There are alot of ways this series at least attempts to differentiate from the standard anime cliches. Sure the main character is 12 years old but they work around this by giving him a form he changes into which appears to be anywhere from 17 to 28 or so. Sure it takes place in part at a school, but much of the story drifts away from it to involve clashes with other monsters. It has parts at school but it doesn't focus on it exclusively. Many of the monsters look like cheap teletubby rip offs but some look decently cool as monsters should with strong abilities. One slight miss however is between this and the second season, he does not seem to remember he has the power he develops by the first season's end. I find that abit puzzling and similar to Fairy Tail (which is a great show but it has a serious rinse and repeat problem where each group of new enemies renders all the power they gained from the prior clash useless as if they never had power and gives them no where to go but back down since they get great power then seem to give it up over and over again.) Well this one appears to have a little of that though in a far more subtle way.
They do an excellent job of foreshadowing between seasons 1 and 2, which is something sadly rather rare in many anime. I did wish and still do hope that there will be some sense of closure with respect to which of the 3 or so girls in this mini harem set up he winds up with and hopefully see that his childhood friend realizes or sees that he has another side to him. We get constant hints and near misses of one or more of his totally human friends seeing him in action or realizing who and what he is. It is never good to constantly tease your viewers with such a thing without having some end point to it. Since it is so often teased and hinted at, i expect rightfully to see some conclusion with respect to that. Maybe the best solution would be at least the girl, Kana finding out who and what he is and accepting him. Technically one already knows and one sort of finds out later but it doesn't quite feel like there is a solid resolution to that realization due to the action. Though, this is not fully realized til the next season it still feels a bit of a let down at the impact. I always think after something big is revealed you would have some sort of a get together to discuss it or see how it changes things if it all between you and the friend or friends. Too often this sort of settling is missing. It is something that I always look forward to seeing whenever this sort of thing occurs but rarely get to see it executed. It is not too late for this series they may add something of that nature by season 3 or later.
I have mixed feelings about the good guys and bad guy ish characters portrayed in the story. My main issue is, there is a certain point essentially of no return. I am however, not completely certain who or what crossed that threshold. Some evil actions can never be undone such as killing someone. If an enemy kills a friend or a relative, I expect there can be no peace between you and no forgiveness without some due justice at least. I just can not tell for sure if that occured in this story as some of those events are a bit fuzzy. I saw plenty of destruction and plenty of humans and creatures getting hurt but how many died and by who, I wasn't certain about. Part of that uncertainty is the reaction of the characters and treatment toward their would be foes. If you do not act like there was a death, then it is hard to determine there was one. I did see fairly clearly one at least die, but again the aftermath of how it was resolved sort of belittles the impact of that or any death or injury which makes that part of the story confusing and difficult to comprehend. Season two is a little clearer about that but not by a wide margin.
Kind of funny that the character Kiyotsugu is a mirror of the friends of Tsutomi from Birdy the Mighty. The same group of friends has quite a few paralells with the Ruins club and their constant/near miss run ins with aliens as the Paranomal group has with Yokai in Nura. There is a slightly better sense of ending and closure by the last season of this over the last one of Birdy but neither feels complete. At least in Birdy, it was clear who he made a connection with, albeit left hanging after a sort of quirk of fate tragedy which left the relationship unresolved again, while it is never clear in atypical harem animes. The harem angle is a bit dysfunctional and quirky in this series however. While at the start, Tsurara, functioned as only a bodyguard with little to no hints of anything more, gradually it is revealed she sees him as more than a master. It almost feels like it was added just for the sake of adding it rather than a planned story arc/ character relation and thus hard to ascertain the true value of it. Though she makes her feelings pretty clear, it almost feels like it wasn't originally part of the story and added as an after thought. There were a few points through the series where this distinction could have been made more clear but failed and a few points where they could have added the strong hint of said interest sooner. The Yura girl, at first seems too dispassionate and also later seems to develop an interest but this too is a tad fuzzy. Kana appears to be interested from the start and with all honestly, mutually so, because it appears very strongly that Nura has a likewise interest in her. Yet she is somewhat pushed into the background later on and a bit more so in season two as they focus more on the monster aspects. It does not feel justified to do so.
So, the way the love/harem angle seems to work here is, a potential love interest appears, they get close, but when they get too close, they drift apart and a new one is added. This may not be intended on their part but the way the story works it feels like that is what is going on. It seems they do not want him to have a love interest and so perhaps the so called harem angle appeared as a consequence to the creators trying to avoid having one. In the end, it is difficult if not impossible to say if he can or will have a future with any of them and that is part of the tragedy of using the harem theme.
This time he does in fact have a mother and a grandfather so he has a family and at least one parent. This is counter to the most common anime trend which is no parents and in a sense no family. The odd thing about the grandpa is that he somehow shrank to about 1/5 his youthful adult size in his old age and grew a giant tumor on the back of his head. No explanation is offered whatsoever. In other animes with a similar odd physical character change like "Black Butler" it was because he did not have the power to maintain his strong youthful form. Maybe this is some kind of old age joke in Japan. I have seen this sort of young man to short dwarf like old age character often and usually explained as a reduction of magical power or some other nonsense but at least there is an attempt to explain the unexplainable.
Nura's yokai form is I am guessing a samurai warrior? Though how exactly that means a monster, is anyone's guess. With the red eyes, I might have expected that he was in fact a vampire but that is not said either. How his adult human transformation with weird hair and a powerful samurai sword a monster, I do not understand, but it does look kind of cool and he is a cool character. It is just the dichotomy of what monsters are versus humans seems a bit week when so many so called monsters actually look and behave more human than most humans. Add to that the fact that some monsters look like teletubbies, parade float slap together jobs, or random mixes of animals, it just feels the attempt to make a genuine monster atmosphere fairly weak and unimaginative.
Still the action, monster/magic fights, character depth (at least for the major characters), intrigues, and subplots make for a pretty engaging overall story. One thing it has that few anime has since there is family is the sense of support and education one gets from parental guidance and families. This is absent froma great many anime that fail to include any family members let alone parents or for that matter any guidance whatsoever. Some that have family fail to offer any kind of support or guidance as expected of a family. I find it a bit confusing. One of the best scenes in the entire series is when Nura in Yokai form takes Kana to the bar to meet some of his friends. I kind of wish they had a little more of that. That scene alone created a sense of that arc going some where which it is stumbling on at the moment. I would really like to see more of Kana and a sense of direction away from the Harem genre for the sake of having a harem genre. It is kind of sad that it makes me wonder that the only way for anime to get popular in Japan or the world is to frivolously include a harem in it. It is nice the way they develop his character to maturity but at the same time odd that it is even necessary at age 12. Shouldn't he have more time to be a child too? Ya know that is part of development as well and people without enough time to be a child do have a few issues. See Michael Jackson. Overall it is a good story with a strong hidden power of the main character element which alot of us really like. I would also like to see more of his powers such as the blue flames or what else he can do. The reason is it would help define him more for what he is supposed to be, a powerful monster like creature. If we compare this to Beyond the Boundary, there are fewer scenes where the main character monsters out but they are much much clearer of what he is and what power he has. You sort of get that sense in this one but they could make what he can do a little clearer. His rationale, calmness, usually increase many fold but on occasion it drops to his human form levels or lower. I am not always clear how or why that happens when it does, but it makes his monster form perhaps a bit more human and show that he is in fact the same person as his human form.
It is a good enjoyable anime. It may not be quite as strong a series as the Irregular at Magic High but it does share alot of qualites that put it in the same neighborhood of great anime.