Magazine: Otomodachi Pink August 2020

In which, enh, I can take or leave this one.

There’s a certain sense of relief I feel when I don’t see a reason to buy more of something — it’s a rare enough feeling, too — and I think that’s the case with Otomodachi Pink (August 2020 issue here), a spin-off of Otomodachi, but, er, pinker?

The holographic effect on the cover doesn’t exactly make it easy to photograph, but it’s pretty, and that’s basically the theme here, along with more Healin Good PreCure than you can shake a stick at.

I’d say that PreCure takes up about twenty percent of this 55-page-magazine, along with other series aimed at about the same age range, like Fun Fan Pink and Mewkledreamy. Speaking of Mewkledreamy, I often regret not showing off how cute the horoscope pages in these magazines are. So we’ll kill two birds with one stone with this Mewkledreamy-themed one!

That PreCure emphasis continues into the stickers, too, although with a good chunk of Sumikko as well, and some others:

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And on these letter sheets. They’re very cute, especially the Sumikko ones — I’m such a sucker for Sumikko in glasses.

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There’s not a ton of Sanrio here per se, but I’m fond of the aquarium stuff:

Magazines like these are just masters of making toys look great. I’ve managed to mostly avoid Ricca-chan up until now, but photo spreads like this are so tempting:

There’s really not much of note here you can’t find in other, similar magazines here, though I did like the manga-fied story on marathon runner Naoko Takahashi:

Sad to say, the furoku is as meh as everything else. It’s supposed to be a letter set, but it consists only of a pink plastic case (you put the handle and sticker on yourself), a stamp and a pen–the letter part is those sheets above, on the magazine pages themselves. The pen is faint and falls apart constantly, the stamp isn’t well inked (though I like the rolling design) and the case is just ennh.

So it’s not exactly a recommend, but it was a pleasant buy from CD Japan nonetheless. In a world with so many great magazines and furoku out there, skipping the next issue of Otomodachi Pink means more of the stuff I can get more enthusiastic about!