YMMV / Demon City Shinjuku

• Cliché Storm: The story could hardly cram up more fairytale tropes. It starts a Hot-Blooded hero with a sword, a princess in distress (well, the nearest to a princess the setting has) wearing pink dresses and carrying The Power of Love who has a Rescue Romance with the hero. There is also a mission started by the hero's father which is trusted to him by a wise master, and a villain who betrayed said master's teachings and made a pact with the forces of darkness to get power. It almost looks like George Lucas wrote it.
• Complete Monster: Levih Rah made a pact with the powers of darkness for power due to envy over his fellow pupil Genichiro being superior to him. Promised power in return for granting the demons dominion over Earth, Levih Rah defeats Genichiro but is prevented from summoning the demons further than Shinjuku. Men are killed, women raped and children go missing as Shinjuku becomes a twisted hellhole where demons prowl and Levih Rah himself reigns. When Genichiro's son arrives to stop Levih Rah, the sorcerer tries to have the world's president assassinated and use his daughter as a ritual sacrifice so he can complete his work and give demons dominion over all the world.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Mephisto. It goes to the extent that, when Hideyuki Kikuchi decided to continue exploiting the Demon City with new characters in Demon City Blues, he brought in Mephisto again as a deuteragonist, and later even gave him his own standalone novel, Demon Doctor Mephisto, which also acted as a crossover between Shinjuku and Blues.
• Fanon Discontinuity: The English dub is widely ignored by fans, due to giving the characters British and French accents even though they're all supposed to be Japanese (and would thus naturally have American accents).And also the fact they got adult male actors to play child characters, as mentioned below.
• Gateway Series: Demon City Shinjuku was a regular part of the Sci-Fi Channel's "Saturday Anime" rotation in the mid- to late 1990s and, along with other movies from the lineup such as AKIRA and Vampire Hunter D, served as many a fan's introduction to anime outside the Animation Age Ghetto.
• Narm: The world president coming to Japan in a space shuttle for whatever reason. Also, the fact that it is referred by the narration as just a plane.
• Questionable Casting: That boy character who helps the protagonists is voiced by an adult male in the English dub, and because the character is a child, the voice does not suit him at all.
• Retroactive Recognition: The voice of Sayaka in the dub is done by Teresa Gallagher who would eventually go to voice a certain blue cat mother with incredible powers.
• They Copied It, So It Sucks!: As said in Cliché Storm above, it's clear that Hideyuki Kikuchi got a bit carried by Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope. The Anime Encyclopedia puts it better:
  "...its ending is surprisingly anticlimactic, though perhaps nobody should expect too much from the story of a Ben Kenobi clone telling a Luke Skywalker clone to avenge the "death" of an Anakin Skywalker clone with a magic sword."

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