Shuten Douji

The series starts off okay with what seems like a standard dark vs light story. However midway through the series they throw a curve ball and from there this series kicks into overdrive with 2 fantastic episodes.

The 3rd episode is mostly an action horror and does a great job at it with the intimidating villain that cuts his way through everyone in his path.

Very sad well thought out ending. If I were to keep a list of the best endings in anime this would be on it. I have a weakness for parent child stories and the ending hits that weakness very hard.

I actually rather liked this anime, it's one of those good old ones where there's a girl that ALWAYS loses all of her clothes at some point and ALWAYS has to be saved.
The actual storyline is pretty sweet, and does actually make sense eventually, and completely fullfills all the supernaturalness it promises.
The amount of blood and guts is satisfactory, and mixes nicely with the amount of 'love' (both maternal, friend and sexual).
Overall i'd say it's worth a casual watch, if only for the sake of having seen yet another anime where the main charecter is a supernatural being that get's ... blonde hair when they power up... not that it's common or anything *wink wink*

“Shuten Doji” is an OVA that attempts to do a lot of things, and although it’s not quite successful, it deserves credit for trying.

The 50-minute, four-episode series starts out with a relatively standard plot involving demons, a teenager who is discovering that he may not be human, and an evil group out to get him for seemingly simple reasons (“he’s good; we’re evil; he’s destined to slay us so we have to kill him”). Jiro, the main character who has the personality of a log, somehow immediately gains friends willing to sacrifice their lives for him, and they fight the demons together. There’s also a ... girl named Miyuki who inexplicably loves him, even though he hardly shows any emotion towards her. She has the habit of getting kidnapped by the demons and tortured in their nefarious plots to lure Jiro to them, and she’s more often than not naked or in the process of getting her clothes ripped off. Jiro has a demon protector named Goki who shows up at just the right moments, and there is another demon called Senki who is supposed to come by when Jiro is 15 to take him to the demon realm.

When the aforementioned Senki arrives for Jiro, the series takes a bizarre turn. The characters get separated and lost in time and space; some get sent back to ancient Japan, while Jiro ends up in the future and in a spaceship. Meanwhile, Jiro’s mother has grown despondent over her son’s absence, and starts painting a mural in a mental asylum that seems oddly familiar.

What’s good about the series’ conclusion is that there’s an attempt to explain just about all of the unusual events and mysteries that are brought up throughout the course of the OVA, including Jiro’s origin, why the demons are after him, and why the protagonists traveled through time and space. This makes for a relatively satisfying ending.

However, the more you think about it, the more you realize that a lot of the fundamental aspects of what happened still don’t make much sense, and the whole story seems pointless. There are many convoluted twists, with logic holes aplenty. And all of the time/space paradoxes cause a chicken-and-egg-type situation. Also, there’s one significant plot point regarding a character Jiro meets in the future that the writers explain with a backstory that feels forced in after the fact, but I guess you can say that at least they tried.

As touched upon earlier, the characters are largely one-dimensional. Jiro is a bland character with little personality; Miyuki is just there to be naked and keeps getting brought along to battles although she provides no assistance; Jiro calls a bunch of people he just met his “friends,” and they’re willing to die for him despite barely knowing him (this is somewhat explained, but it still feels awkward). The two “good” demons don’t leave much of an impression, and neither do most of the other characters, perhaps with the exception of Jiro’s parents, who play a key role in the story. The dialogue between the characters is hackneyed and often doesn’t sound like natural conversation. Characters also don’t react naturally to the events occurring around them sometimes.

Regarding technical aspects, the animation is average, but gritty, and lip movements sometimes don’t match the voices. The art is rather bland. The demons don’t look all that unique, and the gore/body horror is rather tame for a Go Nagai work.

The music is certainly unique, at least in the first episode. Many of the background tracks are vocalized, and there is a mix of wailing and chanting combined with synthesizer sounds. It adds to the creepy atmosphere, and it's disturbing to listen to. The subsequent episodes do not use this soundtrack much, if at all, however, and just have typical forgettable background music. The ending theme is instrumental and sounds like a mellower version of the theme from the "Halloween" movies.

The characters are voiced by top voice actors, but the performances themselves aren't that good. Ryo Horikawa voiced Jiro around the same time he started playing Reinhard in “Legend of the Galactic Heroes,” and Jiro almost sounds exactly like Reinhard. The voice doesn't fit his character very well. Miyuki sounds almost as uninterested in everything as she acts, and everyone else's voices are rather forgettable.

Most of the objectionable content in this OVA is comprised of nudity. Miyuki is naked in the majority of the scenes she’s in, and in some of these her clothes are being ripped off by the antagonists. There’s another female character who is shown naked as well, and there are scenes suggesting attempted rape/torture. There are also a lot of scenes with graphic violence, with body parts being chopped off, transmogrification, etc., although as mentioned earlier, the violence here is much tamer than in similar shows created by Go Nagai.

Overall, “Shuten Doji” is an ambitious OVA that weaves together a plot involving a variety of elements that normally would not be in the same story. While much of the resulting story suffers from severe logic flaws, there was at least an attempt to explain things rather than just throwing a bunch of disparate elements into an anime and calling it a day. The story is interesting, but the explicit content, flat characters and subpar technical aspects make this show difficult to recommend to the average viewer.