Lesbian Ward Box Set

By Chris Beveridge     July 27, 2004
Release Date: April 11, 2004



What They Say
Contains both DVD volumes of Lesbian Ward in one 2-disc box!

Ryoka University Hospital is a prestigious medical center consisting solely of women. At night, the hospital begins a special type of treatment meant only for VIPs.

The nurses must do as the head nurse says, whether it be taking a bath in semen or shaving their head. It will be a long night for Yuka, as there is no dawn for the Lesbian Ward.

The Review!
Sometimes they come up with something just so offbeat that it manages to both be interesting and revolting in the same breath. Lesbian Ward leans more towards the revolting.

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 two OVAs here look quite good. 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 character animation doesn't quite blend with the background shots as well as some other series but it's fairly decent for hentai and doesn't look like their sitting on top of the backgrounds or completely divorced from it.

Packaging:
Released on two discs inside the standard thin cardboard wrapper box, the release overall looks fairly decent in terms of the artwork. Each of the individual keepcases shows different nurses from the cast, the first cover showing a lot of them while the second volume has just two of them. And no, that's not snow falling in the artwork. The back of the keepcases are simple in layout with a batch of pictures along the top and two unusually short paragraphs for the shows summary. The usual round of production information and the bloated features listing NuTech employs to give the illusion of things being there is along the bottom. 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 the image from the first volume cover artwork as its main image. . The back side provides both summaries and a number of the photograph pictures as well.

Menu:
The menu layout uses some parts of the character artwork from their respective covers and has some obscured animation clips of the sex scenes playing in the background to part of the opening vocal song. The layout is standard material for these releases with no surprises at all. The access times are nice and fast and as usual our player preset languages are ignored.

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)
Oh so deceptive. Lesbian Ward. Lesbians. It's like a moth to a flame. Even the nurse aspect could be potentially interesting. But then as it starts up and things start unfolding, it becomes clear: the medical profession in the hentai world is now overrun with scat, scat and more scat. Just when you think it's empty, pow, more scat.

Lesbian Ward's two episodes are set up in a different way than usual. Each episode contains a couple of smaller stories within the larger context. Often the stories are told through the voice of Yuka, one of the more prominent nurses in the hospital who does a lot with the others since her own training is complete and she's hoping to rise in level. Each of the vignettes is self-contained so you can just go to one and get what you want and be happy or just watch the whole thing in one bit scatacular festival.

The premise is fairly simple. We're taken to Ryoka University Hospital which is a very profitable and well thought of hospital. By day at least. The hospitals owner and director has left things in the hands of his daughter while he is away, and she along with the director have had their own plans in the works for some time. By day, the hospital is quite respectable and the model of modern medicine. At night, the VIPs are more than well taken care of by the nursing staff, a staff that's seemingly all female. Each of the VIPs have their own personal nurse who attends to their needs by bringing them off as they watch the special shows that are played out on the cameras for them.

The special shows are fairly varied. The opening one brings Yuka to indoctrinate their latest acolyte, Minako, into the order that the owners daughter has set up in secret. Her baptism of sorts is performed by Yuka bringing her to climax inside a pool of semen that is taken from all the men in the hospital. The full pool has both of them going at each other in all sorts of ways, from simple hand to hand pleasure to Yuka bringing out a gun with a pretty freaking scary looking dildo on it. The amount of semen in this show that's taken from the men and VIPs comes into play in a lot of sequences, from the director wearing a semen filled condom on her strap on and having one of the nurses suck that off to enemas and more. This one is all over the place in the kinds of shows that are put on for the VIPS as everyone is willingly doing what they're told to do to each other by those they adore.

Mixing in the religious side with the order of girls that the director sets up, the show takes on a fervent tone at times and some of the climax scenes have some surprisingly good music tied to it that are quite evocative. What's even more surprising is that the show actually features a vocal opening/ending song, something that's quite rare in hentai releases these days. These aspects add a bit more of a full feeling to the two episodes and helps to give it something that's not in a lot of other shows.

What does not work too well is the character designs. The characters aren't all that attractive in some strange way. The characters feel almost a little too round and soft, their faces almost a bit bubble like and their bodies look more like an amateur's model designs that didn't flesh out the basic circles into something more form accurate. There's also a general lack of detail to the designs, leaving things to more swaths of solid colors. The designs aren't bad per se, but there's something almost vaguely disturbing about them as they're edging towards something that just feels, well, too young.

In what's becoming a standard complaint about NuTech's hentai titles though, I have to say that I'm becoming increasingly annoyed with their 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.

In Summary:
Lesbian Ward had me cringing throughout a lot of it with what was going on, particularly combined with the character designs. There's always a part that's fascinated to see something new and creative in shows like these and Lesbian Ward certainly brings some new things to the table (and promptly inserts them into the girls) but it's just not something that's all that appealing. The vignette style stories within the episodes is a nice touch though and helps break up what could otherwise have been just a string of monotonous scatological moments.

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.