Past lives and current romances intermingle in this surprisingly good hentai release.
What They Say:
A dream of the past and an improbable future…
Night after night, Takakage’s dreams take him away to another life long ago. A life of love and sorrow. A single passionate night in the arms of the beautiful priestess Ayame, and the painful death that separated them forever. But that was all just a dream…
When Takakage goes to a festival on campus with his friends, a fortune teller describes his immediate future madly in love with a woman, and his distant past exactly how he dreamed it! Could his re-occurring dreams of Ayame be flashes of a real past life?
When gorgeous Chisato crosses his path on campus, Takakage begins to believe that Chisato might just be the woman of his fortune. But is she the woman of his dreams?
The Review:
Audio:
The audio presentation for this release brings us the original Japanese language track as well as the previously created English language dub, both of which are in stereo and are encoded at a high 448kbps each. The show is pretty much a dialogue piece with little else there to draw upon, even the incidental music doesn’t make much of an impact, but it carries it all off well and it’s pretty much what you’d expect from a show like this. Dialogue is generally through the center channel with little in the way of placement but it all comes across cleanly and without problems.
Video:
Originally released in 2002, the transfer for this two part OVA series is presented in its original full frame aspect ratio. The release is using the same materials and is essentially just a re-pressed edition of what came before, so there are no changes to the authoring or quality. Colors are nice and solid throughout, though some of the night time blue skies are a little less than. Cross coloration is extremely minimal and aliasing is also fairly non-existent. There were some issues during some of the panning sequences though, as some characters had their designs look like it was suffering from spot cross coloration, or some weird form of dot crawl. It definitely looks to be in the source material though.
Packaging:
The release comes in a single sized keepcase that goes for some good colors and a decent solid blue band along th bottom to tie it all together. The cover here goes right for the cute girl calling, with one of the lead women having dual shots here. One of them has her getting out of a pool while the other shows a good amount of skin along the top as she’s having some mature fun. The back cover provides a couple of good shots from the show as well as a couple of paragraphs of story summary. The discs features and basic production info is also clearly listed here.
Menu:
The menu is a simple one, with some animation and music from the show playing underneath the menu selections. Selections are very simple, with each episode laid out at the top level, leaving only language selection as a sub level. Access times are nice and fast.
Extras:
The only extra here is a nice little slideshow of images from the show itself.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
The Vanilla series is one of those kinds of releases where you just never know what you’re going to get next. In some ways, this is really good, since you can get surprised with something you never thought you’d like. The downside is that it can go from the extreme to the simple.
Campus is more towards the simple, but done very well. With no non-consensual situations and a focus on actual dating and romance, this is a near-perfect couples show. The story is a classic one, as we’re introduced to Ayame and Genshiro four hundred years in the past. Genshiro is getting ready to head out to battle the next day, and naturally Ayame is worried about him. To help alleviate her fears, he tells her they will both get married that night, and that as a husband he will definitely return. The two then get down to some fun nookie.
Flash forward to the present, and we’re introduced to Takakage, a young man who has dreams of the piece described above from the view of Genshiro, and his sister Mieko. Mieko also has these dreams, but from Ayame’s perspective, but doesn’t tell Takakage about them. The two live together on their own, as their parents had died a few years back. They’re also only half-related, and not by direct blood, so they clear up that little potential problem quickly. But for Takakage, Mieko is definitely his sister, as she’s been with the family since forever.
Takakage tries to work through these recurring dreams, only to have things made worse when on campus, his neighborhood friend Mayumi convinces him to let her read his fortune in one of their group stalls during freshmen introduction day. With Mieko going there, she gets read as well, but Takakage gets to learn that his true love will be entering his life in the next few days.
The episodes then introduce an attractive almost Victorian style blonde into Takakage’s life, but also a woman in a shrine who is the spitting image of Ayame. Takakage’s definitely a college age male and goes after everything he can get his hands on, but the episodes take a sharp turn to romance and deep love that brings it up above a lot of other hentai.
In Summary:
Campus is one of those titles that you have some decent hope for because it does try to work some real story into it and to allow the characters to be more than just paper thin cutouts that get to fool around some. The story isn’t complicated, but it goes for a convoluted approach in telling it that may only really make sense once it hits the end, and even then it leaves you asking more questions. The sex throughout the show isn’t terribly explicit, going further than softcore stuff but not much further. But the images that they did use for the couplings are very well done, and owes more to the senses than a hardcore piece. Partially, this is why we recommend it pretty easily for couples viewing, especially for people who haven’t seen a lot of hentai. This is a good place to start.
Features:
Japanese 2.0 Language, English 2.0 Language, English Subtitles, Animated Gallery
Content Grade: B-
Audio Grade: B+
Video Grade: B
Packaging Grade: B
Menu Grade: C
Extras Grade: C
Released By: Critical Mass Video
Release Date: June 4th, 2013
MSRP: $9.99
Running Time: 60 Minutes
Video Encoding: 480i/p MPEG-2
Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
Review Equipment:
Sony KDL70R550A 70″ LED 1080P HDTV, Apple TV via HDMI set to 1080p, Onkyo TX-SR605 Receiver and Panasonic SB-TP20S Multi-Channel Speaker System With 100-Watt Subwoofer.
