Midnight Panther · review
I do not normally watch Hentai, in fact, most times it’s because someone has asked me to review it. There is a lot of Hentai out there that is made for shock value and I am normally grossed out by how the woman are treated as sex objects or the whole anime is revolved around some guy or girl getting laid. This one however had a very interesting plot element and story. I think I have to thank the fact that this was a 23 volume manga before it became an OVA. Let’s start talking about the characters. Just a small warning that spoilers may endup being part of this review as it’s a very large portion of the OVA. There isn’t much that we know about Sonya and Kei, we probably get more in the manga but I never read it. All I know is that both of them are rather sexually active in their job, one turning into a leopard and the other using her hair to strangle the men. We also don’t get much on the Old Hag who has no name. She seems to be like how Charlie’s Angels had Charlie, the boss who told them their orders, took care of them, and gave them what they need to do the job. Unlike Charlie, we see the Old Hag whether we want to or not, mostly not for me. I just always felt very uneasy when she came on the screen, partly because her mouth looks like she has a mustache and partly because she seems to be the comedy in this. She forces Lou to hunt down ingredients for her alchemy while sending the other two out to kill.
Lou is the most interesting of the group in my opinion. Her story begins long before the Old Hag found her and saved her from dieing when she was a child but this is the point where it becomes a bit of a spoiler. While they do lay down most of the story for you in the first episode, I still consider it slightly spoilers. She used to be the ‘brother’ of King Bad a long time ago, until he killed off his mother and Father for the throne. He would of killed Lou too if not for her falling off the side of the castle. They never explained how Bad ended up going crazy but from glimpses of the past, you can piece together that he was extremely in love with Lou.
Hentai’s don’t do it for me because I’m more interested in stories then to just here the slap slap slap of two people banging. There was rarely any sex in this even if there was a lot of fan service and sexual descriptions so it opened up a lot for the story to come out. That and I did like how the women did not just want to have sex, they had a reason they were seducing them.
The animation is… well it isn’t the greatest but it isn’t bad. It reminds me a lot of the first season of ‘The Slayers’ in that it is a very old style. The characters are pretty well detailed with shadows and colors that are bright and set the mood. This goes also for the backgrounds which were mostly medieval style castles and forests. The only gripe I had with the main characters designs were their proportions being a little off like the women’s legs being way to long or the hips of the men look like they could break in half with how thick their chests are. The Old Hag is the one I really wish we didn’t have to see. She seems to be like rubber in how she bends, talks, and even jumps. Sometimes it was so fast that it looked like she was a slide show like the frames couldn’t keep up with her. I can understand the comedy in the way she and Lou react to each other, but she didn’t feel like she fit at all in the story.
For those that love subs, I did watch the sub version of this OVA and found it to be not that bad. The voices were rather decent and fit he characters well but I could not fully grasp the emotion of the translation. The only one that seemed to stand out was if a character was turned on or trying to be sexy… which I guess is all you really need for a hentai. The music didn’t stand out to much for me so I really don’t have much to say on that and the sex sounds were pretty much what you would expect for a hentai, loud and sloppy…
This was one of the better hentai’s I have seen more so for the story then for anything else. It’s a ok one to check out if you want a good story with a small bit of hentai.