Kekkai

By Chris Beveridge     May 02, 2004
Release Date: April 17, 2004



What They Say
Kyoko was found at the scene of a brutal murder by chief inspector Kaoru. Due to the shock of the incident that had taken place, Kyoko had lost her memory. Kaoru has asked Junichi, a suave psychiatrist to help cure Kyoko - but what Junichi uncovers is too astounding to believe! Who exactly is this strange girl... and what are her real connections to the murder?

The Review!
It's CSI: Hentai Division!

Audio:
For our primary viewing session, we listened to this disc in its original language of Japanese. There's little beyond a basic stereo mixing here with the majority of the sound coming through the center channel. Dialogue is nice and clear and the music and ambient effects make decent use of the left/right channels. There's little here to really do much more than a basic track anyway.

Video:
Originally released in 2003, this is another in a line of very clean looking and vibrant transfers. The show has a fair amount of bright and vibrant colors but a lot of it takes place under the cover of darkness and darkly lit rooms, which results in some scenes that would look pretty bad depending on the materials. These scenes come off well with the vibrant colors notching down appropriately but without any breakup or grain like effects. Aliasing and cross coloration are both very minimal to almost non-existent throughout.

Packaging:
The style for this cover doesn't give much to the show as it takes the lead character, Kyoko, and shows her from the first scenes we see her in but without all the blood around her, but still set against the dark dank alley she's found in. The artwork for her design is quite good though and it's an eye-catching piece since the colors stand out against the darker ones so much. The back cover has a few shots from the show and a premise as told by the story's lead character. The rest of the cover is standard boilerplate stuff for NuTech releases with staff listings and the discs meager details. As with all other NuTech hentai releases, there is no insert with this release.

Menu:
The menu uses the image of Kyoko from the cover and has the selections lined underneath her while the background has parts of the show playing along to some of the instrumental music. This is a fairly standard style menu for NuTech and it works well. Access times are nice and fast and the layout is easy to navigate and there aren't any transitional animations to deal with.

Extras:
The main anime related extra is the inclusion of a video photo gallery showing various pieces of artwork from the show.

Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
One of the continued downsides to NuTech's releasing of the single OVAs as they come out is that when you get to actually reviewing them, their disc summary is basically everything you can talk about. There's usually not much more than what's listed there going on.

With Kekkai, this is once more pretty much the case, though of course there's plenty of sex mixed in as well that they don't mention. The show brings us quickly into the dark side of things as Kaoru, a member in something called the IPC that gives her the ability to mess around in crime scenes, checks out the latest bit of grisly happenings in her city to find one dead woman (whose nipples are still quite hard after being gutted) and another woman nearby who seems comatose. Kaoru's not sure what's going on here but she's determined to get to the bottom of it. Since there's some kind of issue with the girls mind, as she just says a few phrases here and there, including naming herself as Kyoko, Kaoru has only one real plan to try.

She heads off to see Junichi, someone she's known in the past that is a solid psychiatrist. Of course, he's got his own little kinks going on during all of this with a young woman whose hair looks like magenta colored biscuit rolls. Kaoru's arrival brings some amount of tension between her and Junichi since there's some animosity going on there. He uses it to his advantage and will only help Kaoru if she does all that he asks. Of course, Kaoru agrees to it in the end and they start getting down to their own business before the business of Kyoko.

When Junichi does start dealing with Kyoko though, he's able to quickly diagnose that she's got multiple personalities and each of them are quite distinct as they begin to show themselves to him. Some are childish, others come across as bondage queens and some are just plain ordinary. But each has a distinct voice and their own little fetishes, and most of them start coming onto Junichi in their own way, something that he finds himself unable to resist at times but manages to do so through his own great will.

There's some discussion on what the violence is about that Kyoko seems to be involved with and there's the obvious point that it's likely one of her personalities, but that Junichi needs to work with her more to discover what's going on. There are a few mildly grisly moments early on in the show and some scenes that show off the damage done to another girl, but it's all pretty mild for the most part. The character designs are decent overall, though Kaoru makes out poorly at times with her outfit that makes her look much sluttier than she seems to be. It also doesn't come across as something you'd figure some form of an officer would wear either. The shows animation is pretty solid as well and looks good, so while it's a bit minimal in a few places it doesn't really feel like it was done on the cheap. The main downside to it is that it is only one episode and just feels like it ends at the wrong point.

In Summary:
Kekkai isn't a bad show but it's obviously an incomplete one. There's a couple of decent sex scenes in it but nothing really outstanding. The continued dubtitling of NuTech's releases are also problematic but it at least seems like they're keeping to the original script pretty closely for non-sex scenes, so it's an area where you and aren't upset at how they're dealing with it. Hopefully more Kekkai is in the works so that there's some sort of conclusion to the show.

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

Review Equipment
Panasonic PT50LC13 50" LCD RP HDTV, Panasonic RP-82 Progressive Scan codefree DVD player, Sony STR-DE835 DD/DTS receiver, Monster component cable and Panasonic SB-TP20S Multi-Channel Speaker System With 100-Watt Subwoofer.