Even with all the hentai tiles I’ve seen over the years, Ogenki Clinic in any form has to be one of the strangest. Get your drinking buddies together for this one, folks.
What They Say:
Whatever problem a patient may have with sex, the wacky Dr. Ogenki and his sexy nurse Ruko are here to help. Using a variety of… unconventional methods and an extremely affectionate bedside manner, this team is devoted to bringing pleasure to those in pain and joy to those who despair. Satisfaction is guaranteed!
The Review:
Audio:
Because of issues with the licensor, or more specifically a Japanese voice actress who doesn’t want to be associated with this title, anymore, the only language on here is the English language adaptation in stereo encoded at 192kbps. This hentai comedy is pretty old so there isn’t much to it when it comes to the audio as it’s a basic almost lifeless mix that gets the dialogue and sound effects out in a clean enough manner through the center channel with a full sound to it. There isn’t much that stands out here, if anything, but it’s as clean and clear as can be with no discernable issues.
Video:
Originally released in 1991, the transfer for this two part OVA series is presented in its original full frame aspect ratio. The show is nearly twenty five years old as of this writing and it was showing it pretty hard twelve years ago when it first hit DVD. This release is identical to what came out back in 2003 as it’s just a repressing of what Anime 18 put out, which we also saw in 2010. Differences in setups show off the issues of the release more as there’s a good bit of natural film grain here and colors that seem even more washed out now. A lot of shows were animated in this style back then so it’s par for the course, but the budget nature of the show is even more apparent. Line noise and cross coloration creep into many scenes but with a show like this, you’re really not looking for a technical masterpiece.
Packaging:
The cover art for this gets a mild upgrade from the original and changes just a touch from the previous edition with no stripe along the bottom. Not that I think they can sell this easily, with one of the lead women stripping out of her nurses uniform so we see plenty of her meager undergarments and stockings. The circular background with the varying shades of oranges and yellows reminds me of the old Looney Tunes startup which gives this an amusing feeling since in some ways it’s a rather looney hentai show. The logo is nicely done, definitely more modern than anything else on this release, and feels very out of place. The back cover has a bit of cosplay fun for one of the women as well as having the lecherous old doctor show looking as perverted as you’d expect against a similar kind of background. The summary is very meager which isn’t a surprise and there’s a lot of blank space. Surprisingly, the features section only lists the previews for other shows though there are a few things here on this disc, a promo video at the very least, to plug. The remainder of the cover is given over to the technical grid where we get a good clean listing of the show and a few basic production credits.
Menu:
The menu design for Ogenki Clinic Adventures is definitely a style that Anime 18 pioneered and stuck with back in the day. With a simple screenshot of the doctor and nurse in their office as the static image with no looping music or anything, it’s pretty bland. What gives it more of a MS Paint feel is the row of buttons along the left side for the navigation. Everything is laid out clearly and easily found, though load times are a bit slow here and there in moving to submenus. The layout is predictable but it works and with it being a monolingual release there aren’t any problems with player presets.
Extras:
There’s a small mix of extras included in this release, such as the nearly three minute promo piece that features the Japanese vocals for the song that plays over it as it shows various scenes from the show. The DVD ROM side features comic pages, art gallery material and the script itself as well. And who could not want to watch the Anime Artform piece that Anime 18 put together years ago to illustrate the artistic nature of hentai?
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
Ogenki Clinic Adventures is but one of a small number of dub only titles that Anime 18 played with over the years when they brought out new shows. In the last twenty plus years of watching a lot of varying levels of hentai titles (and not being ashamed to admit it), the one thing that’s almost always constant is the poor performances of the English voice actors for shows like these. They just never seem to get the same kind of enthusiasm that the Japanese actresses fake so well. While Ogenki Clinic Adventures didn’t change my opinion of this all that much, I do have to admit that as time went on, the main characters did get into their roles more comfortably and did a better job. Some of the minor characters were just plain bad, such as the first blonde woman, but the main nurse Ruko was doing pretty good by the second full episode.
The premise for the show is almost painfully simple but effective. It introduces us to a doctor and nurse team through which we see a variety of patients come through, each with different kinds of problems. The cure is always sexual though and the nurse is ready to lend a hand, or a mouth, while the perverted looking doctor opines about it and tries to get in on the action himself. There’s all manner of situations, toys and costumes in use here across the short variable stories so you can’t exactly get bored. There’s also a lot of on screen silliness when it comes to how things are described as they really “cartoon” it up in a lot of ways for the gag factor. And that’s gag as in humor, not gag as in being bound or throwing up over what you see.
But even for hentai, Ogenki Clinic goes in a different direction than a lot of things brought over. A lot of hentai does have well endowed women, but this show really takes it to the extreme with pipe cleaner ankles and completely unnatural breast sizes. That alone will turn a lot of people off to this show, and it pretty much does it to me. What really saves this show as I watched all of it was the bizarreness of the situations and the sheer amount of humor in it. While plenty of hentai is definitely laughable, this one produces some of the best laughs intentionally. It knows what it is and delights in it.
Oh, and here’s an unadvertised selling point for the disc; it’s a great party game for a mixed group who are real comfortable with each other. Simply pick an order, let the first person pop the disc in and hit random. Let that person then pick someone to enact the scene with and then let the next person go… fun for all!
In Summary:
With it being five years since this show last saw release, it’s back on the market and a few bucks cheaper. I really is, I hate to say, a kind of great gag gift anime that you can stock up on and give out to friends with twisted sense of humor and just watch the silliness go from there. Since it’s just a re-releases, my original hope when it was first announced as part of the package deal was that perhaps they could loosen the grip on the original Japanese track and give us a proper bilingual one. Sadly, it did not happen so we get this repressing of the 2003 disc, which certainly shows its age in encoding efforts. The show is one that’s really awkward in a lot of ways, from the severely dated and often unappealing character designs to the animation itself, but I still think there’s a good game to be had with it for a good group of familiar and comfortable friends.
Features:
English 2.0 Language, English Subtitles
Content Grade: C-
Audio Grade: B
Video Grade: C
Packaging Grade: C-
Menu Grade: C-
Extras Grade: B-
Released By: Critical Mass Video
Release Date: February 3rd, 2015
MSRP: $9.99
Running Time: 90 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.
