Keiichi’s desire for his sweetheart Tomo aligns with a time when a mysterious slightly older woman comes to live in his house.
What They Say:
Keiichi Hayama always dreamed about hot sex with his childhood sweetheart. But one day she transformed in his dream to a mysterious beauty with perfect breasts and a seductive eye. The next afternoon, Keiichi came back from school to find that very same woman masturbating in his room!
His mother introduces her as Reika. Since her parents died in a car accident, Reika has been taken in by Keiichi’s family. But Keiichi knows there’s some dark truth behind this woman, and he has a hunch his prophetic dream wasn’t a dream at all.
The Review:
Audio:
The audio presentation for this series is done up in its original Japanese language track in stereo along with an English language dub, both of which are encoded at 192kbps. With this being a dialogue driven piece that has plenty of moaning to it, there isn’t a lot to work with in terms of directionality. The music track is the only area where it gives a really full sense but even that is minimal with the kind of soundtrack used here. Dialogue is the prime thing to be had here and we had no problems with dropouts or distortions during regular playback of either track.
Video:
Originally released in 2006, the transfer for this OVA is presented in its original full frame aspect ratio. Being a recent show the source materials are in excellent shape and generally come across as quite solid and good looking. The show doesn’t have the most fluid animation to it at times and there are some bad moments here and there but it comes across as a decent looking transfer. Colors are solid with only a bit of noise to them, cross coloration is almost completely absent and there’s hardly any noticeable aliasing.
Packaging:
The cover artwork doesn’t do the show any favors with a harsh looking character design, mostly in the face, that isn’t quite reflected within the animation itself. Reika’s design otherwise and her pose is pretty good looking since it plays out the mirror aspect while giving her a nice sheer white outfit that’s wet and clingy. The back cover is very amusing in its design as it has some well-placed dots throughout that cover the naughty bits that are exposed. The summary covers the basics of what to expect from the basic plot while the rest of the cover is filled out with the minor production information and the accurate technical grid. No insert or reversible cover is included here.
Menu:
The menu uses the character artwork from the cover with colors that make it pop just a bit more while mixing in some of the dots from the back cover to give it a bit more feeling. The logo and navigation strip are all that round out the menu as well as a bit of music. Like most of the adult titles from Kitty there isn’t really anything here besides the show and a few trailers so it’s a bit simple but effective as it gets the job done. The disc unfortunately did not correctly read our players’ language presets and defaulted to English language with sign/song subtitles.
Extras:
Not a thing here.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
The Two Facials of Eve is an amusing release from Kitty that uses an altered pun name for the show. That isn’t unusual for them but this is one of the weaker ones to me for reasons I just can’t quite explain. The show is also one that apparently doesn’t have much of a future for it either as there is only one episode on here. There are plenty of shows that never get past one episode but they still aren’t the kinds of titles that Kitty has released many of.
The story centers on the relationship between Keiichi and Tomo, a pair of childhood friends who have a definite interest in each other. We actually focus in at a time when the two are getting very close as Keiichi has decided to make his move as she comes out of the pool where she’s doing her training at. Awkwardly tied to the ladder, he’s surprisingly adept for such a youngster by taking a pair of scissors and cutting a slit open at her crotch. Not only that he ends up using them on her in a number of ways that make you pray that they’re plastic and not metal. This incident has a strange twist though as before Keiichi realizes it Tomo is vastly different with longer hair and a very aggressive attitude.
Strangely, Tomo doesn’t recall any of this and Keiichi is surprised to find a woman in his bedroom not long afterward masturbating. To his surprise, she’s introduced to him just a few minutes later by his mother as Reika, his cousin by his apparently dead aunt. Reika is moving in with them with practically no notice and Keiichi is surprised by this. It starts to work out in his favor though as Reika begins to torment him about her presence there and toys with his mind about who she really is. At the same time, Keiichi’s slightly younger sister Akane is just in desperate need of sex and listens in to everything that’s going on while pleasuring herself.
There’s supposed to be some sort of resolution or explanation about who Reika really is since Tomo doesn’t recall anything that happened when they apparently switched places. Even worse for an explanation is that we do see Reika and Tomo together in the same place so it rules out a weird switch in that sense. With only the one episode here there isn’t any real chance of seeing more of it, at least not for quite some time, so this is largely a giant tease on a couple of levels. The animation for the show is decent for the most part but in some areas it really suffers. The opening scene with Tomo tied to the ladder is just awful as only her top half moves and it’s not synched up to her lower half at all. Reika is decent at times as the cold dark looking woman but something about her design just doesn’t appeal. If the show had focused around Tomo and Akane it would have worked far better.
In Summary:
The Two Facials of Eve isn’t bad adult anime but it suffers from being both mediocre as well as incomplete. Both of these are things that fans of this area of anime are familiar with but some of them just leave you hanging more than others. With the combination of some shoddy animation in a few places and the lack of an ending or explanation this one left me somewhat cold. I liked some of the designs but the direction the show took wasn’t bad but it wasn’t enough to really keep me interested for all that long either.
Features:
Japanese 2.0 Language, English 2.0 Language, English Subtitles
Content Grade: C
Audio Grade: B+
Video Grade: B
Packaging Grade: B-
Menu Grade: B
Extras Grade: N/A
Released By: Kitty Media
Release Date: February 20th, 2007
MSRP: $19.95
Running Time: 30 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.
