In order to acquire something she desperately wants, even a mother will bargain off her own daughter.
What They Say:
Witness the craziest family reunion ever as Kyosuke meets his luscious stepsister, who’ll do anything to keep him close. She and her sexy mother crave more than just comfort – they are masochists who lust for a strong hand to whip them into shape! Kyosuke rises to the challenge, and the erotic encounter will leave both ladies (and you) gasping for more. Guess who’s coming home for the holidays!
The Review:
Audio:
Stepsister has a standard audio presentation here with the English and Japanese language tracks in stereo encoded at 192kbps. The show mix is pretty basic which is to be expected with very little ambient effects or incidental music to it. Dialogue is clean and clear throughout the show though and the general music sections fill up the stereo mix nicely, but for the most part this is a simple dialogue and moaning piece. We listened to both tracks during the review itself and noted no issues with dropouts or distortions during regular playback.
Video:
Originally released in 2002 and 2003, the two episodes that comprise Stepsister are presented here in their full frame aspect ratio. This release is a repressing of the original Anime 18 release from years ago so there are no differences in how the disc is encoded. The series has some great colors to it and that’s one of the real highlights of the visuals here as they’re very solid and vibrant. Add in no cross coloration and this looks really good. The downside is the large amount of aliasing that shows up throughout both episodes, mostly during the panning sequences. It’s not as strong in the second episode as the first but during the first it’s very evident when the camera moves along the image and the lines lose their solid feel. This gets distracting in a number of scenes but fades into the background during others. It’s not a deal breaker but it’s definitely annoying.
Packaging:
Stepsister has a pretty good looking cover that definitely doesn’t hold back with selling itself. The logo is very simple and kept small overall along the upper left corner which lets the majority of the cover go to the character artwork. The pairing of mother and daughter looks good here with some very crisp character artwork that makes it look fresh and vibrant as opposed to a show from earlier in the decade. The background doesn’t have much to it but the layout overall has a bit of elegance to it with Megumi’s look and some of the colors used. The back cover has a very appealing shot of Megumi looking back over her shoulder while the right has a small series of shots from the episodes. The summary has a good breakdown of what the show is about and a clean listing of what extras are available on the disc. The technical grid is clean and accurate across the board and there are no show related inserts included nor is there a reversible cover.
Menu:
The main menu is a very simple piece with a static piece of animation with Yuna clutching at her clothes while the logo is in the center and the selections line underneath it as part of the closing song plays along. With a little vibrator as the cursor, this is a very basic but cute menu. Access times are nice and fast and the submenus load quickly. The disc also correctly read our players language presets which is a big plus.
Extras:
The extras are pretty minimal with the usual sort found here, that being a simple video art gallery and even a storyboard to animation sequence.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
Stepsister, a show from the studio Discovery, is a fairly decent little two part storyline that has a little bit of just about something for everyone. Like a lot of other hentai series, it gets its start from a morbid place as the death of the father of this particular family is the catalyst for things to change.
Kyosuke’s father has died and that’s left the family, which is made up of his stepmother Megum and his stepsister Yuna, in disarray. Kyosuke has never really liked Megumi and blames her for the death of his real mother. She ended up dying not long after Megumi began dating his father and then ended up being divorced. To Kyosuke, it’s like she lost her will to live once she lost her husband. But now his father, a famous painter, has died and Kyosuke is asserting himself with the women in his life by insisting that they both leave. He’s sure the inheritance will more than make it so that he can live well enough and he’s not going to share one penny of it with the woman he hates.
But as Megumi settles into things with him, she points out how the world works and inheritance taxes and more. She claims she’s not after the money but the paintings themselves, which will end up costing him huge amounts of money via the tax, so they try coming to some sort of deal. To make it a strange deal though, Megumi offers up her daughter Yuna to Kyosuke to do anything he wants to her. Kyosuke ends up taking her up on the offer and the two end up in a number of very nasty situations, including some disturbing scatological ones, that are pretty explicit. Their relationship manages to evolve along the way and the bigger picture starts to emerge about just what Megumi is after with the paintings while Kyosuke starts to learn about his truly sadistic nature and how to master it to get what he wants.
The plot to this show is pretty minimal and doesn’t do much more than set up the situation and provides for certain events to play out that may not have otherwise. The sex scenes in this show are quite good and very nasty in a few of them, particularly when Kyosuke first begins to realize he likes being sadistic with Yuna. With Megumi, he tends to take a bit of a different tact there but that leads to some equally exciting scenes as well when he gets her in her place of work. Both of the female characters have good designs, though once again the blonde has breasts that are just too large to be enjoyable to look at at times, and the show is well animated enough that there aren’t any real issues with it such as repeated scenes or cheap shortcuts in the quality.
In Summary:
Stepsister is a title that was once considered “xtreme” but comes across as fairly tame at this point. Though it does have some mild scatalogical material to it, it plays more with straightforward basic bondage stuff with some actual romantic interests to all of it as Yuna is definitely interested in Kyosuke. With good looking animation, a serviceable plot to hold together, some basic nasty sex scenes and good looking characters designs, what you’ll get from this is a two part series that doesn’t shy away from the sadistic side of things and, as they say, keeps it all in the family. This is one of the Anime 18 shows that held up fairly well overall over the years.
Features:
Japanese 2.0 Language, English 2.0 Language, English Subtitles, Anime Artform, Art Gallery, Storyboards, Trailer, Previews
Content Grade: C+
Audio Grade: B+
Video Grade: B
Packaging Grade: B
Menu Grade: B
Extras Grade: B-
Released By: Critical Mass Video
Release Date: June 2nd, 2015
MSRP: $14.99
Running Time: 60 Minutes
Video Encoding: 480i/p MPEG-2
Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
Review Equipment:
Sony KDL70R550A 70″ LED 1080P HDTV, Sony PlayStation3 Blu-ray player via HDMI set to 1080p, Onkyo TX-SR605 Receiver and Panasonic SB-TP20S Multi-Channel Speaker System With 100-Watt Subwoofer.
