Sometimes a contract can become really personal.
What They Say:
A hot high school teacher, Kasumi, and her sexy younger sister, Kaho, are in deep debt to a local gangster. Okura, a male student, learns of their predicament and offers to pay their debt in exchange for some very special favors.
In exchange for his charitable gesture, the girls must become his personal sex slaves and satisfy his every desire until their debt is fully paid off. With little choice, the sisters must quickly make their decision and proceed with caution!
The Review:
Audio:
The audio presentation for this release is a bit odd in a way, but the positive side is that we get both the original Japanese language track as well as a new English language track, both of which are encoded in stereo. The levels they’re at are what’s a bit odd as the first episode is at 256kbps while the second is at 384kbps, with both languages like that. It doesn’t make much difference in the end, though it’s at least better than the usual 192kbps stripped down encoding. The show is essentially all dialogue driven with little else to work with outside of some incidental sounds and a bit of music, which is what gives it more of a full feeling. But by and large it’s all center channel based material that comes across cleanly and clearly with what it does and there’s no problems in hearing the quality of it or where the general placement is.
Video:
Originally released in 2007, the transfer for this two episode OVA series is presented in its original aspect ratio. Animated by Bootleg, the show is definitely your standard budget hentai where things are certainly several steps above some of the old “ms paint” hentai releases out there, but it’s not a slick production. The show has a decent bit of detail in a few areas from time to time, more so outside of the sex scenes themselves, but the transfer captures the look of the show well with solid colors throughout, a mild layer of noise to it that’s expected and a generally clean look. Outside of some line noise during some of the panning sequences, there’s not much to complain about when watching it in terms of the transfer. Please note that this is a DVD-R Manufactured On Demand release.
Packaging:
The packaging for this release comes in a standard sized DVD case that holds the single disc inside. The front cover gives us the two main characters with a really appealing piece of artwork as they’re wearing more maid uniforms than anything else, but it’s done with light pinks that gives it a soft look. With the yellow background to provide some contrast, the detail in the designs are pretty good and it plays the fanservice side well with positioning and the glimpses of what we get to see. THe logo is amusing along the bottom as is the tagline. The back cover goes traditional with its design as it’s a black background with several images from the show that avoids showing any nudity, but plays to the moments themselves with the expressiveness of the irls. The premise is kept simple and easy to digest and we get a decent breakdown of the production credits and the technical grid, which lays it all out cleanly and accurately. No show related inserts are included nor is there a reversible cover.
Menu:
The menu design is similar to the cover in that it provides a slick and polished look to things as we get a static screen where along the right we get the two main girls together showing off what’s underneath their shirts as they’re open perfectly. The designs look great and the color has some good pop and I definitely liked that it didn’t just replicate the front cover artwork. The navigation is kept along the left underneath the logo and we get the basics here with language selection at the top level while scene selection gets its own submenu. Everything is quick and easy to access and setup is easily understandable at a glance.
Extras:
None.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
In what feels like a truly surreal moment, I’m getting to watch a brand new hentai release. As has been the case for far too long in North America, we’ve been getting nothing but re-releases and compilations of clips from various old releases, leaving fans of the genre with nothing new under the sun to legally purchase. And that’s disheartening, because there’s some good, clean, fun hentai out there that’s produced. There’s a lot of junk as well, but hentai’s almost like a treasure hunt in that when you do find that diamond in the rough, you treasure it all the more. With Kitty Media getting back in the game more formally, and dubbing releases like this one no less, it’s exciting just to get new material. But we do temper that excitement with the content itself, so that’s taken into account.
Paid and Laid introduces us to the standard school setting that’s familiar to hentai fans where we get a young man named Okura who is a bit of a cad, but comes across decently at first for the most part. He’s a gifted kid at moving money and playing the stock market as we learn, but he’s also protective of those that he cares about. Part of this comes initially from fellow classmate Kaho, who is making him lunches for school after he discovered she had a part time job at a restaurant when she shouldn’t, due to school rules. When Kaho’s sister Kasumi discovered what Kaho was doing, she nixed the whole thing. The reason she worked was to make money to pay off their parents debts, which is something like twenty million yen. This is all made real for Okura when, while at school, a punk comes in to rough up Kasumi while she’s there as part of the school staff. That just sets off Okura to do what he can to fix the situation. Which is to pay off their parents debt.
Of course, while he does do this to help them out, he also does it as part of his larger goal, which is to finally get his hands on Kasumi so he can have carnal knowledge of her. While Kasumi refuses the money at first, and the contract he comes up with to try and get her to realize she’s paying it back in her own way, she eventually gives in and essentially becomes Okura’s sex slave. The two go at it pretty intensely and it’s no surprise that as time goes on we see that Kasumi ends up falling hard for Okura and takes to him being her master. Okura wanted the same of Kaho as well, but that plays out with a little more complication than he had expected. It’s also complicated for Kasumi because she doesn’t want her sister involved, primarily because she doesn’t want the competition. And Kaho certainly isn’t thrilled about the situation and makes a stink about it.
But it’s also a cover for her, as she’s really turned on by the whole thing and is drawn to it, but unable to really voice it. Lucky for her, Okura has set hidden cameras up around his place where Okura and Kaho are spending their time these days, and he realizes that she really wants in on it. Which leads to an “elaborate” plan to bring her in and sign a contract to be his slave as well. Suffice to say, we get a lot of situations involving Okura and the two girls separately throughout, and some decent material towards the end with both of them at the same time. It plays to familiar fetishes that you’d expect, but it also plays lighter with others that you’d think they’d invest in. A lot of is is one on one material when you’d expect more threesome time in order to maximize the effect, visually and psychologically. But they also barely touch the scatalogical and bondage sidee as that only comes up briefly at the end, which makes it easy to ignore.
The show largely plays things safe within the context of how hentai works as there’s no real surprises here and no major deviations that leave you cringing with something so disturbing playing across your screen. But it also has the look of a budget show, so you end up with things like very simple character designs and not a lot of detail where it counts. Though I’m no fan of hyper-realiistic hentai that takes you into every nook and cranny, there’s moments here where you wonder if the animators have any basic knowledge of female anatomy. Okay, it’s not quite that bad, but it’s done in the simple way that keeps you from wholly investing in it because of the basic level quality here. But again, it’s several steps above some of the junk that’s made it over here over the years, so I can appreciate that aspect of it.
In Summary:
Paid & Laid is pretty much your standard budget level hentai release, but I’ll be damned if I didn’t enjoy it simply because it was a new release. After years of getting nothing but re-releases and clip shows, seeing some new material, getting a solid and enjoyable dub out of it, and in one solid little package helps to go a long way. It’s fairly standard school based master/slave contract stuff and it’s kept simple with just three characters involved in the action and nothing much beyond that. The result is something that may be predictable, but it’s put together competently enough and it feels like the start of more fun to come from Kitty Media. Which is pretty much what I had hoped for.
Features:
Japanese 2.0 Language, English 2.0 Language, English Subtitles
Content Grade: C
Audio Grade: B+
Video Grade: B+
Packaging Grade: B
Menu Grade: B
Extras Grade: N/A
Released By: Kitty Media
Release Date: April 30th, 2015
MSRP: $29.99
Running Time: 66 Minutes
Video Encoding: 480i/p MPEG-2
Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
Review Equipment:
Sony KDL70R550A 70″ LED 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.
sexy and a dubbed hentai ftw! lol