Isuca

tl;dr: A pretty generic manga with some good aspects but none that can hold it up to be all that great. This isn't all that original of a manga, seeing as at it's core its about a guy who seems average but has a mysterious special power helping a tsundere and eventually a slight kuudere from a family of exorcists fight off randomly appearing demons with light amounts of slice of life and humor in between. Still, it does have some interesting aspects. Though unfortunately, all of these aspects falter severely towards the end due to a rushed ending. The first interesting aspect would be that thetwo main heroines are both currently in competition to be the next head of the family and it makes the reader sympathize with both of their desires which makes it pretty suspenseful where things will go in this regard. The romance that goes in parallel to this is also interesting. There's a lot of build up regarding dealing with who's going to be the next family head and who's going to end up with Asano, but the ending is both conclusive in a way that it feels like it rushed too much, and inconclusive in a way that it feels like things were left hanging, which is the worst of both worlds in terms of endings. The romance aspect felt especially forced, because while there are some good moments throughout the manga and definite development on the heroine side of things, overall it didn't really feel like there was much progression happening on the protagonist's side at all, which makes the sudden development at the end kind of random. The manga also has mostly decent character arcs for the two main heroines, where Sakuya goes from being an unbearable tsundere to less standoffish and much more honest about her feelings which makes her a far more likable character by the end, and where Suseri goes from simply obeying her mother to becoming more independent and following her own goals which similarly makes her more likable. However, it has to rush these arcs considerably at the end in order to get there, which feels a bit forced. The manga also has a decent backstory for the characters centered around a certain event that happened before that start of the manga that's slowly revealed as the focus of the overarching narrative. But similarly to other aspects, the the overarching narrative gets resolved way too easily at the end with basically everything happening in a single chapter, which is incredibly anti-climatic considering it was built up over 9 volumes. Furthermore, it dropped a few plot threads in order to do that, so it really wasn't satisfying at all. The action also felt like it had interesting concepts, but it wasn't developed nearly enough and thus felt overall kind of weak. The comedy was better in this regard, wherein there was solid quantity and quality throughout the manga, but that wasn't the focus of the manga, so ultimately I think it may have hurt the pacing. The art wasn't amazing but was pretty solid all the way through wherein the character designs weren't particularly unique, but they worked well enough.