Last night I finished
Seirei no Moribito, and it was a pretty good anime. The plot gets interesting, the characters are great and you get attached to them, the action sequences are so well animated. It's good Asian-like fantasy and pretty to look at. There are no evil villains, either, not even La Lunga.
Also, Balsa/Tanda are so OTP ♥ Everyone ships them in canon, even. Really where can you find stoic wild warrior female + mellow herbalist shaman male where the waifu waiting for the husbando to return and love them back is the MAN? Nowhere else, that's where. Stupid Balsa. But I still love both characters separately and together all the same, especially Tanda. Maybe Tanda is my favorite character, go figure.
Chagum, the title character and the boy Balsa is protecting, has really awesome character growth and he's overall adorable in several occasions. My only concern was that he seemed to get used to life in town too fast for royalty, but it might be a problem of time constrains. Probably the original source took its timing.
One thing I like about the series is how smart the characters are. Balsa is pretty clever herself, dodging death and persecutors and future attacks, what you wouldn't quite expect from the brawns of the team. Tanda is a herbologist/doctor and a shaman disciple so it's a given, but I particularly love how several of his own discoveries and talents at the ending were what saved the day. Chagum is also quite the clever kid. And then we get to characters like shaman Torogai, who's your kooky yet filled with ancient knowledge old lady, for your interrogate-astral-lifeforms needs. And star-diviner Shuga from court (another favorite of mine), who takes the role of the resident Ravenclaw and academically investigates in parallel the whole plot a la noir detective like nobody else does. Then we have the emperor's elite assassin group, who don't have to envy a thing to the FBI. And Tohya, a boy who's friends with Balsa and Tanda, who might not always be the brightest crayon but lives out of his nice street smarts. And so on.
Do I recommend it? I do. It started slow for me -but I know people who fell in love from episode 01- but it's packed with awesome. And even if you were a shallow, nitpicky person, the animation and character design is pretty. It's only 26 episodes, also.
