OBSCURE O.V.A.S, *Demon City Shinjuku

Yoshiaka Kawajiri is probably best known by Western otaku as the director of Ninja Scroll, along with adapting several American franchises like Batman, X-Men, and The Matrix. He even went on to do a feature-length Highlander, which his appreciation for the original live-action movie was on full display in this 1988 OVA. Demon City Shinjuku was a sci-fi horror novel by Hideyuki Kikuchi who also wrote the source material for Kawajiri's similar anime of Wicked City which came out a year prior, even though this outing tones down on the sex and violence. The anime dub was done by Manga Entertainment's British studios, so there is a gratuitous amount of overused cursing in it to try and appeal to edgy genxers.

In an alternate history, a corrupted psychic uses his teachings to open up the doorway to Hell from the Shinjuku section of Tokyo. The evil Rebi Ra defeats his spiritual brother in arms Genichirou in an epic battle, leaving the entire area a wasteland filled with demons. A decade passes with the rest of world achieving peace, now lead by a "World President" who gets caught in a trap by Raban Ran, although his original psychic teacher manages to save the President by staving off the trap. This leaves no one left to challenge Raban's final act, so Genichirou's surviving son Kyoyo is sent to confront him armed only with a wooden sword and a moderate amount of training in the school of demon slaying. Kyoyo now has to deal with the remaining local killers still hanging around Shinjuku, along with taking care of the President's useless daughter in one big escort mission right out of a video game.

You can see a fair amount of what would influence Kawajiri's work in Ninja Scroll what with a lone swordsmen side-scrolling through a hazardous landscape battling a variety of superhuman adversaries. The story is stilted and wonky, suffering from serious pacing, although the selling point is the electrifying action scenes. The anime has achieved a level of popularity among American otaku as a cult classic, mostly because of its screenings on network TV in the 90s, as well as having its own English-language RPG. It might not be a keeper for your personal library, even though it could fill up an evening of retro anime watching.