Bondage Mansion returns after a decade away..
What They Say:
Reika used to like games… until her body became the playing field.
Yukio Mimura came from a wealthy family and never wanted for anything. Kind and gentle, he obediently fulfills his dying father’s final request: find a previously unknown cousin and allow him to live in the family mansion. But his cousin Hayato has other ideas for the family’s mansion, its fortune, and especially Yukio’s girlfriend Reika?
Woefully unaware of his family’s sadomasochistic history, Yukio is forced to agree to a sexual competition to avoid the exposure of the family’s dark secrets. A competition where Reika has become the playing field: the first to break her sexually is the one who gets both the mansion and the money.
Caught in the middle of a bizarre ritual between her current boyfriend and his sadistic cousin, it is Reika who will ultimately decide the winner of this twisted competition: the one who can take her to the extremes of ecstasy, or the one who loves her.
The Review:
Audio:
The audio presentation for this release brings the original Japanese audio in stereo along with the English dub, both of which are encoded at 192kbps. Being hentai and one with average production values at that, it wasn’t surprising to get a basic stereo mix that feels like it’s using the center channel pretty heavily. There’s various bits of music throughout and some sound effects that use the stereo channels, but otherwise dialogue and other sounds are pretty much through the center.
Video:
Originally released in 2001, the transfer for this two part OVA series is presented in its original full frame aspect ratio. The transfer for this show is very nice with my main nemesis, cross coloration, being hardly apparent at all. With this bane of my existence not here, I got to enjoy the show much more. Colors look good overall with some splashes of vibrancy here and there throughout (such as the candle and certain clothes), but a lot of the show is very dark with shadowy rooms and hallways and exteriors. There’s hardly any line shimmering during camera panning either, so the only place most people will have problems is in how your player will handle the dark black and blue backgrounds.
Packaging:
Ah, isn’t this a cover you’d be proud to place on the counter at your local retailer. With the main woman in her early stages of bondage here and mostly naked, it’s definitely eye-catching to say the least. The back cover provides a few more shots of the show and a big summary of what to expect inside. Features and production information is all listed clearly along the bottom. As with all Right Stuf releases at this point, there is no insert in the package.
Menu:
The menu is essentially a segment of animation playing on the screen with the episode selections and language selections on top of it. Access times are nice and fast and getting where you need to go is easy as there’s little here.
Extras:
The only extra is the slide show which is a video gallery really, but when it shifts from one image to the next, the music stops for a split second before continuing.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
The first entry for the Vanilla Series when Critical Mass started to bring these over, Bondage Mansion definitely moves things in the direction that several episodes of Cool Devices were playing around in. The basic plot of Yukio and Reika arriving at his newly discovered cousins mansion to live with as is his father’s last request. Yukio’s cousin is the older Hayato, someone who has taken advantage of the mansions and family history of bondage. Essentially, Hayato challenges Yukio to a game of domination over Yukio’s girlfriend to see which of them can break her first. And Hayato plays very dirty at this game.
That’s what really is the basis of the show and it doesn’t go far beyond that. With the hidden areas of the mansion, we have Hayato taking Reika there and having his way with her along with other menu while he has Yukio succumb to some prostitutes he brought in, using them to break him and Reika by telling her what her boyfriends is up to. It’s not the most outlandish plot in the world, but it moves along fairly well in the scenes where there’s no action. With this kind of hentai, story really is secondary, being only a motivator to get to specific scenes.
The character designs for the show are pretty nice overall with the women getting the most attention paid to them. Between their designs and the clothing, they come out on top. The actual sessions themselves vary with some being nastier than others, but some also feature some violence to some extent and there was one segment where yard tools are used against their implied design. There’s also a few moments of the old golden showers which made me reach for the fast forward button.
In Summary:
For those looking for something beyond the normal hentai you see and have been waiting for something that’s trying to be like Cool Devices, this is probably a good series to check out. The show doesn’t delve deep into bondage and all that’s involved with it and it plays it in the usual darker terms that many hentai series do, which is one of the downsides of it since there are so many different ways to present bondage in an interesting manner. But this is what the Vanilla Series used as its bread and butter at the time and it certainly has its place and is a title that I can certainly see some fans of it getting pleasure out of it. It left me a bit cold overall in terms of what it wants to do, but I liked the designs of it all.
Features:
Japanese 2.0 Language, English 2.0 Language, English Subtitles, Art Gallery
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: October 2nd, 2012
MSRP: $14.99
Running Time: 60 Minutes
Video Encoding: 480 i/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.
