Reviews

"Kyomu Senshi Miroku" is an action- and violence-packed OVA from the late '80s with decent animation and sound/music, average voice acting, a convoluted plot and stereotypical characters without much depth to them. From the beginning, there isn't much background information given on the characters, so it's hard to tell what's going on. It seems as though you're expected to know a lot about this already (perhaps it's more geared to those who have read the novels that it's based on). Anyway, the titular Miroku is the son of the head of the Kuryu, a clan of superhuman ninjas. He is summoned by his father after the decapitated head of Sanada Yukimura gets possessed by an evil demon/alien that wants to take over the galaxy. Yukimura's head gets the Sanada Ten Braves together (they are also aliens/demons with special powers), and Miroku likewise gathers his ninja buddies, and they all fight each other in bloody, gory battles. Crucial to Yukimura's plans is the "Dragon," a powerful "flying ship." This is shown to be a spaceship (keep in mind that this OVA is set in the 1600s). Both sides race to find the ship and the "infinity devices," which are the keys to starting up the ship. The ship itself is full of Buddhist imagery, and its control panel even looks like a mandala. The devices also resemble Buddhist ritual items.

The characters are relatively memorable, but only on a superficial level. Many of them die before any character development can take place, so their deaths don't have much of an impact. Characters make contrived and illogical decisions to drive the plot forward. For instance, sometimes they'll tell the character they're fighting about the only way they can be killed, or about their special power and how it works. There's also a scene where one of Miroku's friends is getting attacked and is almost killed by one of the bad guys, when two of the other good guys come in and save her right in the nick of time. And although she clearly can't continue to fend off the bad guy herself, she tells the other good guys to go on and help Miroku instead, leaving her alone to almost get killed again.

There is a lot of blood and gore, but most of it just looks silly and is hard to take seriously. There are a couple of scenes where one of the bad guys makes his entrance by literally tearing open a person's body and climbing out of it (how his clothes manage to be clean after that is beyond me). There is very little nudity; only one scene in one episode, and it's not even very detailed. This OVA is definitely more gory than fanservice-y.

As for technical aspects, the animation is fluid, colorful and detailed enough for the time this was made. However, there are way too many scenes of the characters running (mostly through forests). Every episode has at least three or four scenes of characters running, always accompanied by a "running" sound effect that kind of sounds like wind. The character designs are rather ugly. The music is decent; the opening and ending themes grew on me after a while. Interestingly, I can't find any information on the singer, "K-Chan," or the lyrics of the songs anywhere. As an aside, the fansubs I watched for this were completely inaccurate for the opening and ending themes; it seemed like maybe they used machine translation. (The fansubs were about 70% accurate for the actual episode content.) The voice acting is OK, but nothing remarkable; the main character is voiced by Kazuki Yao, who seems ever-present in these '80s OVAs.

Overall, there are definitely worse shows out there, but this one isn't particularly good. If you're in the mood for nonsensical action and violence, it can be rather entertaining.