I was prepared to be a lot harsher on the show before I watched the finale, but then I watched the finale and had a really good time, so I don't know. This show is unambiguously really flawed in several ways I'll discuss as I continue the review, but overall it was really fun to have a female-led adventure show and I really liked the cast of second generation characters and their chemistry.

...second generation being the operative term here. I'm one of those weridos who was drawn by the fact that I really liked Towa's design and wanted to see what adventures she'd get up to even if I didn't watch or read Inuyasha proper. Like the most complete exposure I've had is reading a Let's Play of the PS2 game where you got to play a self-insert. I do wonder if that made me enjoy it more given that I didn't have the baggage of wondering what the original cast was getting up to or that I wasn't really pressed that Sesshomaru is a bad dad or so on. I dunno, I did like what I saw of Miroku now that he isn't a sex pest, though I found myself not particularly fond of Sesshomaru himself. And it's not even related to the elephant in the room of Towa and Setsuna's mom's identity!

...okay no, that's part of it. Honestly, I understand they were pandering to the shoujo wish fulfillment fantasy of "I want to grow up and and marry the immortal expressionless bad boy who's protected me since I was young! It's fine, he's been nineteen for a millennium, so he'll still be nineteen when I'm... however old I am!" But I don't know, the Hikaru Genji method is still kind of a bad, creepy look even when I know it's probably meant to be the Twilight problematic immortal husband fantasy instead of the Usagi Drop problematic fantasy.

But this ain't about the characters from Inuyasha, this about the characters from Yashahime, and I love them! The best is quite obviously Moroha, who is always simultaneously the stupidest and smartest person in the room and has absolutely perfect gremlin energy, but I see people being down on Towa and Setsuna and I don't know, I like those girls. Towa's a little dim and naive, but like, she's a jock. It's fine. She doesn't know anything about all this demon stuff, she just wants to resolve her childhood trauma and rekindle her relationship with her sister. I expected Setsuna to be a boring lineface type, but I think she's actually pretty fun to watch because she's clearly an edgy teen trying too hard to be cool, but you can see her subtly melt a little bit when a little girl is like ONEECHAN YOU'RE SO COOL.

The rest of the cast is... more of a mixed bag of really good and really nothing, honestly. Riku was consistently the most interesting character outside the main trio to me, and it was a lot of fun to watch him scheme and backstab his way through things. I'm mixed on his relationship with Towa but I don't know, I could be sold on it? Zero was a pretty neat villain even if I feel like her motivations were kind of eh, and I really hope to see more of Miroku's daughters next season because they seem fun. On the flip side, man, Hisui and his gang of demon hunters are super boring even when they get some focus. The Four Perils are a victim of the show's inscrutable pacing that I'll discuss a little later, and... I'm not super sure how I feel about Kirinmaru? He felt like he very suddenly went from a laconic villain who almost felt like he was having weird memory issues to almost trying to be a Demons Have No Sense of Right and Wrong sensei to the main trio. I like that he feels like a very grey morality character, but... hm.

Okay, here's the part where I get into what I think the show's big issue is: it feels like they started out pacing the show like the original Inuyasha but with more of an initial bunch of mysteries for the characters to solve, which I actually kind of liked. After the gang rejects the Tree of Eternity's quest and decides to do their own thing, you get to learn one or two things about them or the plot every episode while they have monster of the week adventures. Then, around the big backstory episode halfway through, it starts to feel like they realized they might not get a second season so they doubled down on trying to include everything they possibly could? The Four Perils felt like they were supposed to be more important than they ended up being, particularly Konton, so their deaths felt weirdly sudden. I know that starts before the half point of the series but Konton felt like he was the one that was being set up to be the primary midboss and then he gets suddenly killed off? I think the most egregious point was Moroha's backstory episode, which felt like it was meant to be a two-parter except part one got axed. I'm pretty curious about the behind the scenes of this show's production because I genuinely can't tell what conditions the crew was working under.

Moving on from discussions of the plot and characters, man, they really did save the entire show's animation budget for the fight with Kirinmaru, huh. I spent the majority of the show being really unimpressed with the show's animation, especially when it came to the more monstrous creatures. Totetsu's design was kinda neat but his mouth didn't move at all? Is that an intentional choice or just limited animation? Man, this is probably an unfair comparison, but I was watching Jujutsu Kaisen and Dragon Quest: The Adventure of Dai at the time and their monsters are really beautifully animated, so the way a lot of the critters in this show were animated were kind of a letdown. The music's pretty alright, with bangers of OPs and EDs and pretty solid (if somewhat repetitive) in-episode music.

So yeah, the show does have some failings, but I've gotta admit I was super hype seeing Towa going absolutely feral and unlocking her demon form in the last episode, and I really wanna see more of this cast's adventures. I'm glad a second season was, indeed, greenlit so that the cast can have a little more room to breathe and develop, and... maybe I'll go back and watch Inuyasha proper someday? Maybe? I don't know, I like Not-Sex Pest Miroku.