A baby cries as the man holding him is murdered with a sword thrust. A vast purple explosion throws off yellow glowing symbols. Zombielike creatures descend on white threads to attack a girl. Thugs murder someone in one alley while girls beat a man in another. A man with an umbrella offers carrots to caged rabbits. Robed priests chant in the woods. In a colorful space full of floating candles, a tattooed man smiles. And on and on, until eventually, two boys—abrasive delinquent Kyouichi Houraiji and mild-mannered "narcoleptic transfer student" Tatsuma Hiyu—leap out of a school window during class to answer the challenge of four thugs apparently known as the "Four Great Ones."

Some of these images do eventually fold into the plot. Later episodes are less staccato and bizarre, though they do jump around in time to establish their story: Demons are returning to Tokyo for some reason, killing local people in horrific ways. Kyouichi and Tatsuma begin fighting them—the former because he wants to test his mettle against something tough, the latter because his master sent him to Tokyo for that purpose. They first encounter a demon in the presence of other students at their school—feminine tea-ceremony club president Hisui Kisaragi, beloved student council president Aoi Misato, rambunctious archery-team captain Komaki Sakurai and gruff wrestling-team captain Yuuya Daigo. Kisaragi, who comes from a long line of demon fighters, explains the basics about what they're up against but can't understand the strange powers that the other five seem to share. But he advises them to continue fighting as a group.

Unfortunately, various things interfere—Kyouichi's attitude problems, Aoi's meekness and lack of aggressive powers, Komaki's doubts, Yuuya's crush on Komaki. Yet they clearly need to fight together, given their complementary powers, and given the way the creepy smiling tattooed man, Kozunu, keeps conferring demonic powers on angry people with murderous grudges.

Not your grandfather's game adaptation

Tokyo Majin is yet another episodic fight anime based on a video game, and the influence shows in the main characters: five people with radically different powers and attitudes, but without much other characterization. And yet the series isn't particularly gamelike. It's got a little monster-of-the-week action, but episodes tend to end, not with the defeat of the monster or with a cliffhanger, but just whenever they run out of time, regardless of whether there are issues left to address or conversations left to finish. It feels a bit like a movie that's been arbitrarily chopped into half-hour segments.

And then there's the odd storytelling style, with its brief glimpses of all sorts of random moments, some relevant to the central story, some just there to give it a larger sense of time and place. (The rabbit-feeding man is at least a fringe part of the main story; the girls beating a man to death with golf clubs seem to be just scenery.) All this and the grim horror-story tone add up to something much closer to the eerie storytelling innovation of Boogiepop Phantom than to Street Fighter Alpha.

Add in the fact that the series looks terrific. The usual anime attention has been paid to making the fight scenes look thrillingly dynamic, but additional effort has gone into making every character impressive and interesting, not to mention unflinching in battle, no matter what powers they face. The result somewhat resembles the fluid action of Cowboy Bebop, where smiling combatants dance as much as battle, throwing planet-cracking blows at each other without breaking a sweat.

About the only thing wrong with Tokyo Majin is that there are so many characters and so much background action that nobody gets much attention—and even when they do, it's somewhat repetitive, like the ongoing fuss made over whether Aoi is too weak to join the fight. With only 14 episodes total (though there was a sequel series as well), and a ton of mystery to unfold, Tokyo Majin sometimes seems like it should be spending more time on unraveling its story and less time on covering already-covered ground. But as video-game adaptations go, this is one of the more creative and enthralling ones by a good bit.