8 Man After

When a routine investigation into stolen cyborg parts turns fatal, private detective Hazama Itsuru ends up shot dead by a rogue cybernetic criminal. That's just episode one. What comes next is a gritty resurrection story set in a near-future city where cyber-junkies are tearing the streets apart and the line between human and machine keeps getting blurrier. Hazama gets a second chance at life, but it comes with a new body, new power, and a whole lot of questions about who he even is anymore. He also crosses paths with Sachiko, the former love interest of the original 8 Man from the 1960s source material, now caught up in the same web of corporate shady dealings and cyborg crime. The show leans hard into its dark setting — this is not the clean, heroic robot story you might expect from that legacy. It's closer in feel to RoboCop or Ghost in the Shell than anything kid-friendly, with real moral weight behind the action. If you liked Ghost in the Shell's meditation on identity through a cyberpunk lens, or RoboCop's blend of violent action and existential dread, this 4-episode OVA from 1993 scratches a similar itch in a much shorter runtime. It's rough around the edges in the way older OVAs often are, but that grittiness actually fits the story it's trying to tell.