I will start with the positives: I really love the art style and the animation. Amazing work by the studio. The story is decent and relatively well told. The characters are pretty interesting, although I will say that some of the secondary protagonists are better written than the MC. The music is also a standout for me. It gave me naruto vibes, some shamisen scores made me think of mashiro no oto, sothe music is very japanese traditional, and I personally like that.
Now for the negatives: it feels shallow sometimes, a little too generic, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but I can see why some people might not like it. I stand by my general opinion that an anime doesn't have to reinvent the wheel when it comes to its genre. It just has to be well made, and up until now I think it gets the job done. The villain is the one that feels most generic of all and tbf, I saw the plot twist reveal from miles away. I am expecting more backstory in the future however.
A side note I wanted to make is that they straight up ripped the design of 2 characters in this show: one protagonist and one pretty unremarkable side character. The design for Sakuya looks very much like Xiao from Genshin Impact and the design for the criminal killed by Sakuya when he refused to join the group in the first episode (forgot his name, too lazy to look it up) looks waaaaay too much like Luchist from Shaman King. And I have a feeling other characters in the show look a lot like characters from other anime I'm not familiar with.
But overall, this anime is pretty good, especially as a week by week watch. I would recommend, since it's an easy watch and a decent anime overall
