can also absorb ki as shown when he absorbed Beerus's attack and his own god ki into his base form. 

While Goku might have the "weakness" of letting his opponent reach their maximum, a number of Pretty Cure opponents try to intimidate their opponents, talking to them and trying to break their will sadistically instead of trying to beat them quickly, especially the strongest ones. However Goku is famous for his tenacity and determination above all other things, and would be able to perserve in spite of this.

But if you want a character who can better fight the verse hax to hax, I suggest you could use

Doremy Sweet from Touhou. 

Doremy is powerful enough to control universal sized dreams, able to warp them at will and scales to other Touhou High Tiers suggesting she would be trillions to quadrillions of times the speed of light.

Doremy Sweet is a non threatening look foe who could use dream manipulation to attack the pretty cure where they can't use each other to get stronger. She's even able to bfr people to dream world and seal them there, which would be a one-shot against basically anyone in Pretty Cure.

What's even more notable is that Doremy has been shown to both create and erase both of Dream Worlds, including alternate versions of people, suggesting she could create her own version of the pretty cure characters to fight them, which would be a highly problematic and distressing to the PreCure, she could summon her own Dream PreCure to fight the PreCure villains the way PreCure themselves did.

Doremy can even split herself into numerous selves and use homing attacks to overwhelm her enemies which is helpful when most of her opponents don't have any kind of defensive hax. It's unknown how much of a dream world she could erase if she had too and if that would be bigger then Dark King's existence erasure but it's possible in Dream World she could simply erase who she wanted too.

That said Doremy has one arguable counter in Pretty Cure, that being the undreaming Fusion, who could arguably absorb her dream magic if she used it against him. To truly beat him, you would need either overwheming power or someone who can hit him in a way no one in the Pretty Cure verse can, which leads to my ultimate counter

Slappy the Squirrel from Animaniacs.

Slappy is stronger then the Warner Brothers (and the Warner Sister) who could warp a universe into a little jar and move across the universe quickly, suggesting she would be at least relative to the verse in raw power.

Slappy has absolute manipulation having wiped away the surroundings around her to transport her and Skippy to the airport. She also has immersion able to walk into a tv set and trap an enemy into a tv set. Immersion is an extremely rare ability in Pretty Cure, which she could easily use to as a one-shot against anyone here, but more notably, Slappy's absolute manipulation is unlike anything in the verse, and even Fusion would not be able to absorb it.

Slappy also has the advantages of seeming to just be a squirrel and not a threat they would even notice as well as the fact that she is a master manipulator due to her decades of experience. Most of the top tiers of PC would be very vulnerable to Slappy's type of manipulation, especially if they thought she was an ordinary squirrel.

Slappy could manipulate the verse into thinking she was in one place only for them to find that instead there was a bomb disguised as her when they try to melee for instance. Or she could simply trick them into fighting each other. She has a regen factor comparable to Noise's except hers is a lot less easy to figure out during a fight meaning they would have no idea how to actually put down Slappy, if they could.

In fact given Pretty Cure are powered by all the happy emotions of humanity including Joy, it's possibly the verse would make Slappy even stronger. But what about Miden's memory wipe? Well actually Slappy's lost her memories before, but her love for her nephew Skippy has allowed her to regain them. 

Slappy would be able to manipulate the verse, be impossible to put down, and one-shot them with various gag powers.

And that's how to be OP in Pretty Cure.