Lingeries Box Set (of 1)

By: Chris Beveridge
Review Date: Wednesday, July 21, 2004
Release Date: Sunday, April 11, 2004



What They Say
As Yusuke Nakonishi begins his new job at the Best Beauty Body Lingerie Company, little does he know that he's about to find himself in the center of a ring of business and sexual intrigue. Charged to disrupt and eliminate the cohorts of an opposing faction, Nakonishi thrusts himself on the prowl after three of his sexy co-workers around whom this sex drama spirals. His first target is Alice Nonoyama, an indentured sex servant who is forced to submit to the perverse whims of her bosses and clients. Can he win her heart and keep himself in the clear while the bewitching Rena looms menacingly? Watch the sex packed action as Nakonishi tries to free this hot blonde from her chains of debauchery, and in doing so, enslaver her himself.

The Review!
It's an office drama hentai that's set in a lingerie design company. Simply put, how perfect is that?

Audio:
For our primary viewing session, we listened to this show in its original language of Japanese. The mix for it is standard fare for hentai so there wasn't much surprising about it. Dialogue is good and clean and generally center channel based. There's some use of the stereo channels for music and some of the moaning and grunting as they get creative once in awhile, but otherwise it's the usual routine. We didn't have any issues with dropouts or distortions during regular playback.

Video:
Originally released to video back in 2001, the three OVAs here from Green Bunny look fantastic. The shows colors are from a rich vibrant palette that's well used here and manages to avoid problematic things like cross coloration or aliasing. There's some chroma noise in a few scenes around some characters hair edges, but that was pretty minimal in general. The look and feel of the show isn't quite as detailed and fluid as some of Green Bunny's earlier more traditionally animated works, but Lingeries comes across really well here.

Packaging:
Released on three discs inside the standard thin cardboard wrapper box, the release overall looks really slick for the packaging. Each of the individual keepcases has some great looking artwork with the characters being given a good full shot while using simple backgrounds with one or two colors. Mixing in pieces from the office setting, the third cover is probably one of the best with the young woman leaning back on the copy machine half naked and covering herself with blank paper. The blush is just perfect. The back of the keepcases are similar in layout with a section of larger pictures along the top that's followed by a series of photographs lining down the right. Each has a surprisingly lengthy summary and the usual round of production information and the bloated features listing NuTech employs to give the illusion of things being there. As is standard with NuTech releases, no inserts are included in these releases. The thin cardboard box, which is little more than a wrapper really, uses a different image for its main panel of one of the office girls partially undressed on her boss's desk with him getting ready to have fun with her. The back side provides all three summaries and a number of the photograph pictures as well. The spine goes with an erotic piece of artwork as well with Alice doing part of the shows presentation sequence.


Menu:
Each menu utilizes their respective cover artwork with that piece being static while music plays along and some animation runs behind it. The layout is standard material for NuTech releases with little real variation but these look really good just due to the excellent artwork included. Access times are nice and fast and the layout is easy to navigate. On the downside, the discs did not read our players preset language settings and played English without subtitles.

Extras:
The only included extra on each volume is a series of stills from that particular episode in a video gallery.

Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
I have to say right up front that I'm becoming increasingly annoyed with NuTech releases as they continue to cut corners. While the shows presentation and actual content is fantastic, their treatment of the subtitle track is just getting worse and worse. While the track is about 90% accurate to the original script and the English dub is being faithful while adding more vulgarities to it, the fact that the subtitle track is being timed to the English dub is making it difficult to watch these shows. Segments of nothing being said but there being subtitles are become as common as segments where there's talking but nothing subtitled. The bulk of the story gets through but when you hit these areas it takes you completely out of the show. It's extremely annoying as is the increasing number of misspellings that are cropping up.

That said, the Lingeries 3 episode OVA series is a very enjoyable piece of work. Set inside the big company Best Beauty Body, we're introduced to Yusuke Nakanishi of Temp Careers. He's been hired by the son of the company president to take over as a section chief. That's his cover at least as the president's son is actually giving him another assignment. One of the VP's and his faction are working up something that's detrimental to the company's future under his father but they don't have the evidence to back up their beliefs about a take over or some other hostile intent. So Nakanishi's hiring is to find out what he can before the next company meeting in three months and stop that faction from doing whatever it is they're planning.

Nakanishi is given charge of one of the sections that practically nobody cares about and it works to his advantage at first since it lets him concentrate on getting to know the people around there and doing his investigations. Of course, in every group there's always one of them in there and in this one it's a young go getter named Mayumi who pushes her idea for "seamless lingerie" on her new chief. To her surprise, he gives her the go ahead to get it done and starts using it to make his way to interacting with various department heads such as advertising and research so he can check out and interrogate those who are believed to be aligned with the VP's faction. From the gorgeous blonde Alice to the cold but terribly slutty Rena in advertising, Nakanishi goes one by one and gets the information he needs to build his case all while bringing about a new product line.

Lingeries has two plots going forward and mixes in a lot of really great sex scenes, some consenting and some not. The only downside to some of the scenes is that we get the old man VP himself involved and quite frankly I still don't like it when the skin and bones old guy is having his way with the women in anime. In the real world, fine fine, but here, no thank you. At least this one doesn't talk like Yoda does. Outside of that, the character designs are fantastic and work towards titillation quite well. The blonde, Alice, is a great piece of work and a great piece of ass in the show as she falls under Nakanishi's sway early and often. There's some amusing playing with one of the girls from R&D in how he ends up manipulating her. She falls under the girl with glasses category but with the combination of an office lady uniform it's even better. One of my favorites though is Mayumi, the young girl in his group who comes up with the idea of the seamless lingerie. She's completely unlike all the other women in the show in both design and attitude so when he gets with her it's very hot.

Some of the animation tapers off in a few areas and you can see easily what's really animated and what isn't, but it's not so bad some of the really bad shows out there. There isn't a lot of repetition in scenes and the show is plenty explicit and even creative in how they show things, such as doing a "ghostly" image of Nakanishi as he explores the various women in the company.

In Summary:
Lingeries just sounded bad from the title but it turned out to be three episodes of surprisingly fun, erotic and decently plotted hentai that helped pass an otherwise dull afternoon. The character designs are solid and the inclusion of two active plot lines in addition to all the sex made it all the more interesting. While not the best Green Bunny has worked on over the years, it's a solid and fun addition to their library and this is one I can easily see watching again and again. Good stuff.

Features
Japanese 2.0 Language,English 2.0 Language,English Subtitles,Art Gallery

Review Equipment
Dell W2300 23" LCD HDTV, Panasonic DMR-E20 Progressive Scan DVD Recorder connected via Monster component cables and using the TV speakers.