Discipline Vol. #1

By Chris Beveridge     April 06, 2006
Release Date: January 24, 2006



What They Say
Lesson 1: Welcome to the all-girls dormitory!
It felt like heaven when Takuro Hayami first transferred to St. Alcadia School with its all girls dormitory! The babes are luscious and Saori Otokawa, the caretaker, is the hottest of them all. Being extravagantly welcomed by the girls, his expectations for a heavenly school life were huge. But his bubble began to burst when the beautiful but malicious Morimoto sisters, who actually control the school, try and control Takuro when they discover his hidden "Ultimate Sex Power."

Lesson 2: Girl's Battle Royal has Begun!
Reona Morimoto, who controls the school, solicits Takuro to join her "Social Club." Her only intention is to have his "Ultimate sex Power" just for herself. He refuses with all his might, but rumor about his sexual power has spread in the school. Now, aside from the "Social Club," the Tennis, Swimming and other clubs started soliciting Takuro! Irritated, Reona kidnaps and imprisons Takuro's love interest, Saori, to lure Takuro into visiting her club.

The Review!
When Takurou arrives at his new academy as a transfer student, he's learning that he's a most wanted commodity by most of the women there for good reason.

Audio:
For our primary viewing session, we listened to this show in its English language adaptation. Both it and the Japanese tracks are in their standard stereo mix which is pretty decent but unexceptional. Most of it is very full sounding across the forward soundstage with little in the way of real directionality. For the most part, these are both pretty standard mixes for an adult show. In listening to both tracks, we had no problems with dropouts or distortions during regular playback.

Video:
Originally released to video in 2003, the transfer for these OVAs is presented in their original full frame aspect ratio. The source materials are in gorgeous shape here and the transfer lets it all shine beautifully for the most part. Between the vibrant colors and detailed designs there's almost always plenty to look at there that looks great. Colors maintain a very solid feel while backgrounds avoid macroblocking. Some of the backgrounds have a very minor color gradient that's sometimes visible but it's very minor overall. The transfer avoids both aliasing and cross coloration which leaves us with what would be a gorgeous print overall. Where this all goes wrong is that there is branding throughout the entire program with the 'Amorz' logo in the very extreme bottom right corner. Due to this, I consider the video edited all the way through, hence the grading. This is completely unacceptable in this day and age.

Packaging:
The cover artwork for the release shows off its very stylized and detailed designs with two of the lead women from the series in very little " though still wearing their school stockings. The background is a very indistinct piece that's of a school hallway but it serves to keep the focus on the character artwork which is just gorgeous here. The back cover breaks down the release into the two episodes here and provides screenshots and summaries for each of them along with the episode titles. At the bottom we get a very small technical grid that covers all the basics you need to know about the release in terms of languages and options. No insert is included with the release nor is the cover reversible.

Menu:
Using a portion of the front cover artwork of Leona looking backwards, that fills up most of the right half of the menu while the left half has the basic navigation selection strip as some of the instrumental music from the show plays along to it. The layout is pretty simple with a bland blue background but having individual episode access is a plus as is the way the audio setup menu doesn't send you back to the main menu every time you make a selection. Access times are nice and fast and the disc correctly read our players' language presets and played accordingly.

Extras:
The extras are pretty minimal but rare on adult releases anyway as the volume has both a gallery of shots from the show and a series of production sketches.

Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
Discipline is one of the more popular adult series released in the last few years and going by the first two episodes on this volume released by Amorz it's not hard to see why. The show features a lot of sex, a lot of gorgeous women and... well, what else does it really need at that point beyond a willing male star?

The series starts off with the introduction of Takurou, a newly transferred student at the St Alcadia School. Due to his late arrival he's found himself residing in one of the girls dormitories which is a really big expansive house that's barely filled. Only a few women currently reside there but one of them is the gorgeous Saori, a student who is quite eager to show Takurou around as she becomes enamored of him in a typical schoolgirl way. The other girls in the house are a bit more skewed than her though as they're all heavily into sex and pleasuring themselves which leads to some amusing situations as Saori shows him about. For Takurou, he's convinced he's landed in heaven.

Takurou's arrival is something that's seemingly been talked about for some time as a number of women are after him right from the start, complete with some interesting footage of how he performs. Takurou's got the strange ability to, once hard, expand the size of his penis even more which will unleash a massive wave of release upon climax. This ability seems to fascinate all the women who get close to him and when it happens in person they're just positively excited by the development, even if their own bodies have a hard time handling the super-sized Takurou. As it turns out, the big club on campus is the Social Club as lead by Leona and her sisters. She's intent in her dominating way to acquire Takurou and have his "ultimate sex power" all to herself, which is something that Saori tries to keep him safe from with little luck. Along the way, numerous women from both sides try to make their play at him which leads him into a number of strong sexual encounters.

Discipline is filled with gorgeous character designs and it's one of its best selling points. While some of the girls are in the larger than reality realm of breast size, they thankfully avoid that size of being so large that you can't help but roll your eyes every time you see them. There's a good amount of variety between the numerous women here but the larger size is favored so there's a lot of fun to be had there. As attractive as the individual characters are, particularly Saori, the show also excels at the uniform design which is just fantastic. These are creative and detailed designs that help the show really stand out above your average school based show.

The release, the first from Amorz, isn't without fault however. The subtitles are fairly decent for the most part in their small white format but there are a number of places where spaces are added where they shouldn't be, improper capitalization and other small issues. The English language dub, while welcome, is more reminiscent of dubs from several years ago with below average performances almost entirely across the board. When they can't even say the names in Japanese anywhere close to what they're supposed to sound like it takes you out if it entirely at first. And lastly but not least is the video bug that's on the lower right corner with the distributors name. I despise it because my eyes are constantly drawn to it and I consider its placement there to be an alteration on every frame of the video which is just unacceptable.

In Summary:
Discipline is an enjoyable show that's marred by a couple of issues depending on how you view the show and whether the video bug will bother you. There's a lot to like about the show itself through with its character designs, gorgeous costumes and strong sex scenes. The plot is pretty simple at this point and not much of one at that but it's leading to Takurou getting to have sex with a lot of different women over the course of the first two episodes. Amorz has definitely got some things going for it with this release such as being bilingual and having two episodes so there is plenty to counter the problems, which will be different depending on how you watch the show. Discipline could have been an outright easy recommendation otherwise.

Features
Japanese 2.0 Language,English 2.0 Language,English Subtitles,Art Galley,Production Sketches

Review Equipment
Panasonic PT50LC13 50" LCD RP HDTV, Zenith DVB-318 Progressive Scan codefree DVD player via DVI set to 480p, Sony STR-DE835 DD/DTS receiver, Monster component cable and Panasonic SB-TP20S Multi-Channel Speaker System With 100-Watt Subwoofer.