The Summer 2025 Anime Preview Guide - Onmyo Kaiten Re:Birth Verse

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In an alternate version of Heian-kyō (the old name of Kyoto when it was Japan's capital in the Heian era) called Denji Heian-kyō, a delinquent high schooler named Takeru Narehira resides in our world, but after an unfortunate accident, is transported to Denji Heian-kyō. Here, he immediately meets Tsukimiya, a woman he has seen many times in his dreams before. Hardly a moment passes after that encounter when Takeru and Tsukimiya encounter an oni monster, and lose their lives. Takeru awakens, stunned to find himself again at Denji Heian-kyō. He puts together that he has the power to go back in time. Now he resolves to learn this world's version of mystical onmyōjutsu techniques and become an onmyōji sorcerer to save Tsukimiya.

Onmyo Kaiten Re:Birth Verse is an original project from david production, director Hideya Takahashi, and Fujiko Sakuno. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Wednesdays.

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Episode 2

Rebecca Silverman
Rating:

Episode two of this show is not substantially better than its first. It is a bit more engaging, mostly because it settles down and has a focus, albeit one that still feels like it's being thrown at us in fast-forward. With Takeru having realized that if he wants to protect Tsukimiya, he's going to have to learn to play by Denji Heian-Kyo's rules, he at least has a more concrete goal, and that does help, if only because there's a place for him to channel his energy.

Unfortunately, this doesn't work as well as it could because we learn nothing about how the onmyo work or how the shikigami fight. I do like that we're shown that piloting the mecha isn't done with the physical body – unless I'm misunderstanding, the pilots astral project their spirits into the machines, which are wooden dolls wrapped in vines that have been fed spiritual power.

It's easy enough to understand from what we see, and it saves on boring explanations. On the other hand, how that power works is remarkably unclear. The little gloves with mechanical inserts are just thrown at us, and there's no discussion of how the different elements of power are used. Do different onmyoji have different elemental affinities? Is there an energy that works better for revving up the shikigami than others? Is there a specific element that's stronger than the others? Who knows? Takeru's lessons certainly aren't interested in telling us, although I suppose it's possible that he simply slept through that part.

Character motivations also remain on the surface level. Takeru's attachment to Tsukimiya is still paper-thin, and Atsunaga's is only a bit stronger because he's known her in the waking world. (And it's still pretty slim.) I don't need to know what the black mist's deal is, but it appears so often that it feels less like a threat and more like a plot device, and that doesn't help to make the story feel more compelling or immediate. If the first episode failed to make Denji Heian-Kyo's fate – and by extension Tsukimiya's – something for the audience to care about, the second episode continues that unfortunate trend.

There simply isn't enough of a foundation, to the point where I paused the episode to see if maybe this was based on a video game that david production was assuming we'd all played. (It's not – this is an original series.) There simply isn't enough of a foundation to build a strong story. I'm out.

Episode 1

Rating:

This is one of those episodes that I desperately wanted to like but simply couldn't. The ingredients are all there – a potential Re:Zero-style time reset, an alternative version of Heian-Kyo (a time and place I find fascinating), and a world that's a cross between cyberpunk and historical. In other hands, this could have been an intriguing story. Sadly, the episode we get instead feels like a rushed mess, a mishmash of concepts that aren't given the space to breathe. It's like someone read the recipe, threw everything in the bowl, and then didn't bother to mix.

There were several points when I had to stop to double-check that I was actually watching the first episode. In medias res is a perfectly valid way to begin a story, but that's only if it's done well, and that's simply not the case here. Protagonist Takeru has apparently been dreaming of Denji Heian-Kyo and Tsukimiya in particular for almost two thousand nights (take that, Sheherazade), but we don't get any context to make that meaningful. He appears to be mostly attracted to her breasts, which doesn't make his journey to her world particularly compelling. There's no foundation at all to the story, and that makes it difficult to feel any attachment to the characters. Takeru, despite being the sort of muscle-for-brains protagonist we've seen many times before, should be sympathetic or at least admirable in his drive to fight the mecha monsters known as oni, but all he turns out to be is a guy who yells a lot and has some very odd family sayings. The battles should be exciting, but the choreography and mechs themselves don't look great, and without really understanding the stakes, it's just a lot of bright colors on a screen. There's nothing to give us a stake in the story.

