It’s like they titled this release just for me.
What They Say:
Contains a full hour of tentacles, girls, tentacles with girls… you get the idea.
The Review:
Audio:
The audio presentation for this release is like the majority of clip shows at this point as it has only an English language track in stereo encoded at 192kbps. But unlike all the other clip based releases, this one has one scene which is in Japanese with hard subtitles as the original work was never dubbed. The audio track is fairly decent for the most part but it’s very dependent on the individual clips as some of them have a bit more noise at higher levels, some are slightly muffled and a couple are a bit lower, but they are all for the most part very easy to understand and free of serious problems. You may want to keep the remote handy to adjust the volume on some clips though.
Video:
Comprised of clips from across several years, the transfer for this series is presented in its original full frame aspect ratio. Similar to the audio department, the quality of the transfer is really dependent on the clip itself as each of them come from very different places and different kinds of source quality. The ones with a bit more of a budget tend to look better while others have a soft and fuzzy feel to them. The actual authoring and encoding looks to be done just right but with a lot of the low quality source material, the DVD is just showing off the flaws in it all the more. This isn’t the kind of show where you jump up and down looking for pristine quality to begin with but it is for the most part in the realm of acceptable.
Packaging:
The cover art for this release is one that definitely wants to highlight the tentacles but also the fun. It goes with a four corner design here where each section has a different piece of tentacle action with a different girl. It’s pretty dark and kind of murky in some ways but it doesn’t hurt the overall look, it just gives it a very dark feeling. What kind of makes it fun is the oversized logo in the middle which uses the big heart that has a tentacle wrapped around it. It uses a good font as well, mixing it up between the words, so that it’s playful in its own way. The back cover has a lot of black space to it for the background and it’s otherwise filled with lots and lots of shots from the various clips from the show. They’re all of the “hard” variety as there is no soft cover here so it shows you exactly what you’re going to get. The premise is pretty simple of course and it lays out the meager technical details well and what bonus items are on the disc. No show related inserts are included nor is there a reversible cover.
Menu:
The menu design for this release again shows some strong skills once again as it has some mild animation moving in the background but keeps its focus on the oversized image of a girl in the foreground as she gets taken care of by a series of tentacles. The logo is wrapped over her and it adds some extra color to it as the only other color really here is all of her visible flesh. Amusingly, since her position basically shows all of her from behind, they have to mosaic it out so that it doesn’t run afoul of anything I guess. The layout is simple and easy to use and there’s no real setup to be done here, letting you get right into the show.
Extras:
The only included extra is a five minute long video gallery of still shots from the various clips.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
Way back in the day, I cut my teeth when it came to hentai with tentacle releases. One of the earliest things I saw was Urotosukidoji so my idea of hentai came from all of this. Tentacles had their day during the 90’s but then the adult anime world decided it wanted to do real world creepy material with disturbing perverts and we got fewer and fewer tentacle hentai shows. This really disappointed me and was a sign of the decline of hentai for a lot of people. So when Adult Source Media decided to do a compilation of tentacle material, I was obviously pretty interested to see what would be pulled together. Of course, some of it seems familiar but others I can’t place, though I assume that most if not all have shown up in other releases over the years.
The collection of clips here is pretty straightforward as we get the school girl type, the magical girl type and a variety of others that get caught up in things. There’s even a piece from the 3DCG show that ASM created in which we have a young woman laying on a pier, naked, enjoying herself in the sun only to have tentacles come up from below and make it extra exciting for her. It’s not exactly subtle but it’s also not terribly explicit either and it just feels kind of weird, which helps reinforce why I avoided those kinds of shows in general since they just don’t work for me.
The other part that doesn’t work to well here are the last two pieces, one of which uses the really pared down animation from some bonus scenes we’d see on some older ASM releases. The other is a heavily utilized piece from some of the earliest compilation ninja-style releases which uses the method of multiplying the image on the screen repeatedly. They just kind of drive me nuts since we saw it so many times during those early releases that seeing it here again was like a bad flashback.
There are some good fun ones to be had here though as the girls are put through their paces. Tentacles are a difficult thing to deal with for some hentai fans for good reason since a lot of what they were used for in the 90’s were to be pretty brutal. Not that there were a lot of loving tentacles, but some just went pretty far with the violence and the body ripping that happens. Sometimes these are things that work well, but the ones that don’t end in that are generally more fun. We do get that here for the most part since there’s no bodies torn in half and that leads to some enjoyable sequences, including one that only has the tentacles in there briefly before it turns into a straightforward male/female scene.
In Summary:
Clip shows continue to be hard to write about but I certainly enjoyed this collection more overall compared to some of the others because, well, I love tentacles. Hentai is a wide and varied world thankfully but these little members and their length are the things that got me into hentai to begin with when it was all the rage and it still holds a special place in my heart all these years later. The mix of clips here is about half and half with what works and what doesn’t and the first half works the best for me. The 3DCG work continues to be unappealing to me and after that it drew on some clips that we had seen many times on past releases that aren’t all that good a quality. But there’s some good variety here overall that’s definitely worth checking out.
Features:
English 2.0 Language, Photo Gallery
Content Grade: B-
Audio Grade: B-
Video Grade: B-
Packaging Grade: B-
Menu Grade: B-
Extras Grade: C
Released By: Adult Source Media
Release Date: March 20th, 2012
MSRP: $24.99
Running Time: 68 minutes
Video Encoding: 480i/p MPEG-2
Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
Review Equipment:
Sony KDS-R70XBR2 70″ LCoS 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.
