There's a lot of pleasure going on here but often not for everyone involved.
What They Say:
Get ready for some hardcore bondage and hot hentai sex at our special bondage training academy! These girls are bound for your pleasure, so let your imagination run wild and have your way with them.
Audio:
The audio presentation for this release is done with a single language mix as we get the Japanese track in stereo encoded at 192kbps. With the age and rather general low quality of the actual production itself, the encoding and the mix itself aren't a surprise nor is the end result. It's certainly not bad or problematic, but it lacks anything other than throwing the material out the center channel and letting it all hang out there. Dialogue is clean and clear, which is good since many scenes are just stills, and it's free of problems so you can enjoy the aural experience.
Video:
The transfer for this show is presented in its original full-frame aspect ratio. The sixty-minute feature is made up of several different shows so there's a different look and quality of materials to be had here. There's a mix of traditionally animated material here and some digital animation material as well so there are obviously differences between the two. The older material looks decent but it has a rougher feel and the backgrounds tend to be noisier. The newer scenes tend to be a lot cleaner and with few problems overall outside of some mild noise during panning sequences. Some cross-coloration creeps in as well but is fairly minimal overall, especially in comparison to the line noise when it comes to the older clips. Colors are generally good and there's a mostly solid feel to the bulk of it. The disparity in the materials is pretty obvious and a little off-putting at times.
Packaging:
Generally, I'm a fan of the covers that Adult Source Media creates as they do some neat things to make it appealing, even when dealing with a show that looked awful twenty years ago. This cover doesn't fit the bill though as it takes material from within the show itself, notably one of the girls from one of the last segments, and has her bound up pretty as you please. It lacks the kind of style we've seen on numerous releases of theirs and almost feels a bit cheap. The back cover takes a couple of the girls together for a very up-front scene with full nudity as the hardcore cover is facing outward. We get a series of six raunchy shots from the show as well with plenty of nudity that lets you know what you're in for. The summary is non-existent since it's just buzzing for the show itself while the remainder is given over to the basic technical bits and some logos. The cover is reversible, though it's only the back cover that's really any different, as it adds the non-graphic material of one of the girls. Amusingly, the front cover's "soft" version has the same artwork but with far more ropes around her chest.
Menu:
The menu design is nicely done as it takes the front cover artwork from the hardcore version and places it along the left side. The character artwork is decent here with its soft design and the color mix. The logo along the top is done the same as the covers' while the background itself is essentially a CG blur of various widgets in blue. Navigation is straightforward and easy to use and submenus load quickly and without problem. With this being a monolingual release, player presets aren't a problem at all.
Extras:
The only extra included in here is a nearly two-minute slideshow (animated) of scenes from the feature to some hard-rocking music that makes it all go by very fast, though it is a short loop of music.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
My distaste for hentai clip shows certainly goes back a long way, though there are occasionally some things that work well as we found out with Sexual Education. With Bound to Please, the same premise is applied but with the shift in material towards domination, light bondage, and overall just a lot of angry men. It's not terribly bondage-heavy which you might get the impression of going by the front cover, but there are some bits in there and plenty of dominating sequences as well. And similar to past clip shows, yes, it is done dub only which is probably what bothers me more than the mediocre material itself. Having it in Japanese wouldn't exactly make it sound better, because honestly, adult actors are adult actors on either side of the ocean and they're not going to be the cream of the crop, but I still have this weird adherence to wanting to hear the original material even in clip form as it was supposed to be presented.
There are no real surprises here with this title and little of the material was really all that appealing in clip form, not that it would be much more so in full story mode. The show has a couple of clips that run across multiple segments here, such as the main one with one girl in a gang situation that gets visited a couple of times. A lot of the clips tend to focus on women in school (college!) who are being set upon by their classmates. Some of it is generally willing where they're just unsure of it all and act shy and very submissive while other scenes have them being taken completely and totally. Sadly, what a lot of the scenes feature are just a lot of very angry men doing crude things to the girls that they don't want to have happen to them. There's definitely some very good dom/sub material out there and good bondage material within and without that as well, but none of it makes it into this clip show and very little of what's here is appealing.
The actual sex bits themselves are decent enough overall as they run the gamut of styles and types. It plays with toys, it has filming going on, it has the gang scene as mentioned, lots of multiple group sessions and there's even a church scene that features nuns with their headgear on going at it with some poor young girl who hasn't a clue why this is going on. Or at least it feels that way to the viewer for the surprisingly short segment it runs. But there are some serious nunsploitation fans out there who love to know every little bit of nun erotica. With a lot of the dom-type shows, you get a wider range of what's going on because almost everything is on the table (including the girls!) and they do their best to try and shock. Thankfully, the scatological material here is very minimal with only one scene that stands out in memory.
In Summary:
While they push hard on the whole hardcore and heavy bondage angle, it's surprisingly light with it and it tends to play more with the "mainstream" view of what bondage is as well as the dom/sub angle. What we get here is the porn version of it as opposed to the real version of it, though that's hardly a surprise. But it's also what keeps people from exploring it properly and discovering what it is that they may really like. This show wasn't one that I was terribly interested in even if it was bilingual but there are a couple of decent scenes mixed in with the below average pieces that may make it worthwhile for the fan of this particular genre. The dub-only angle really is bothersome but at least the release is generally well put together and free of problems.
Review Equipment:
Sony KDL70R550A 70'' LED 1080P HDTV, Sony PlayStation3 Blu-ray player via HDMI set to 1080p, Onkyo TX-SR605 Receiver and Panasonic SB-TP20S Multi-Channel Speaker System With 100-Watt Subwoofer.