oh, sweet times, it's finally over.
it took them some time to get to the finale, and then another week to summarize what happened in a post season episode. that's two recaps in one season.

I can't really rate the series on it's own, but even without comparing it to the source Manga, I think it's an odd duck, and not in a good way.

as a manga reader, my main problem is that I can't think of a reason for half the changes they did. many times it felt as if they were moving around scenes between the episodes just for the sake of being different, without considering how it effects the general plot.

for example: chapter 001, who's absence I've been complaining about since the first episode, get's a flashback mention during the 24th episode. it's not a complete flashback so it doesn't give us any details about WHY it happened in the past. instead of having the flashback early on to explain why Rikou is so against being a youkai, we get a minute of it where night Rikou comes in, kills the !EVIL! monster and saves the girl.
in the manga, the chapter explains Rikou's personality and cements him being the same person as night Rikou, in the anime, it looks like the producers are trying to force the shipping of two characters.

more of my 'favorite' changes:
* having bad guy kill his own bad guy in the 24th episode for fighting dirty. this is all the more stupid because he saved him during an earlier episode and called him a valuable alley. then, ONE episode after he kills his most loyal man, he gets a chance a redemption. compared to the manga, where he kills that guy after the first fight, and uses the death to motivate his other troops.
* instead of using the two sneaky guys in a reckon mission, have them get caught and rescued by another bunch of characters. the anime brings in a different character to go to the bad guy mansion and get his ass kicked and saved. and after that the two original guys go, but it's far too long into story for them to do any serious spying, so they just happen to hear about the plot advancement, and then they're detected, get their ass kicked, and rescued. the two sequences have taken roughly the same amount of time it would take to do the original part.

above all these changes, I have a feeling the producers simply don't like the main character. many of the changes turn out to make Rikou seem like a fool, who's only being saved by his teammates and by sheer luck (suddenly it's night-time!). add that to the many times Yura gets to fight generic-inuyasha-youkai without any contribution to the plot, and the shit load of screen time that Gyuuki gets (probably appears in every episode, mostly standing around without moving) and it seems the anime simply doesn't want the fans to like him.

I can go on and write about all the changes that are gonna bite them in the ass later on (yura and Rikou's grandfather, the evil sword and Yoshizune), but I want to address the ending song.
it's pathetic. you can actually see that someone in marketing said "hey! that dancing bit from Haruhi sure is famous, I'm sure that's why people like that show! let's have our own!" and that how they made it. I won't be surprised if they tried to host events for dancing like that.

all in all, I didn't like it, and I dont think the next season would be any better. But I'm still gonna watch it.