Daemons of the Shadow Realm Review

Arakawa is the reason this exists and the reason it works. Yuru is a farm boy in a village that appears to sit somewhere in a premodern past, and the premiere pulls the floor out by revealing what is actually outside the valley, which reframes everything the episode had just established. From there the series is a chase, with Yuru hunting for the sister he was separated from at birth and a family of collectors hunting them both. The daemons are the good idea. They are bound in pairs, they have personalities, and their limits are stated plainly enough that fights stay legible instead of escalating into noise.

Bones Film gives it the best action direction of the season, and the collision of swords with aircraft and handguns produces set pieces that look like nothing else airing. The reservations are about the writing. Character work is thinner than the twist machinery, the exposition arrives in dense blocks, and the tone swings from grim to broadly comic in a way that has not settled. The comparison to Arakawa's earlier work is doing part of the promotion. Two cours in, the show has not answered it yet.