It starts like every merch-driven summon show you've already dismissed, then quietly spends 52 episodes earning the runtime. Riku Tachibana is a first-year junior high kid with nothing special about him until a self-declared Warrior of Earth picks a fight, and suddenly he's the last of a bloodline everyone assumed was wiped out. The hook isn't the Drive on his wrist, it's Kogenta: a gruff tiger shikigami who did not sign up to be a middle schooler's partner and spends the early stretch making that painfully clear. Watching that relationship shift from tolerated arrangement to genuine trust is the entire show, and the Heaven-versus-Earth conflict never lets it stay cute. This is 2004 kids' programming that treats a twelve-year-old's obligations as real weight. You come for the beast summons, you stay because Kogenta finally says the kid's name like he means it.

Riku Tachibana is an ordinary first-year junior high student who expected a quiet life. Raised by his grandfather, he has picked up the old man's odd habit of making strange hand gestures, which his classmates find funny. Soon after starting junior high, he is drawn into a duel with a mysterious man who calls himself a Warrior of Earth. Riku then learns he is a survivor of the Warriors of Heaven, a group believed to be extinct, and that his grandfather's gestures were lessons that could now keep him alive. Using a device called DRIVE to summon the Shikigami Kogenta, a divine beast, he commits himself to fighting the Warriors of Earth in this action fantasy adventure.