The Spring 2025 Anime Preview Guide

Sword of the Demon Hunter

Jinta, a bodyguard to a priestess in a remote mountain village, lives during Japan's Edo period. While Jinta is an outsider to the town, he is still tasked with seeking out a demon in the forest on a quest to vanquish it. But upon meeting the demon, it instead tells Jinta of a puzzling and mysterious future. The novels' story spans 170 years from the Edo period to the Heisei period, with the protagonists traveling through space and time while seeking a meaning for why they wield the blade.

Sword of the Demon Hunter is based on the Sword of the Demon Hunter Kijin Gentosho light novel series by author Moto'o Nakanishi and illustrator Tamaki. The anime series is streaming on HIDIVE on Mondays.

I'll admit it—until the very end of this episode, my thoughts were along the lines of “this is good, but not for me.” That may still be the case, but the finale of this double-length premiere ended up feeling both warranted and engaging with the time skip in the end, from 1840-ish to 2010. It tapped into the same sort of intrigue that CLAMP's X/1999 did, with the idea that there are certain destinies that can't be avoided, although how they play out may still be up for debate.

Most of this takes place in the mid-19th century, with two children who escape from what looks like an abusive household to a town housing a sacred forge and a priestess of the fire god known as the Itsukihime. Jinta and Suzune give every impression of being blood siblings, although that may not be the case; Suzune has one red eye that marks her as having demon blood. That's, of course, why their father abuses her, but what's more interesting is that no one in their new village of Kadono seems to care. At first that may be because they don't notice, since she keeps that eye covered, but by the time Jinta is grown, the rest of the townsfolk must know, because while he and the other children have grown up, Suzune still looks like she's five or six. And given that the Itsukihime and her Sentinels are meant to keep demons out of Kadono, I feel like we're missing some major pieces of Suzune's puzzle.

That may be intentional. One hundred seventy years is a long time for a story to play out, and I doubt we're just going to skip over them entirely. That means there's plenty of space to begin filling in the gaps—what will happen to Kadono without an Itsukihime? How has his strange rebirth after a battle with a demon altered Jinta? Was Suzune really half-demon, and if she wasn't, how did she end up as Jinta's sister? These are all questions that this episode does a good job of setting up, and it's also careful not to dole out answers to them, creating intrigue for the rest of the series.

The episode itself is good, but in what feels like a fairly pat way. The first half of it unfolds without any real surprises, and apart from Jinta's fight with the demon in the second, that's also fairly rote, albeit well done. There's some gore, some almost-sex, plenty of village politics, and all of it is capably animated, although there is a noticeable number of foot shots, from young Jinta running in the rain to people putting on their shoes with careful attention to detail. It feels like the first layer of a foundation, when the hole is dug and the concrete is poured—not a house, but the obvious sign that one is coming. I'm willing to give it a second episode to see what takes shape.

I swear I could feel my score for Sword of the Demon Hunter ticking down in real time as its 50-minute premiere progressed. I don't have a particular rubric for adding or subtracting points, but I thought I had a four-star review on my hands for the first half or so. The animation was beautiful, which may be a first for Yokohama Animation Lab. The writing was relatively understated as it traced the relationships of Jinta and Suzune, a pair of orphans fleeing abuse, and Shirayuki, the daughter of the Itsukihime shrine maiden and one of her sentinels. When Suzune's bandage slipped, revealing her glowing red eye, there was no lengthy explanation that she was an oni; similarly, it trusted viewers to pick up on what was going on when time jumped forward to Jinta and Shirayuki as adults, but Suzune was still a small child.

This might sound like a low bar, but watching overwritten narratives every season will really make you appreciate a script that doesn't stop to exposit about the characters' every action.

But as the plot kicked up, it started to feel more and more like any old schlocky action show. Still above par, but the style started to push substance out of the way. When Jinta and an oni stopped in the middle of a fight for a conversation about how, despite onis' longevity, humans can become stronger across generations because of their ability to pass on their knowledge and techniques, I knew we were in trouble. It threw off the pacing of the fight, taking its momentum and slamming it straight into a wall. This suspicion was only cemented when the female oni, a sexy lady, came in and manipulated Suzune into aging up and murdering Shirayuki.

I don't think Sword of the Demon Hunter will be bad; if it's what you're in the mood for, you could do way, way, way worse. It's not the kind of thing that leaves me tearing out my hair. It's just not my thing, and it's not original or unique enough to override my general preferences. But hey, if you're craving a dude in feudal Japan running around killing demons with a weird arm, go for it.

Sword of the Demon Hunter is a show I was feeling all over the place about right up until the very end of its double-length premiere. At first, I was appreciative of how it took its time building up Jinta, Suzune, and Shirayuki's dynamic as main characters; the pacing felt very novelistic, which made me not the least bit surprised to discover that this anime is adapting a series of regular books. Eventually, though, the languid pacing and lack of cinematic style bogged the whole story down, and I began wishing for a premiere that was willing to cut things out and move things around to pick up the pace. Then, by the time we got to the bloody and brutal climax of the episode, I found myself coming back around in favor of the longer runtime, even if I still wish it were better executed.

I also had a similar oscillating response to the writing of our main characters. At first, I dug the found-family dynamic that the runaway Jinta and Suzune shared with their new sister, Shirayuki, and the swordsman who took them all in. Then, after realizing that the episode was doing little more than repeating the same “Aw shucks, look at how cute and loveable this totally not doomed set of characters is!” routine, I began to get bored. The show once again won a bit of favor back when Suzune dropped her Perfect Little Sister shtick and let her go buck-wild murder-bananas on Shirayuki, which leads to the painful moment where Jinta decides that the only way to set things right with his little sis is to punch her into a bloody pulp with his monster arm. It's still just as broad and formulaic a story turn as what came before, but the shift in tone helps sell Sword of the Demon Hunter as the kind of dark, theatrical fable that can get away with being a little broad and formulaic.

Just about the only thing I had my opinion set on from the beginning was how perfectly average I found the show's production values to be. There are some decent cuts here and there, and it is certainly striving for a moody and respectable aesthetic, but it's just not quite polished enough to achieve its goals fully. A perfect example of what I mean is Jinta's fight with the demon before Suzune goes off the reservation. There's a beat where he loses his arm that is supposed to be visceral and shocking—I can imagine how much inspiration the animators at Yokohama Animation Laboratory took from the legendary opening of Princess Mononoke—but the sequence ends up looking plastic and silly, as if Jinta was a Ken Doll that got played with a little too hard.

In the end, I'm still split on Sword of the Demon Hunter. I could easily imagine a version of this anime that is a satisfying, blood-soaked tale of revenge and loss in a world of mythical monsters. This premiere just hasn't convinced me that the show we've been delivered can live up to that potential.