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Demon Fighter Kocho

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Title Info

• seen: 1-1 of 1
  
• type: oav
  
• grade: flawed
  
• source: unknown
  
• Other elements of this title:
  • Contains excessive fan service.
• dur: 30
  
• form: sub
  
• made: unknown
  
• Review created: Fri Feb 16 11:19:09 EST 2001
• mod: none
  

A strange beasty this, it's an attempt to mix all sorts of `sure-fire' elements in a single anime. It's got young people battling with spiritual monsters, it's got humor and self-referential parody, and it's got buckets of fan-service, nudity and sexual references. It's just a shame it's not actually that good.

As mentioned the plot begins with a, slightly spooky, run in between a young lady and a hostile spirit on a dark and deserted university campus. It looks like this might even be a bit of a horror until we meet the cast. The lead, per se, is a young somewhat gawkish guy. His primary ability is that he's been possessed and cursed by the spirits so often, he seems to have a positive talent for attracting them. He also seems to be able to attract ghost hunters. Although if they were all nubile attractive young women like Demon-Fighter Kocho many young men might consider it an even trade. The cast is rounded out with Kocho's younger sister, introduced as "the sort of girl who goes all the way", and who also has her sights set on the guy...although possibly only so she can compete with her sister. And, finally, there's the older lecturer in `astrology' who's a master of all things occult, but would rather see a bit more of Kocho. If the phrase amusingly ecchi turns you off then you probably don't need to read further.

The plot centers around them discovering the truth of the haunting and confronting the source. If you've watched much anime you've seen this sort of `asian ghostbusters' thing before. However in this case it's really just an excuse for all the things they want to include in the show. This includes lots of `spiritual rituals', which all seem to start with one (or both) of the females in skimpy revealing outfits and end up with one (or both) of them naked. Naturally this also includes `swirling spiritual forces', which generally means as bit of boob wobble. As can be seen this isn't deep and the addition of nudity and fan-service is really unsubtle, forced, and breaks up any attempt to be serious.

On the positive side they don't really try. While there's a couple of moments where the show, or the ghosts, looks serious in general they're just as silly as the leads. And if this a chance for humor, a joke, or some flashy effects, they'll take it. There's also some, quite amusing parody, where they make fun of themselves. Like a character being criticised for taking too long with the character intro's. It's not really enough to save this title, but it's mildly entertaining. And indeed I think that's the best way to see the show, it would be pretty offensive if it wasn't so silly, but as a result it's not worth taking too seriously. None of the elements are strong enough to really make it worth viewing, the fan service is too obvious and contrived, and the humor will only raise the occassional grin.

It takes another hit on the production quality. The animation is fairly basic and cartoony, and their attempts to do fancy effects often fail. This is somewhat of a problem for a story that wants to be full of impressive supernatural effects. But it's even more of a problem for something that want's to have lots of fan service. The characters, male and female, look more plain, or odd, than attractive which sort of breaks the point of having fan-service. The voices are pretty bad, the feuding sisters being particularly hard on the ears. The music was eminently forgettable.

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Words by Andrew Shelton, Web by Ticti, Last Compile: Wed Aug 5 12:39:17 WST 2009