Dragon Fist · review
Spoiler warning
This review may discuss plot details.
If you're aware of the existence of this OVA, chances are you're into obscure anime from the 80s/90s. That kind of stuff is like a Russian roulette: you can find hidden gems, but there are plenty of mediocre, bad or terrible ones. This is a terrible one. They probably wasted all their budget in the intro, which has a catchy song and is the best thing you will see if you watch Dragon Fist. The plot is rushed and barely makes any sense. The main character is a weird Chinese dragon-guy, son of a powerful clan leader, who is too weak to become the nextclan leader so is sent to Japan to become stronger. From now on, this part is never referred to again in the story, and it's totally useless: the plot would've been the same even if the hero was a regular dude. While living in Japan he stumbles across a villain who is a high-school student but also has a laboratory where he clones people and genetically enhances his henchmen. Yep, nothing weird here. After some disappointing battles and some sad moments the bad guy is defeated and the OVA ends with the hero sadly looking at the sky with the ending song playing in the background. The whole clones thing has nothing to do with his mission in Japan and we will never know if he became strong enough to be the next clan leader. Maybe it is intentional and that part was a MacGuffin, or maybe the plot is just too rushed and poorly developed to explain it. I haven't read the manga so I don't know if this is the result of a bad adaptation.
The bad plot isn't the only problem here. The animation is really low quality, the characters move like they are in a videogame that runs at 5 frames per second. There is no room for character development but that's expected given the short duration of this OVA. Character design is ok (it's made by Shingo Araki, a quite famous designer), the opening song is not bad, and that's it. The important things just don't work, everything is bad or lame and could have been made better with just a little more effort (and money).
In general there is an audience for every type of anime, even the really obscure ones like this. But Dragon Fist is so bad that I really can't find a category of people who could enjoy it, and I don't know who to recommend it to. Maybe you can give it a try if you are with friends, have some time to waste and want a good laugh, otherwise you can just ignore it. Of course I've seen worse anime than this one, but this is not enough to save it from a 3 out of 10.