I do like the setting, though, even if it comes with yet another version of the inescapable Abe no Seimei. (Some of you may recognize that Takeru misreads his name in the exact opposite way that Haruaki's name is misread by his students in A Terrified Teacher at Ghoul School!.) It feels less like an alternate version of the past and more like a futuristic Heian-Kyo, and I like the use of colors to depict its cyberpunk aesthetic. The framing of monsters and mechs as “oni” and “shikigami” is also an interesting choice and calls to mind the classics of Japanese folklore and literature. I also very much like the use of feathers to show Takeru's shifts in reality; it's unique and attractive. I don't have high hopes for this series, but at least this episode isn't a total wash – maybe it'll surprise me going forward.

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Episode 2

James Beckett
Rating:

When I covered the first episode of Onmyo Kaiten, I concluded that it didn't seem likely that the show would magically fix all of its problems in its second episode, since its pacing and characterization issues were not the results of a poor adaptation of preexisting source material, but rather shortcomings that have been baked in to this original product from jump. Having watched the second episode of the show, I think it is fair to say this was an accurate prognosis.

To be fair to Onmyo Kaiten, the series hasn't suddenly nosedived, either, and if you dug what the series was doing the first time around, it seems that you'll likely enjoy it going forward. It still has a fairly novel alternate-history/science-fiction Japan setting that is pretty neat, at least on paper; it continues to have fun with the tokusatsu tropes it is gleefully stealing from other mecha anime and Ultraman-esque action series. The visuals from David Productions are bright and generally decent to look at. So far as cheesy Saturday-morning kids' cartoons go, this isn't the worst thing I've watched by any means. As of its second episode, Onmyo Kaiten has accomplished the task of being a decently functional episode of candy-coated schlock. You could put it on for a birthday party filled with ten-year-olds who have gotten too hopped up on cake, ice cream, and action figures, and they probably wouldn't be bored.

Still, the show is simply moving too fast and stuffing too much material into its scripts to be particularly engaging on anything other than the most surface levels. The characters are all meagre cutouts of silly tropes and loud outfits, with our protagonist Takeru being the most aggressively mediocre of them all. He's basically the protagonist of a middling season of Beyblade or Yu Gi Oh!, except maybe with more muscles than the usual tweenage hero. He exists to yell a lot and doggedly pursue the general idea of beating up baddies with special powers, and occasionally, the show will remind us of his crush on the priestess who doesn't even recognize or remember him. On top of all that, we're now adding time-leap powers into the show's already full-to-bursting trunk of random anime tropes that it wants to play around with. This just makes me more worried that Onmyo Kaiten is just going to continue to absent-mindedly smash together whatever bits and bobs of other, better shows it likes without paying any mind to whether those ideas even work particularly well together or have enough time to be properly taken advantage of.

As it stands, I'm not going to tell people to go running from the hills if they happen to metaphorically turn the channel and find themselves stumbling on an episode of Onmyo Kaiten. If all you are looking for is a brain-cell-killing excuse to kill a half-hour or two, you may even get a real kick out of it. Just don't expect anything more of the show than that.

Episode 1

Rating:

Watching the premiere of Onmyo Kaiten Re:Birth Verse is like flipping to the back pages of the notebook that belongs to that one kid in the anime club who was even more obsessive and creative than the other nerds. It is just chock-full of ideas and references that are inspired by many of the genre's greatest hits, though it probably makes a whole heck of a lot more sense to the kid who scribbled everything down to begin with. Before even ten minutes have gone by in this first episode, we're introduced to the dream world that our hero Takeru has been visiting for years, apparently, before he is hit by a truck and teleported to that exact world, which like an alternate universe feudal-era Japan, except there's all sorts of future tech everywhere, too. The problem is that the girl he has been crushing on doesn't know who he is, not to mention the fact that giant monsters come creeping out of black mist on a regular basis to destroy things, which the heroes can only destroy by fighting in puppet-mecha called shikigami. Oh, and Takeru can transform into an Ultraman-esque hero to also fight the black mist monsters, in case there wasn't enough going on already.

Taken as individual pieces, there's a lot to like about Onmyo Kaiten. The world of Denji Heian-kyo is vibrant and interesting compared to most isekai settings. The shikigami puppet-robot-things that fight the black mist creatures are really damned cool. Takeru's transformation is also a fun take on the usual sentai hero shtick, which I'm always happy to play around with. The soundtrack is also pretty good, which keeps the action scenes moving along nicely.

