Hanoka might not have reached the infamy of other terrible anime such as Skelter+Heaven, Abunai Sisters, or Mars of Destruction, but that’s because this isn’t quite as bad as those other anime. It’s still not good, it’s just not as bad, which is the best compliment that I can give it.

What little story there is takes place in an indeterminate year far off into the future on planet called Tokinea, where human beings only known as “Inhabitants of the Stars” are attacking Humans on a planet called Tokinea, accusing them of polluting the planet with their technology. Humans have created “Demon Gods”, powerful weapons used to destroy the Inhabitants of the Stars. This series focus’ on “Demon God 7”, known as Hanoka, and the boy who she is teamed up with, as they struggle to fight against the Inhabitants of the Stars.

This premise for this series is pretty good, but it's unfortunately hampered by the execution of literally everything else, and the problems start pretty much immediately.

Each episode is roughly 5 minutes long at most, and the OP for each episode is 90 seconds long. More than one fifth of each episode is purely the opening. If it was 10 seconds, maybe 15 to 20, there wouldn't be much of a problem, and it would give the plot room to breath while filling out the same amount of time, and every time I have to skip it, it subconsciously feels like I'm skipping huge chunks of an episode.

And this brings it us to the series's biggest problem, the whole thing feels like the footnotes of a 12-episode series. There is clearly is the hint of a plot and characters, but the series is way too short to give either the proper depth they need to be even remotely fleshed out, let alone entertaining or interesting. On top of that, the series has a recap episode. The whole series is barely long enough for just one episode of a regular series, and it has a recap episode just over half way through the series. Just why?

The animation isn't much better, and is the highlight of the series. Released in 2006, Hanoka makes the big claim that it's the first anime to be fully animated in Adobe Flash, and it kinda shows. While I've seen uglier animation and art, but Hanoka is still now winning any awards for it's animation.

And it's not like flash wasn't being used at the time for animation, just look at a sites like 'Newgrounds', which started in 1995, 'Cool Math Games', which started in 1997, and 'Miniclip', which started in 2001, a whole 4 years before Hanoka's release. A lot of amatuer animators were doing producing animation than this supposedly professional studio, all while using an animation software known for being hard to work with.

I could have easily gone onto the internet and within a couple of minutes found both animated series and video games with better animation done by relative unknowns that were better quality than Hanoka. Here, let me give some examples:

-Broken Saints (2001 to 2003)
-Foamy The Squirrel (Started 2003)
-Alien Hominid Game Protoyped (2003)
-Salad Fingers (Started 2004)
-Charlie the Unicorn (2005)
-The Ultimate Showdown (2005)

The DVD actually comes with a couple of touch ups, such as a new and extended scenes as well as some re-recorded and new dialogue that add a tiny bit more plot to the whole thing. The DVD even comes with a prologue and an epilogue that changes the whole resolution to the show, so I guess if you're going to check this out, the DVD is probably the version to go with, but good luck finding it.

So the team behind it knew that they had a bit of a flop on their hands, and they tried their best to make it better for the home version, but it didn't work out for them.

Unfortunately, due to Aruji Morino's (the creator of this series) failing health, the series didn't end up the way he wanted, and even he is unhappy with the final product. Maybe someone can pick this up and make a fully fledged series so it could see it's full potential, but I doubt that is ever going to happen.

Hanoka was a valiant effort into making something big with flash, but unfortunately it couldn't compete with it's competition, which was often free and better, and to add insult to injury, was done by people doing it as their hobby.

As it stands, I can't recommend this to anyone since it's not very good and not even entertaining in the so-bad-its-good way. Maybe it like watching and collecting niche and obscure anime that might even have something mildly noteworth about it, like the fact that this is the first fully animated anime is Adobe Flash, this one is entirely skippable.