Review of Natsume's Book of Friends: The Waking Rock and the Strange Visitor

It's a little disappointing that it'd been 3 years since the last Natsume related thing was released and this is all we got. I was hoping for maybe a bit more backstory for Reiko or something remotely resembling character progression but instead we get what is essentially two OVA episodes crammed into one. The first one is a standard youkai of the week story where Natsume gets tangled up in the affairs of some new monster he meets and learns a valuable lesson about the true meaning of friendship or something. You can maybe tell that I've become a little burned out on the series afterbinging 6 seasons of extremely episodic content back-to-back.

The second episode was a little more interesting, involving Tanuma with one of the youkai in Natsume's little group that follows him around disguising himself as a human. Tanuma is an interesting character for his connection to youkai without ever being able to directly see what's going on, so having a youkai appear to him even as a human was kind of neat. I think I'd be happy to get more of this series but for now, as I said, I'm a little burned out and happy to take a break. These episodes get a pass at an average 7/10