The problem mainly lies in the execution of all these ideas. There's just too much happening too fast in this one episode, and there's never any chance for the audience to get grounded and invested in the story. Takeru is the same stubbornly optimistic protagonist we've seen a thousand times before, so there's not much to latch onto with him, and we barely get to know any of the other characters the premiere introduces, despite there being so gosh darned many of them. It's not “confusing”, exactly, because the plot of Onmyo Kaiten is no more complex than any other Saturday-morning cartoon meant for ten-year-olds, but it's overwhelming. It's also hardly david production's finest (half)hour, so far as production values are concerned. The CGI is decent-looking enough, but the 2D character animation is only ever just okay, and the character designs are as overdesigned as they are underwritten. I wish I could say that I'm feeling optimistic about where things go from here, but I've been doing this job long enough that I'm not about to get my hopes up. Usually, when an original anime starts this rushed and discombobulated, the best we can hope for is that things simply stay the course and don't get markedly worse.

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Episode 2

Richard Eisenbeis
Rating:

If nothing else, I suppose I can say that I enjoyed this episode more than the first one. Everything I disliked is still there, but vastly toned down. Takeru remains a meathead idiot, but at least it only takes him a few minutes to understand that he has time-traveled. More than that, he quickly grasps the idea that he will need more than guts to save his crush from what is to come and starts working on gaining onmyouji powers.

As for the other characters, Takeru uses what he knows of them from the first loop to pique their interest--though this is not something he decides to do consciously. Through this, we learn a bit more about each—especially Autsunaga—along with the mecha's dual pilot structure (reminiscent of Pacific Rim).

But for me, the most captivating thing about this episode was the mystery looming in the background: not only “Why does Takeru have the ‘Return by Death’ power?” but also “Why does it bring him back further into the past than his original arrival (though at the same location)?” There is a greater force or power at work here, and I won't pretend I'm not interested in finding out what it is.

I'll also give the visual design and dialogue props for giving us a hint at the source of Takeru's black mist powers. I would guess that he is an Oni, as they are defined as ‘from another world’. (He's just not from the same world as the invaders.) Thus, he has the power to make a similar magic mecha suit, though what exactly this implies and why are questions for the long term, I suspect.

All that said, will I continue watching this anime? It's doubtful. While I may read an episode summary at some point to see the mysteries exposed, I already have more than a full docket of shows this season that I enjoy watching that will be taking up my time.

Episode 1

Rating:

I have a bit of trouble defining my dislike for this show—is this first episode not my cup of tea, or is it just plain bad? Takeru, for one, is my least favorite type of protagonist—a meathead whose sole virtues are basic human kindness and the willpower to never give up. He's so in his own little world that he expects everyone to understand him, his history, and his predicament without explanation. He's so dense that he's unable to figure out he's in another world for most of the episode, or that it might be better to let the pros handle things than trying to punch a monster out of personal pride.

Then there's the world itself. What we see here is a future version of feudal Japan, and that does very little to hook me, in and of itself. Then there are the visual aesthetics. The neons of the city within the black mist do little for the show visually, and the mecha designs… they're just terrible. They are messy and cluttered, and the respective sides aren't very distinguishable from one another. Like, sure, the Onmyoji's mecha are humanoid in shape, and the invaders' mecha take their shapes from animals, but they look like they were all made by the same designer despite coming from literally different worlds.

However, when it comes to the story, I can at least say that it makes sense. We're dealing with a Re:Zero type time loop story where each time our hero dies, he restarts at the moment of his arrival in this fantasy world. Of course, the issue is that, unlike Re:Zero's Subaru, who has to realize he's not special, come to terms with that, and then grow into a likable human being, Takeru is special from moment one. As long as he is alive and doesn't give up, he can alter his personal reality to reverse injuries or manifest a mecha out of thin air. Add to this his return by death skill, and he's invincible. The only thing in the way of him eventually reaching his goals is his own thought process and personality—and if that's the moral the creators were aiming for, then good job. You guys nailed it.

At this point, can I say I'm looking forward to watching the next episode? No, not really, but I am interested to see if it does anything that isn't completely paint-by-numbers. In the end, the best thing I can say about this show is that I wasn't bored, even if that's for all the wrong reasons.

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