Despite being only an hour, Kaitouranma was awful. Visual novel anime are notorious for reducing any interesting elements to background noise. The medium is so oversaturated with samey porn games and dating sims that each game has to resort to tacking on random sci-fi or supernatural elements to stand out. Kaitouranma goes a step further and makes the entire story background noise. The "hunt for the sword" Media Blasters' localization title references is an excuse for the main character to be left alone and unaccountable around uncontrollable women. That is the entire OVA, until there is an obligatory fight between the main character and hiswhite-haired, red-eyed rival with some supernatural babble tacked on to make this single moment look deep. Visual novels, truly the vanguard of originality.

The anime tries to have the quirky humor and sensibilities of 80s/90s ecchi like Project A-Ko and Tenchi Muyo, but the characters are so bland and the anime is so sexually driven that it falls flat. How can you craft likeable characters when they have no personality outside being dumb and horny for the MC? The aforementioned anime gave each character minimal traits and personalities outside sex and romance; Kaitouranma failed to do that, so the show is boring.

The only interesting thing about this OVA is that it's AIC's fourth digipaint production, and their best looking pre-Y2K one. Legend of Black Heaven was saved by its interesting character designs and weird imagery, Trouble Chocolate just looked bad, and Sol Bianca: The Legacy relied too heavily on dark shading. Kaitouranma, however, surprisingly looked very good -- even better than a particular infamous Sunrise production from three years later! It was smart for AIC to use a visual novel to test digipaint; the source material is digitally colored anyway. I refuse to believe this OVA was anything else but a digipaint test; this historical significance is the OVA's only redeeming quality.