This felt like the best possible version of a bildungsroman anime: incredibly sweet, memorable characters and a penchant for surprisingly deep characterization, lovely art and a simple-but-not-too-simple plot. (Bojji and Kage are the absolute best, and their bond somehow never feels too saccharine.)

There were probably two things that I didn’t quite love (and I think it’s fair to say that this was a show that I 80% loved to the moon and 20% didn’t like, which is often more interesting than a show that I 100% thought was pretty good):

1. The back half of the show got into Dragon Ball levels of “talking during fights” and power level creep. It was hard to take a given fight scene (or indeed, an episode involving fight scenes) particularly seriously once it became obvious that nobody was going to die and the outcome of the fight didn’t matter. (The fight scenes themselves were still fun, though!)
2. The show has a bias towards redeeming and forgiving literally every single character, which I think played nicely with the first few folks who looked to be trope-y and then were revealed to be detailed (the snake handler, the step mother). But going from “this evil witch did a genocide and wanted to kill everyone” to “we’re going to marry the evil witch” was… too much for me.

★★★★