Buffy The Vampire Slayer

Yohko Mano is Japan’s equivalent of Buffy The Vampire Slayer; a young girl begrudgingly given the task of defending the earth (more specifically, their home town... you never really saw Buffy go too far from Sunnydale) from demons and derelicts. Yohko’s a real girl, one who swears, has hormones, and would rather track down the newest boy in town than face down the newest beast in town. In the second half of her adventures, can she face off against the threat of... music videos and a twin cousin?

Episodes included in this collection-
Episode 4: 4-Ever!
Episode 5
Episode 6
Excel Saga: Episode 1 (No joke)
Steel Angel Kurumi: Episode 1 (Once again, I can’t make this up)

Ah, Devil Hunter Yohko; it’s ADVs first dub job after all, which... might be its only notable point in the history of anime. It’s been a long time since I checked out the adventures of the Devil Hunter Yohko. To give you a timeframe, this was released for ADV’s tenth anniversary. I picked up the first collection years ago, but only got the second collection AFTER a combined set was released, and Right Stuf had it for under ten bucks.

Fair warning; despite there being two discs in this set, there are only two real episodes of Devil Hunter Yohko here. The first disc consists of episodes 5 and 6. The other item is "Episode 4" in name only. Apparently Japan had a problem with releasing a "fourth" episode due to "tetraphobia" (go look it up on Wikipedia), so they released a series of music videos (new animation for some, old animation for others, and... live-action included as well) that added up to the length of a full episode and called it "4-Ever!" The music videos are rather interesting (I loved the bipolar SD one) at points, but lacking at others (okay, yeah, there’s a hot asian chick dancing around. I want my hot asian ANIMATED DEVIL HUNTER chicks dancing around right now).

Episodes 5 and 6, which play out more like miniature movies than actual episodes (with the tendency to "revert back to normal at the end", it feels like a series, but the complete avoidance of what’s come before [and in some cases, characters that were core before] give it a movie feel) bring the Devil Hunter back to doing what she does best.

Whining.

Well, yeah, she does some Devil Huntering too. Episode 5 is standard issue, go fight a demon that’s possesed someone. The animation is far from horrible in this episode, but it’s definitely noticible as from the early ’90s.

Episode 6 is the standout on the disc. It turns out that throughout the ages, another line of Devil Hunters had been trained, thanks to a pair of grandparent twins having a half-century-old battle about who really should be the next Devil Hunter. The plot actually gets interesting, and the animation certianly kicks it up, reminding me of the art of someone who I can’t name at the moment (looks very Re: Cutey Honey-ish). Animation of this caliber is very good... as there’s a lot of flashy fanservice (full disclosure: The DVD is rated 17+. Yes, there are teh boobies. Yes, I do enjoy ’em in here) of Yohko and her inevitible, and logistically impossible, twin cousin, but hell, if it worked for Kevin Smith, it works here.

The first disc contains a little bit of extras, those being clean closing animations and trailers (1 for episode 5, 3 for episode 6). For the two actual episodes, the dubbing is okay, but it sounds WAY too much like it was in a cave at points, and gets a little TOO eccentric at times. The Japanese language is there, I guess, if for some reason you wanted to hear that. So, when I bought this, I opened up the case and saw that there was a second disc with no actual Devil Huntering on it. I thought it would just be some "10th Anniversary of ADV" retrospective stuff... and it is... sorta. Instead of going full-on E! True Hollywood Story, we instead get the first episodes of Excel Saga and Steel Angel Kurumi (two series they were pimping at the time), coverage of some of ADV’s DVD features (clips showing off the Jiggle Counter, A.D. Vid-notes, audio commentary, and... how to make oden)... along with a messload of trailers. If that’s your thing, yeah, consider it part of an ADV anniversary collection... if not, consider it a preview disc that they usually send to press and just happened to be put in that second DVD holder slot.

What do I think of the Devil Hunter? If all I saw was episode 5, meh. From what I saw in Episode 6, I really think this franchise could have had a shot at being an ongoing series, especially with the ’90s propensity for having magical girls on weekdays. With such nice animation, I know I would have tuned in every day. Given the incredibly cheap price of this now, go grab it and the first volume, and tripback in time to simpler days of both shows and DVDs.