I was inclined to write this review because every other review for this show before they started being removed had less than 12 episodes seen, which means it was still in the "monster of the week" formula and it still had the potential to become something interesting.
Disclaimer i dropped this show at the end of the first cour (12 episodes) because while it tried to start to have a plot it was still episodic. I should have dropped it for good because the plot that started to appear is nothing special or even creative, the episodic stories about different monsters are far more interesting than the main story.
i will give a rundown for the topics:
Story: It started episodic, which is fine but it took to long to start with the bigger story, more than half this show (13 eps) are of monster that we will never see again. But now for the actual story, should i say its "generic", i dont really wanna use that word but you are not getting here anything new or creative, the villain also doesnt have any motivation besides being evil. The villain is also super all powerful and nothing can defeat it except for our special snowflake protagonist with his super secret powerful weapon.
Nothing fascinating about it, it has been done a million times already and much better than it is done here
2
Art and Animation: Really well done and it has a nice 80's/90's feel to it, looks really good. Still nothing super impressive about it like from other shows but it looks nice and it is consistently good
7
Sound: this is the one i have no clue what to give it, i liked the op but i didnt really feel any impact from the soundtrack in itself. I dont really remember anything from the OST, and it didnt really feel impactful during the show but it didnt feel out of place either. So i guess the score of average not good but not bad perfectly describes the sound for Ushio to Tora
5
Characters: At first i loved them, i still love Tora he is the high point of the show but he isnt enough, the side characters are all uninteresting and the biggest problem of the show has become Ushio.
Ok spoilers in this paragraph so i can explain why. The reason i say this is because he hasn't developed one bit, he is still the same exact person he was at the start, his "strategy" to fight any and all youkai is full frontal attack, which not surprisingly always fails. So the show becomes super repetitive because of this, Ushio has to save everyone as is typical of every shounen Mc but the only way he goes about defeating youkai is running at them and trying to poke em with a spear, over and over again. The youkai eventually wins over Ushio and then Tora comes in and saves his ass. EVERY SINGLE TIME. And to someone who as almost died 7+ times during the show you would expect Ushio to develop a bit and start thinking of other ways to go about it, unfortunately he doesnt so it feels like you are in a loop with different youkai to beat in each episode. Even when the story starts to develop he just stays the same.
Villain is just boring, its the same thing we have come to expect from these shows. Pure dark, no motivation for actually doing what he does except for the fact that it is evil. I would talk more about why the villain sucks but it would go into spoiler territory, so ill leave it at its boring.
Tora is the best thing about this show without a doubt, he is entertaining to watch he develops through the show and hes actually interesting. He does have a problem with his power level tho, its all over the place.
Every other character doesn't matter, no really they don't. They aren't even particularly interesting and when one actually is interesting at the start he just becomes a boring one after a few episodes, only there to help Ushio and Tora.
3
Enjoyement: It is clear that i am not enjoying this show, i dropped it once and then caught up to it again, but it was hard to do so because of how uninteresting this show was. If i wasnt watching it while it was airing i wouldnt have given it a second thought (dropping it). This show is something i watch in the evening so that i can focus on other things, because it destroys my desire to watch anime for the rest of the day. Even watching this show sped up like 1.5x the normal speed doesnt help (at least for me), it is a great show to put yourself to sleep with.
I dont know if i should mention that i almost always fall asleep on the second half of the episodes. Because some people will say that the reason i find it uninteresting is because i did sleep through it. Its not like the story is hard to follow, in fact its pretty basic. I did eventually watch the parts i slept through to see if i had missed anything important. This show has the highest score for making me fall asleep which in itself is actually a pretty big deal.
2
Tl;dr:
+ Tora
+ Art style and animation
+ 80's feel
- Ushio and side characters
- Repetitive monster of the week show
- The actual plot latter on
- Villain
- Character development
- Story
This show might work for some people, especially people who havent seen many shounens of this type. It does have some pretty fun first episodes, which made me stick to it. The second half of the show is just boring. I now know the reason why they kept the episodic gig for so long, because the actual plot is uninteresting compared to it.
Ok so after finishing the last 3 episodes i have to say that, the animation of this show + artstyle works really well for it, unfortunately it still has the problems i listed before (it also seemed the relationship of our mains regressed on the last episodes, and again Tora got an amazing random power for no reason at all). I stand by my word, this show should be skipped because it doesnt do anything special.
