Mad props to Ufotable. Demon
Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba – the studio’s first venture in adapting a shonen
manga into a full anime series – ends up being an anime masterpiece.
However, this wasn’t really apparent
at the start. In fact, I even contemplated of dropping it after watching the pilot. It took a few
episodes before
I was convinced to watch the series all throughout. It indeed got better and better with each passing
episode, but even though I’ve already come to like it at the
end of the spring season, I wasn’t convinced yet that it was going to amount into something special.
Going into the summer season, I even wrote
that I was “a bit doubtful it will be able to compete against the new season’s
crop of strong, new shonen anime series.”
Boy, was I ever so wrong. Not
only was it able to hold its own against the summer season’s Big Three (
Dr. Stone,
Vinland Saga, and
Fire Force),
but it utterly surpassed them. The
second half of its 26-episode debut season leveled up to heights I didn’t
expect it would go.
