Discipline Vol. #2

By Chris Beveridge     April 25, 2006
Release Date: March 31, 2006



What They Say
Sex Battle Continues for Craving Ultimate Pleasure!
Maiko and her gang manages to rescue Takuro and Saori from the hand of Reona, the leader of social club. Soon after, Reona gets caught and detained inside a cage to receive extreme sex lessons and is disgraced by someone who holds a grudge on her. Her pride being torn apart, Reona suspects Maiko as a culprit and tries to give her the same disgrace but...

The Biggest Crisis Hits the St. Alcadia where All Girls are Into Kinky Stuff!
Reina, the board chairman of St. Alcadia, forces her sister, Reona to wear virtue band so that Reona can not have sex with anybody in the school. Reona thinks it's unfair that only she can not enjoy sex. So she tries to give all the students the same feeling. She makes up the law to ban all the sexual acts in the school.

Around same time, academy was stunned by the report of terrific incidents that a mysterious foreign student has been having sex with girl after girl. And this person has let all girls reach orgasm. Reona gets angry and starts searching for this criminal who breaks her rule!

The Review!
Leona continues to try and dominate the school with her methods and demands of no sexual contact between men and women, but is it all just a big misunderstanding?

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. This volume attempts to minimize the issue by shrinking down the logo some more and generally making it light so it has less of a footprint, but just like the first volume my eye was continually drawn to it on my set. 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:
Though they have pretty minimal roles in this volume, the cover artwork for the release shows off its very stylized and detailed designs with two of the women from the series in very little other than 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 from the first volume 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 concludes with the second volume of two OVA episodes as the situation spikes up almost out of control before we learn it's all a case of a simple misunderstanding. The opening volume to the series, while not as strong as it could have been, provided for some very shiny character designs and sexual situations but felt like it was missing something critical that would make it, well, engaging.

The third episode here picks up where things left off with Takuro and Saori being held by Leona where she's doing her best to try and get what she can from the unknowing super stud. This doesn't go on for too long though as Maiko and her bizarre little group of men in black take down the social club and actually kidnap Leona for their own plans, plans where they put her through the kind of torture that she'd not even dreamed of performing on someone else before. Her take down isn't exactly brutal but when she's finally freed it only serves to inspire her more when her goons are able to capture Maiko and do the same to her. It's like a strange little fest of orgies going on with leather clad faceless men with electric shocks on their members reluctantly having sex with a really hot blonde woman.

The competition of sorts between Leona and Maiko ends up coming up in front of Reina again but she's got her own plans underway to get the school properly taught in the way of sex. While Leona is set in her crusade to keep men and women apart and sex non-existent on campus, a new woman named Linda Hamilton has arrived and she's been messing around behind the scenes in her quest to oversex the campus. She's reached her final goal, as seems to be with everyone, of getting her hands on Takuro after she's able to easily dispose of Saori. It only gets weirder from there as Leona starts taking on B-Ko like proportions as weird mecha start arriving as she's intent on putting down this strange little insurrection.

Discipline's strong points are similar to the first volume in that it's the character designs and the uniforms that the girls are wearing that are the draw. Most of the women continue to be really attractive and the uniforms are so nicely designed and with such detail in some scenes that it's surprising they maintained the quality throughout. The animation is very fluid in most of the scenes and the actual sex scenes are well done as it avoids doing a lot of repetition or speed-up sequences. In the end though, I keep coming back to the story just feeling weak, somewhat convoluted in a way and not really much of a draw since it doesn't seem to really have anything to do with anything in the long run. The more the characters talk, the less interested I became in what they had to say and the show came down to just enjoying the action scenes and that's it.

In Summary:
Discipline has it's good points and is certainly enjoyable but the less thought you put into it the more enjoyable it'll probably be. It just feels like certain things never get explained well enough, the characters tend to be just a bit too mean at times and a bit over the top in some regards. I love the character designs and the uniforms and the sex in general is pretty good but it's a mixed package overall. Those that are fans will be pleased by the release unless video bugs annoy them but those that don't care will have a crisp clean transfer with a good sub and dub on it. I hope that if Amorz releases more material that they don't have to put the video bug on it since it's a distraction that doesn't make me want to go back to this release or see other things by them.

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

Review Equipment
Panasonic PT50LC13 50" LCD RP HDTV, Toshiba HD-A1 Progressive Scan HD DVD player via HDMI -> DVI with upconversion set to 1080i, Sony STR-DE835 DD/DTS receiver, Monster component cable and Panasonic SB-TP20S Multi-Channel Speaker System With 100-Watt Subwoofer.