“Fuuma no Kojirou: Yasha-hen” essentially consists of a pointless ninja battle royale with lots of bloodied foreheads. The paper-thin plot, which doesn’t make much sense, revolves around two schools, Seishikan and Hakuo. Students from Seishikan have been bullying and beating up students from Hakuo, forcing them to transfer to their school. Normally, one would get the police involved in an issue like this, but a teacher at Hakuo (I guess she’s a teacher, although she’s dressed like a student) sends for a member of an elusive clan of ninjas, the Fuma, to solve the problem. After killing several rival ninjas who had intercepted the teacher’sletter, the intended recipient, Kojiro, heads to the school and is immediately smitten with the principal of the school, another young woman in a school uniform. She is mostly forgotten about after the first episode, however. Also, despite the premise being centered on schools, we never once see students in a class, so I’m not sure what kind of schools these are supposed to be.

Anyway, Seishikan has its own elite group of ninjas protecting it, and when it’s obvious that Kojiro can’t handle this job alone, his fellow Fuma ninjas come to his aid. For reasons not adequately explained, both of the clans then decide to fight each other to the death. The majority of the content of this OVA is just that — ninjas barely getting introduced before fighting and killing each other. Naturally, there’s a lot of blood, and oddly, the characters often bleed from the forehead. Perhaps that’s just the creator’s style, but it’s repetitive and unrealistic.

Due to the nature of this OVA, there is little character development. The main character, Kojiro, doesn’t change much, though in the first episode he’s portrayed in a more comical style. The main antagonist, Musashi, has a cliched backstory consisting of a sick younger sister, and he is working at Seishikan to pay her hospital bill. Ranko, the teacher who hired Kojiro, is shown as illogically mean in the first episode, but in subsequent episodes, she does a complete 180 in terms of personality and suddenly acts like she cares about, and may even have feelings for, Kojiro. The other characters are hardly given any screen time, and most are killed off just minutes after their initial appearances.

The fights themselves are somewhat interesting, as each ninja uses a unique supernatural attack — one uses feathers, another uses fog, et cetera. Two of the strongest ones call themselves “psychic soldiers,” and they use psychic attacks. I’m not sure how these are different from the supernatural attacks, but apparently they’re more powerful.

The dialogue is cliched and repetitive. The direction is all over the place, and there are lots of close ups of the characters’ eyes for some reason. The character designs are different from the typical anime look — the author of “Saint Seiya” created this, so there’s a similarity in style between the two. The characters are kind of difficult to tell apart, though, since many of them look alike. The animation is limited and choppy.

The opening theme is a rock ballad, while the ending theme is an upbeat heavy metal song, both by the same artist. These two songs are decent. The background music is just generic Japanese-sounding music, typical for something ninja-related and not very memorable.

With a cast of many popular/veteran voice actors, the voice acting is okay, but it’s wasted on the substandard dialogue. Keiichi Nanba and Show Hayami particularly stand out as the voices of the protagonist and antagonist.

As for objectionable content, in addition to the excessive blood and killing, there is an upskirt panty shot in the first episode, which added absolutely nothing to the series and felt like a cheap attempt to reach a fanservice quota.

Overall, while some of the fights are innovative and interesting, this OVA is difficult to recommend, mainly because of the nonsensical plot and near-zero character development. It all boils down to ninjas killing each other for no reason. If that’s your thing, then you may enjoy this, but otherwise, I would say avoid this one.