The story follows Ushio, a boy who used to be skeptic from the legends about a powerful samurai impaling a monster with a spear, that is until he finds the same monster and spear in his basement. From there starts an epic journey that's guaranteed to be a rollercoaster of emotions. The story has a lot of very interesting twists and turns, and packs a very important moral with some great symbolism, but it never feels pretencious. It's a very fun ride and I bet you'll get attatched to atleast a couple characters as it goes along.
Ushio and Tora for example, have one of my favorite dynamics in anime. Many often sumarize it as Calvin and Hobbes if Calvin was a demon hunter and Hobbes was a demon wanting to eat Calvin, except that's just a simplification of it all as you begin to feel their friendship grow very naturally and deeply as the manga goes on. It's also one of if not the only time I can think of that the main characters being the most important is actually done right, as you can feel the burden of Ushio having to form an tought to be impossible alliance to defeat one of the most threatening villains in Manga, making it a surprisingly wholesome story.
Sadly just as many supporting characters are also thrown under the bus after their initial introductions or a couple of appearences and are barely seen again. Many critizice the series for it's "canon filler", but not only do I feel each arc contributes a lot to the characters and their development (thus it's a shame the MAPPA adaptation had to skip half of them) but I feel that more episodic arcs near the end centering arround these side characters would've helped the series more.
This holds it back from getting a 10, but adding to everything I said above, it's lovable characters and overall charm are what make it one of my favorites and a must read if you're into kickass, but charming battle shonen.
