What if a professional animation studio decided to make a show based on the inane ramblings and designs you find on the Internet?
What They Say
Those who are at the top of a zaibatsu, a large Japanese business conglomerate, tend to have eccentric tastes. For one particular executive, his hobby of choice is spending his fortune on women, buying sex slaves. At his luxurious mansion in the most remote of locations, he spends his time training his pets far from prying eyes. An acquaintance of his shares the same pastime and the two one day decide to compete to see who can train the best sexual servants. At the same time, an amnesiac young lady shows up at the doorstep, not realizing what awaits as the game begins.
The Review!
Audio:
Bondage Game gets a decent bilingual release with both the English and Japanese language tracks presented in their original stereo mixes encoded at 192kbps. The show has a pretty standard stereo mix in that it’s all very center channel based overall both for dialogue and what few ambient effects there are. Music, what little there really is, is the only area that gets a full sounding feel to it but it doesn’t stand out all that much. Essentially, this show is free of problems and sounds good on both language tracks as it’s free of dropouts, distortions or any other issues of note.
Video:
Originally released in 2003, the transfer for this two part OVA series is presented in its original full frame aspect ratio. Bondage Game has a very strong clean digital look from the time period in which it was created and the transfer here represents that well with bright, bold and vivid colors throughout. Detail is pretty good for the most part, though it’s more dependent on whether they animated much in t way of detail. Colors maintain a good strong feel throughout with only some minor noise in a few backgrounds standing out and often just with the dark blues of the basement itself for the background. Character animation is smooth and the look overall is pretty good.
Packaging:
Bondage Game lets you know exactly what to expect here if the title alone wasn’t enough, though some people may get confused and think they’re getting a game. The front cover has a piece of artwork of two of the main girls that get thoroughly abused in the show as they’re tied up in different ways while wearing their bondage gear and looking positively beaten down and fearful. There’s a raw feeling to the artwork here with the way it looks and that definitely works to its advantage. The back cover keeps to a fairly normal layout with a lot of black space which makes it easy to read the text of the summary and the production credits. There’s a small series of stills from the show and a good larger piece of two of the women in a “tender” moment together. The technical grid covers everything in good detail and is accurate and there are no show related inserts included in this nor is there a reversible cover.
Menus:
The menus for this release mirror the front cover artwork as it uses that piece, zoomed in a bit so they can put the logo on the right along with the navigation strip, with two of the women in their bondage gear and looking quite beaten and bruised from all their training. The menu, like the cover, certainly lets you know what you’re getting into but I have to say the best part of it is the sixty-second loop of instrumental music that’s simply haunting and quite chilling. The submenus use the artwork from various stills placed on the back cover and load times are quite quick and they’re all easy to use. Everything has a decent flow and the usage of the chains to tie all the menus together is nice. The disc does not read our players’ language presets and like other Kitty Media titles it doesn’t indicate what’s actually selected before or after making a selection.
Extras:
None.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
Over the years I’ve found myself watching a lot of hentai, both before I started reviewing them and afterward. I’ve been exposed to all sorts of material, some of which once left me cringing but now is a bit more interesting, to put it lightly. Tastes change and hentai certainly can expand those tastes. Some shows are tame, some are extreme and a lot are sort of in the middle when it comes to the actual money scenes that we all watch them for. After watching such extreme shows as Bible Black, Night Shift Nurses, and Dark Love, I thought I was pretty much set to watch anything without too extreme of a reaction. I felt I had been properly desensitized to hentai at this point.
Bondage Game, based on the game of the same name, plays in the realm of bondage material but it takes it to its comical extremes, or at least it’s intended to be comical. Instead, what it does is provide for some stomach churning moments where you feel like the entire scene was designed by the people who come up with twisted images that are occasionally posted on the Internet by people to gross out others with. There’s a sequence in the second episode where one of the female characters has her breasts enlarged to a size nearly as large as her body itself and then they start beating it up and poking it. Another scene has a woman having her nipples ripped off and another forcibly adds a penis onto a woman, leaving her a rather lovely scar along her stomach. The ripping and shredding of characters are par for the course here, though they take that further along the way with a beheading and a drowning as well.
So what’s the point of this show? We’re introduced to Yu, an orphan who now finds himself in the household of a man she calls Master Renji. Renji lives to take these kinds of women in, something his father did before him, and turn them into proper slaves that he can play with or sell off to others. Yu finds this to be the only life that people like her have so she gives into it fairly easily, but once the training actually starts it moves into the ridiculous extremes covered before Other women, wearing the same kind of maid outfit that Yu has on, wander in and out and participate in the events or watch them quietly. Renji participates at times, sometimes just verbally, but he also brings in some men to play with the girls and they look like they’re truly hung like a horse.
Because of the ridiculous extremes, the show goes to, this doesn’t really come across as bondage. At least, not good properly done bondage. What we have here is pure and simple cruelty with a whole lot of scatological material mixed into it. There are some truly disturbing scenes brought into play with both the feces and urine that honestly had me feeling like I might throw up. Thankfully, the character designs are pretty nicely done here when the women are all in a normal form and not so badly done with the things that they’re put through. None of them stand out better than any other, but they go for the normal things here with red hair, blue hair, purple hair, and a blonde. The uniforms they wear are straightforward though the more adult costumes tend to be a bit more creative overall.
In Summary:
Bondage Game is flat-out one of the most depraved hentai show I think I’ve ever seen. Nothing appears off-limits here and when they do find a limit it’s just something they can push past. There have been other shows similar to this before and after but none of them feel like they go this far beyond the pale in what they offer. I found myself looking away in horror so many times and wishing they didn’t go that far or in that direction at all so often that it nearly made me throw up. It’s definitely a well-animated show with good base character designs but the actual content is something that you only see in animation and may be pretty thankful for that when all is said and done. This isn’t titillating in the slightest but I’m not sure that they were actually trying to do that anyway. This is more like a strange fan-script come to life professionally more than anything else.
Features
Japanese 2.0 Language, English 2.0 Language, English Subtitles
Content Grade: D
Audio Grade: B+
Video Grade: A-
Packaging Grade: B
Menu Grade: B
Extras Grade: N/A
Released By: Kitty Media
Release Date: November 24th, 2009
MSRP: $29.99
Running Time: 100 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.
