Reviewed on May 31st, 2006

Visually

Saiyuki looks very good. It is good quality and it has fluid animation. It has a large diversity of situations, bringing in different levels of light and color. It all comes together to make a great looking anime.

Audio

The sound quality is superb and clear. The mouths move perfectly with the voices and the voices match the personality of their characters. The music is good, but not very diverse; there are only a few songs.

Storyline

The west has become overrun with evil demons, so a priest and three good demons band together to find out why the demons are raging out of control. The demons have their own way of killing the demons and the priest uses a special gun (Banishing Gun). The priest name is Sanzo and the demons names are Gojyo, Hakkai, and Goku. Goku character is based on a monkey god. He uses an extending staff and has a large appetite. Sound familiar, yep; both Saiyuki and DBZ are based on the same story. Sanzo is a very high-rated monk and is known throughout the world.

Hakkai is a demon that has a dragon that turns into a jeep that the group uses to get around. He is sort of the nerd of the group, and the smartest one. He is the only one in the group that can shoot a ki blast. Gojyo is a pink-headed demon who is the worst fighter of them all and always talking about women. The demons all look like humans and they use special power limiters so they can control themselves. One of the best parts of the show is the humor. Goku and Gojyo fight with each other all the time and call each other names. Hakkai and Sanzo also get in the act a few times. I guaranty this show will make you laugh.

DVD

You can either have the episode dubbed or subbed. The extra include production sketches, cultural background, and ADV previews. There are 5 episodes on the DVD, which is good compared to some other anime DVDs. The menus have a good graphical interface, along with good background music. One bad thing is the lack of more extras, most anime DVDs have quite a few extras. One extra that would be nice would interviews with the voice actors and production crew. They reason for the lack of the features may be that the DVD has 5 episodes, and they didn�t have any more room.

Overall

Saiyuki has made a good transition from Japanese to English. That's what to expect coming from ADV films. This is an awesome anime you should watch. Saiyuki is unrated, but I would say that it's pretty close to an R rating. The first 10 volumes are already out. The review of volume two is up, so check it out. I give this anime 5 out of 5.

by Aidan