So, the latest Rumiko Takahashi series, MAO, finally got an anime adaptation.
This one goes back to a more Inuyasha style with isekai time-travel shenanigans to fight monsters, just now the time-traveling is only to the 1920's instead of the mid-1500's.
I actually read the manga when the series first started and... honestly couldn't really get into it. I appreciate that starting with Kyoukai no Rinne, Takahashi abandoned her previous habit of making the male and female leads physically and emotionally abusive to each other, and MAO continued the trend of them being generally civil to each other.
But after 80 some-odd chapters of the manga and introducing several generally forgettable characters, it just didn't feel like it was going anywhere. For series like Ranma or Rinne the lack of direction was okay because neither of those series promised any kind of underlying plot to begin with. It was just generally episodic comedic adventures under their respective themes of "Ranma is water-soluble trans and everyone wants a piece of him/her" and "Turns out the afterlife is also late-stage capitalist".
But MAO opens up with an over-arching mystery right off the bat. What happened to Nanoka? Who cursed Mao? Then later it just kept adding more questions with the introductions of the other characters and the promise of some kind of deeper conspiracy. But unlike Inuyasha that at least had the episodic Shikon shard collecting to give the characters some kind of motive to keep doing other things before Naraku was introduced as the new primary motivator, I don't remember the characters in MAO being particularly driven by anything at all. Like, yeah, years-old cold case mystery in the background, but barring any leads about that (which there were scant few), what's motivating them in the here and now to actually go do stuff? Just wander around and fight monsters? Like, woo, transformations. Woo, swords. But what are we even trying to do here?
And it doesn't even have Inuyasha's goofiness or over-the top characters to keep it interesting despite all that. MAO is a relatively more dramatic and violent series (given that blood is a major plot element). But that just left basically all of the characters except Otoya feeling kind of flat to me (Otoya at least has the "cheerily unfazed by any kind of weird shit" personality). Even the requisite add-on characters like Hyakka and Kamon are more like Ageha and Tsubasa from Rinne than Miroku and Sango in Inuyasha, where they don't "join the party" in any sense, but just kind of exist in the background and show up whenever the story calls for it.
Like, maybe the plot got more coherent after I dropped it (I don't remember exactly when, but it was like the fifth time it was like "here's someone else with the white hair streak and facial scar who was coincidentally also one of Mao's fellow classmates at onmyouji school", and I was finally like, "okay, is this actually going anywhere?"), so I'll give the anime a chance still. Hopefully with foresight it can start dropping actual plot threads to follow earlier than the manga did.