What They Say:
Aiwa spends his days endlessly obsessing over Kozue, the girl he knows he can never have. To take his mind off of her, Aiwa bought a little something special to ease those lonely nights. Unfortunately, his order took so long to arrive that he forgot about it!
When the package finally arrives, Aiwa discovers that technology is a little better than he bargained for. Packed inside is a female robot named Satomi. Not only is she loyal, pure-hearted and cheerful, but she’s also utterly and totally insatiable when it comes to sex!
It doesn’t take long for Aiwa to learn just how good Satomi is, but even as perfect as she is, he still finds himself dreaming of Kozue. Of course, Aiwa’s not above a little of practice until the day he can finally score with the girl of his dreams. Now all he’s got to do is to find the off button before Kozue comes over!
The Review:
Audio:
The audio presentation for this release is fairly standard material for a show of this age in that we get the original Japanese language in stereo as well as the dub that was produced ages ago in stereo, both of which are encoded at 192kbps. The show is pretty much, um, dialogue, so there’s not a lot of real use for the left/right channels outside of a few bits of music here and there. The dialogue for both tracks comes through pretty clearly, with the English track being a bit louder than the Japanese one.
Video:
As the years go on, this old transfer is showing some serious signs of age as the full frame presentation is riddled with source material problems There are a number of very soft looking sequences throughout the show and a lot of cross coloration that make some of the edges look indistinct. The only other problem I noticed was that every now and then, you’re see a glitch line of some sort flash at various places throughout. It seemed to move and basically be all over. I’m not really sure how to even describe it. But it was apparent both on our Skyworth player and our Apex player.
Packaging:
The packaging for this release is certainly familiar with some nice updated to it as we get the standard image of our lead showing off her undergarments, which I always felt was an awkward pose, while the background is done in black and white showing the human couple enjoying an ice cream on the bench. Adding a touch of color to that with the pink ice cream and letting the blending of the two shots come together, it works better than I thought it would have. The back cover goes for a clipboard approach that brings us the plot concept as it has the package being delivered to Aiwa. The background has a few shots from the show that are blended in really well and makes the whole thing feel a lot more current than it is. The technical grid lays everything else out clearly and we get a brief look at what the language options and extras are.
Extras:
There’s a brief video image gallery that shows a few shots of the show itself as well as a closer look at the cover artwork.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
Mail Order Maiden 28 is one of those hentai/ecchi shows that make you wonder just a little bit more about how such things get greenlit. While the show itself isn’t bad bad, it’s pretty mediocre and doesn’t have all that much of a story to it. And before anyone gives you that “hentai doesn’t have stories” garbage, just give ’em a swift kick and move on. Those who watch enough of these shows know that there’s some really good ones out there that do have stories.
This one however is pretty minimal. We’ve got Aiwa, whose madly in love (well, mostly lust) with Kozue. He constantly dreams about her doing all kinds of things to him and does everything he can to go out on a date with her and spend time with her. Aiwa’s just a bit of an undersexed guy who just acts out a bit too much.
His life gets a lot more troublesome though when something he ordered finally arrives. He had ordered a sex doll months ago, but it only now just arrived. Ah, the perfect thing to practice with he thinks! Unfortunately, the company sent him the wrong model, and this one comes to life on him. He ends up deciding after a few minutes of surprise that this really works to his advantage and they end up going at it for the rest of the night.
As the show goes on, we get the usual and predictable moments of Kozue running into Aiwa’s robot girl who he names Satomi. Satomi tries her simple best to do anything for Aiwa and follows every order she’s given. So you can easily imagine how things go wrong for Aiwa when he tries to keep dating Kozue. At one point during the show, Aiwa, somewhat despondent, states that he’s a loser. That basically does sum him up pretty well.
There’s just not a lot here really, with some of the animation even reused for some of the show. It had a couple of chuckles here and there, but these were offset by other things that just had us rolling our eyes. And to cap it off, it’s one of the few US released shows that has a bunch of guys relieving themselves on Satomi, since Aiwa basically told her to have that happen.
In Summary:
Revisiting Mail Order Maiden after several years of it being out of print and not pulling it out of my own collection, I had wondered if it had aged well or not. It’s a release that I always felt awkward about when it first came out because of some of its presentation aspects and seeing it again after all these years just reinforced it. It’s a product of its time as well with the non-animated adult parts or done in super pink fluorescent, so it’s easy to be taken out of it. And the characters never really act in an engaging way so that you can enjoy what they do. It’s a simple little show that doesn’t have much meat to it, in more ways than one, and the whole thing leaves me feeling a little awkward because of the designs and the overall approach to it.
Features:
Japanese 2.0 Language, English 2.0 Language, English Subtitles, Animated Art Gallery
Content Grade: D+
Audio Grade: B
Video Grade: C-
Packaging Grade: B
Menu Grade: D
Extras Grade: C-
Released By: Critical Mass Video
Release Date: March 5th, 2013
MSRP: $14.99
Running Time: 45 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.
