Sins of the father are revisited upon the daughter.
What They Say:
Nanase’s father has just been arrested for murder. While his guilt remains in question, Nanase’s classmates have already passed judgment and are punishing her for her father’s crimes. To atone for his sins, she must obey their every sexual command to satisfy their twisted desires. At school, in her room, even on a crowded train – no matter where they are, Nanase must pleasure them in any way possible.
But not all of Nanase’s classmates can be so easily satiated. Someone’s publishing very detailed articles about her nightly lustful escapades in a special Atonement Newspaper! Spread across campus, this public humiliation might just be worse than her nightly tortures!
The Review:
Audio:
The audio presentation for this release has the original Japanese language track and the English language dub in stereo, both of which are encoded at 192kbps. Not surprisingly, the mix here is fairly standard in what it does for an adult release in that it’s primarily dialogue driven so the forward soundstage has a basic center channel kind of full feeling without much in the way of noticeable directionality, if anything. What’s here is decent and covered well but it doesn’t stand out or do anything to make it noteworthy. Dialogue is clean and clear throughout and we had no problems with dropouts or distortions.
Video:
Originally released in early 2003, the OVA series for this release is presented in its original full frame aspect ratio. The show is one that fits for a lot of the hentai OVAs of the time period where it has some solid and good looking colors but doesn’t overdo with things nor is there a ton of detail to it. With this release using the same encoding as the previous version, essentially being a repackaging, the transfer here is decent with only some noise visible in some of the darker solid color backgrounds and no other issues such as cross coloration. Line noise is minimal overall though there are a few minor instances of it..
Packaging:
Giving you a good idea of what to expect right from the start, we get a good shot of the lead character going through a bit of atonement with her fellow classmates and they use the old trick of obscuring the guys faces to make it a touch more evil looking. Proper placement of the logo and title bar continue to add a bit of a tease to it as well. The back cover uses the newspaper aspect from the show to provide the pictures and summary for the show. The discs features and basic production information is somewhat small but still readable. As is the case with other hentai releases, no insert is included (nor needed really).
Menu:
The main menu for the release plays up the newspaper aspect with some of the shows animation slowly scrolling through the photo “window” while the selections are lined up as the text, all set to some of the dangerous sounding instrumental music. The layout works nicely and fits the theme of the show well. Access times are nice and fast and submenus loaded quickly. The disc also correctly read our players language presets.
Extras:
The release comes with a few extras as there’s a brief image gallery and the trailer made for the US release. Also included is a far too brief dub outtakes section that barely lasts what seems like fifteen seconds. I’d really like to see the actors just have fun with some of this stuff sometime and really do some lengthy comical outtakes for a show.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
Classroom of Atonement is another in the long line of releases from the Vanilla Series line that takes us to the Akemi Private College where the student body takes things on for themselves when it comes to ensuring that students don’t get away with anything, including murder. Even if they themselves didn’t commit the murder.
The show kicks off quickly as we learn that the shows lead, Nanase, is the daughter of a recently arrested man who is being accused of murdering someone just a few days prior from his own college years. He denies it all to his daughter but now she has to go through school with the public knowledge of what her father is accused of. That would be hard enough by itself but one of the male students has decided that since she shares the same blood as her father, she’s just as guilty as he is and must atone for it. With four friends whom he directs into action as he never participates himself, Yuuka begins a series of events with Nanase that completely humiliate and break her.
To make matters worse, after each incident there is an amateur produced newspaper distributed throughout the school secretly that details what happened to her and how she’s atoning for her sins. She tries to deny it but it just causes more problems and she then finds herself being handled by Yuuka and his group again and things get even worse. While she’s had to put up with it at school, she finds herself being assaulted at home when they come to visit her. To make it even worse for her psychologically, they take advantage of her visiting female tutor when she comes by and then blame it all on Nanase, which sends her into a vicious cycle. As more friends get sucked in, it gets worse and worse for her. Well, with the exception of Madoka, an honor class student who ends up being taken advantage of and then forced into a lesbian show with Nanase for the guys enjoyment. When those two are together, Nanase realizes just how much she’s enjoying all of this and Madoka goes into total enjoyment mode and wears out the guys first. It’s an amusing twist that plays out nicely for the scene but doesn’t have much long term impact.
Obviously, a good chunk of this show if not all of it is really non-consensual scenes but it’s not done with heavy handed violence or any real bloody moments about it. The character designs are about average in general if just a bit below for some of the secondary characters, but they’re not bad looking by any stretch. The animation quality is decent if unexceptional but it mixes well with the designs and is about average for what you get with the Vanilla Series overall. There isn’t any heavily noticeable repeated animation used, it’s fairly explicit if under-detailed in that area and the sex is good for the most part. While not a stand-out title from the series, it’s a solid entry into the more hardcore side without going to an extreme.
In Summary:
Classroom of Atonement takes some of the usual elements of the punishment style storyline and plays them well but there are just the usual number of clichés, from a former boyfriend being involved in the gangbang to the secret that the mastermind behind all of it is holding. There aren’t any real surprises until the last few frames of the show that end it in a slightly different way than expected but it left a smile on my face and the hour spent with the characters certainly wasn’t a chore. While I wouldn’t recommend a newbie jump into something like this as their first hentai, it’s definitely a good title for someone wanting to start explore this side of the genre to see what’s out there without being completely overwhelmed.
Features:
Japanese 2.0 Language, English 2.0 Language, English Subtitles, Animated Art Gallery, Original U.S. Trailer
Content Grade: C+
Audio Grade: B+
Video Grade: B-
Packaging Grade: B
Menu Grade: B
Extras Grade: C+
Released By: Critical Mass Video
Release Date: August 7th, 2012
MSRP: $14.99
Running Time: 60 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.
