Creative Staff
Story/Art: Tanuki Kamogawa
Translation/Adaptation: Ex-S Woo
What They Say
The newest pretty girls collection from the author of Innocence! One Night: A young maid gets her wish to pleasure her young master when the regular servant falls ill. Bon Voyage: Kissing siblings squeeze in some quality time while their parents are on vacation.
Packaging:
The packaging is standard for Icarus, which is to say it’s pretty good. The cover is simple, yet pretty, and the printing throughout is spot-on. Lines and tones are solid and crisp, and blacks are deep and dark. At the end, there is a thank you note from the author and assistant as well as the glossary and pronunciation guide.
Unfortunately, in the first print run of this book, there was a printer’s error – page 110 was left completely blank. Simon and all the good folks at Icarus Publishing have gone through the tremendous effort to ensure that you do not have, nor will you be able to get this defective version. It simply should no longer exist for anyone to be able to purchase. If you did get it when the book first came out, you should have been notified of an exchange program already and retailers were instructed to provide replacement copies free of charge.
If you are a real worrywart and are very persnickety, you can check the back cover for a red sticker that indicates the book is the second printing, which corrected the problem. But, as it stands, there is a near infinitesimal chance that you will unwittingly get a defective copy if you haven’t yet purchased the book, so don’t worry.
Art:
The art is clean, detailed, and gooey when appropriate. And there is a lot of goo. One thing that the art isn’t, though, is varied. If you are buying this on-line or are in a position where you can’t see the interior art before you buy it, let’s just say that hopefully you really like the look of the girl on the cover. Aside from slight variances in their hair, pretty much every main girl throughout the book looks exactly like her. Hell, even the boys look like her as well. All the characters have the same long, lean frame with the same face on top. Girls all have the same conspicuous grapefruit boobs on their chests and guys…well you don’t really see the guys all that much anyway. This isn’t damning or anything, it’s just that the look of ero manga has just as much to do with your kink as what goes on inside, so hopefully you know if this is the look that gets you off. That said, the art is still pretty and well done, so kudos to that.
Text/Translation:
It’s kind of amazing that they could fit any text in between all the sucking and fucking, but they did somehow, so you might as well see what they characters have to say. The short answer is not much. Elements is pretty concerned with getting right to the deed, so there is very little in terms of dialog, and exposition might as well just refer to the reverse cowgirl you had her in five minutes ago. What dialog there is, though, reads well and has a good flow. Sound effects (except for moaning) remain untranslated.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
This is a collection of short sexual adventures, so there isn’t an overreaching story. The first five stories might as well be called vignettes since they are only about three pages apiece. The last nine are a little bit longer with a bit more story, but if your counting, you know that that means there are fourteen stories in this 176-page book. With only a little more than 12 pages per story, there isn’t much room for anything other than straight genital-to-genital action.
The kinks that are most prevalent in this collection are school girls, stocking feet, incest, and lots of cum shots. Lots of cum shots. Honorable mentions are light bondage, gang chikan, is that Heero Yuy?, straight shota, maids, and classroom sex – something that happens enough to be more than an honorable mention, but you can’t really tell they’re at school, so no dice.
It’s pretty much a waste to go through each story and discuss what happens and what they’re about because the stories always start with the character already having sex. Kamogawa pretty much skips over any kind of build up and just has the dialog fill in the bare minimum of what you need to know to get the situation. Personally, I like bigger stories and involving situations, so the constantly changing set-ups and characters all doing the same things from different angles got pretty tiring for me. I like some build up before release. But if you’re a person that doesn’t really care for that stuff and would rather just see people going at it the whole time with gallons of man-juice in between (and I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that), then Elements is more up your alley.
Elements isn’t bad, it’s just that it’s the nuts and bolts of ero manga with very little frill. I realize that when you boil down my content section it pretty much comes down to “people have sex,” but that’s really all there is. You won’t really know any more about the book if I did go through it and say, “here a girl has sex on a train, here a girl has sex with her dad before work, here a guy has sex with his new girlfriend.”
The most involved story is the last one where some girls lock a boy in a room at school over winter break so that they can have sex with him as much as they want. But, in the end, this is just like those old pornos were the guy supposedly goes around the world hooking up with girls in every country, when really it all takes place in the same room, sometimes with a ficus in the corner, other times with a faux ancient column, and it’s always the same girl but in one scene she’s wearing a beret and later she’s speaking with a forced accent. Sure you still get the sex, and it’s still pretty hot, but it’s just the same thing over and over. And that can get boring.
In Summary
Elements isn’t a bad purchase, it’s just something that I could only recommend if you knew going in that it was going to be your cup of tea.
Overall Hotness (1 out of 5): 3 – Pitched Tent.
Content Grade: C
Art Grade: A
Packaging Grade: A-
Text/Translation Grade: A
Age Rating: 18+
Released By: Icarus Publishing
Release Date: February 28th, 2008
MSRP: $19.95
