Five Card 1-4 Box Set Review

Reviewed by astroknight  on  3/22/2003

Running Time: 114 min.

Director: Akebi Haruno

Cast: Anime featuring the voices of Inari Vachs and Tabitha Stevens

Initial Expectations: I wasn’t quite sure what to expect going into this one, but had some hopes.

Initial Reaction: It’s a decent series, but the set leaves me feeling ripped off.

Who Should Watch It : Anybody who likes anime or is curious about it

Who Should Avoid It: Anybody wanting to watch consensual sex or wants to feel a little value for their buck

Audio /Video Quality: The technical aspects are pretty impressive. The audio is clear and well balanced, as is the video. There aren’t any great feats of animation here, but for Japanese anime, it looks about as good as I’ve seen it.

Music: The music is about the same as what you hear on Japanese cartoons today, or at least it sounded about like what I heard in the thirty seconds of Pokemon I once endured. It’s nicely balanced with the rest of the audio, and fits the cartoon feel very well.

Menus: The menus are animated with the same feel as the movie. The main menu has a nice little bit of animation, and the chapter menu lets you choose a scene based on a small clip of the scene and a scene title.

The Feature: The Five Card boxed set consists of four DVDs: Five Card 1, Five Card 2, Five Card 3, Five Card 4. Since I covered each of these DVDs previously, I’ll cover some general points here and leave out most of the details on each individual episode.

Five Card revolves around Daina Nariyuki, one of the most popular teaches in school. He’s young, charming, handsome, and he knows it. His main goal, however, is to get in the pants of four of his students, a jock, a bookworm, the student council vice president, and a loner, as well as his assistant. Unfortunately, Onikuma, the dean of students and basketball coach, has plans of his own for many of Daina’s planned conquests.

The plot is nicely done. The characters aren’t overly strong, but each person seems to remain about the same throughout the series. Daina changes a little towards the end, but when one looks at the series as a whole you can see a gradual progression and his change is a big part of what left me liking the series. Each episode adds a little to the overall plot, and develops things little by little while balancing itself well with the sex scenes. There are also nice changes in mood throughout the plot sequences, which is a very nice touch that shows some thought going into the overall series.

As usual with Japanese animated adult films, however, there are some very dark and taboo themes. Each episode features rape, girls being drugged, pedophilia, and other themes that most people without a criminal record are happy to avoid. That said, there’s also a lot of consensual sex, and each episode also has at least one scene where there’s a lot of love and more than a little chemistry between the animated characters. Normally the darker scenes would really bother me, but they didn’t bother me quite as much here as they normally would. They fit into the plot rather than feeling like they were what was expected to be there, and the brighter scenes balanced them out very nicely. I hate to take a step down Riley road, but the pedophile scenes were some of the best scenes in the series. The sex was obviously consensual and there was a great feel of love in each of them. They also fit into the plot just as well as the darker scenes.

Five Card is a decent series, and deserves to be seen as a whole. The story progresses nicely from episode to episode, and the sex balances light and dark very well. Sadly, this should be a single DVD rather than a box set, as you could fit the entire box on one of the DVDs in the set rather than four. I couldn’t help but have a bad feeling about this set because of it, and as much as I want to recommend it, I also want people to avoid it. If you are interested in it, I’d strongly considering renting an episode first to make sure you like it before buying one or all of the episodes.

To me, box sets like Five Card make NuTech look like a moneygrubbing company who wants to milk porn fans for every dollar they can get from them rather than putting out a product that anime fans would feel proud to pick up . While NuTech puts out sets like this, companies like A18 / Central Park and Kitty are putting out entire series on one DVD, such as Night Shift Nurses and Slight Fever Syndrome. If that’s not enough, you can pick up the DVDs from A18 / Central Park and Kitty that have the entire series on them for just a few bucks more than you could pick up one of NuTech’s Five Card DVDs that don’t even last a half hour, and they look just as good and have as many or more extras.

Sadly, from what I understand of authoring costs, NuTech could have authored the entire series onto one DVD for the same price as authoring just one episode on a DVD. I’ve heard from a couple places the NuTech all but stole the rights to these features, so they don’t have a lot of money into developing them. Cutting their processing and shipping costs by a quarter, as well as reducing the amount of stock and products they’d have to handle, should make putting out a DVD with an entire series like this much more affordable for people, while probably letting NuTech make just as much money on it. Yes, I knew what I was getting into when I bought this set, and even though the series surpassed my expectations, I still feel a bit ripped off. That’s not a feeling any company should be proud of leaving their customer with, but from what appears to be much of the thought behind the Five Cards box set, I just don’t think NuTech gives a damn.

Extras: The extras are the same on each of the four Five Card DVDs. There are three photo galleries, one for Tabitha Stevens, one for Inari Vachs, and one for the feature. Each gallery lasts about two minutes with six seconds per very nice looking full screen photo. The B-side of the DVD is also devoted to trailers of other Nu-Tech movies.

Themes: Straight, non-consensual sex, rape, prostitution, group, lesbian, toys, masturbation, slavery, drugs, pedophile, and anal

Raincoat Factor: Medium High

Condom Usage: None.

Overall: Currently, the boxed set of the Five Card series can be found online for between $25 and $77 with many stores offering it for around $40 and only two stores offering it under $42. At $25, this is pretty fair, but even that is a bit on the high side. I’d recommend renting an episode of this series before you buy it since it isn’t for everybody, as well as hating the type of attitude NuTech seems to put forward with releases like this.

Note to NuTech: It looks like your marketing scheme is to gradually bleed people’s money away rather than giving them a decent product at a fair price. With companies like A18 / Central Park and Kitty offering a similar product at a better price and more attractive offering, such as offering entire anime series on one DVD (which would have been easy to do here) for roughly the same price as what you get for a single episode, as well as giving them extras and a great transfer. I’m sure your competition is very happy to have you continuing to produce DVDs like this. It’s the best help they could hope for.

If you have any questions or comments, please e-mail me .

Other reviews by Astroknight