Review for So I Can't Play H Collection

Introduction

It’s funny how I can watch a distributor’s fortunes wax and wane with the quality of the discs that they release. Although in MVM’s case, as they usually release discs authored in Australia or the US, they become something of a prism through which I can see the Australian or US distributors’ current state of play. One Australian company whose discs MVM have used since practically the beginning has been Madman Entertainment. There was a time when they were the only Australian company releasing anime, although Siren, and subsequently Hanabee have appeared as competitors in the last few years.


For a long time, Madman’s PAL converted anime discs were as good as they got, with imaginative menus, standardised transfers, first PAL-NTSC, and then native PAL, and recently to cut costs, the US NTSC masters. It’s cost cutting that has been most apparent in Madman’s recent output as seen through MVM’s releases. Gone are the imaginative menus, and in comes standardised authoring (something akin to Warner’s movie discs). You can see it on discs like Log Horizon, Rozen Maiden Zuruckspulen, and Outbreak Company. Gone are the play all options, episode select menus, and credits screen at the end of the disc, and in comes a simple, numerical listing of episodes (no episode titles), beneath which will be a link to audio options, and extras (for those textless credits), all against a screen of key art. It’s conveyer belt, on the cheap authoring, but it works. With So I Can’t Play H, Madman have cut costs yet again, and indeed cut corners. But this might be a corner too far!


Ryousuke Kaga is your everyday, normal high school student; normal except for his extreme perverted tendencies, and the route between his glands and his mouth bypassing his brain. It’s a good thing that his childhood friend and big-breasted classmate Mina is so forgiving of his perverted nature. And at least he’s a loud and proud honest pervert, unlike some sneaky perverts he could mention. Then one day he encounters a mysterious red-haired girl who he invites in to dry off from a rainstorm. When Lisara Restall acquiesces despite his obvious nature, Ryousuke thinks he’s struck it lucky.


But Lisara is actually looking for him. She’s a Shinigami and she’s been sent on a mission to find a person of exceptional spiritual energy to form a contract with, which will provide her with great power in her homeworld of Grimwald. Ryousuke isn’t that guy. She wants to form a temporary contract with him to give her enough energy to stay in this realm long enough to find the ideal partner. Sure enough Ryousuke isn’t exactly a font of energy. That’s until a monster attacks, and the low on power Lisara is beaten into a state of dishabille. Which is when they learn that when Ryousuke is turned on, his perverted juices flowing at maximum, that he puts out unprecedented spiritual power. That’s okay for Lisara, if wholly embarrassing, but being drained of power leaves Ryousuke a tad... flaccid. Luckily for him, he’s going to get a lot more in the way of stimulation as they search for Lisara’s ideal partner, especially as she’s not the only hot female Shinigami paying a visit to the human realm.


12 episodes of So I Can’t Play H are presented across 2 discs from MVM.

Disc 1
1. Red String of Fate?!
2. Being a Perv is Good for the Environment
3. The Dangerous Idol
4. The Gap Between Large and Small Breasts
5. Invisible Dictionary
6. Together as One

Disc 2
7. I Want To Let You...
8. Rival, Sways
9. My Kingdom Standing Tall
10. Heaven After Hell
11. Making Love Happen
12. Shut Up About H

Picture

So I Can’t Play H gets a 1.78:1 anamorphic NTSC transfer on Madman authored discs. Why they felt the need to re-author Sentai’s NTSC discs to local NTSC discs escapes me, as they should essentially be the same thing. What it does mean in this instance is that Madman have avoided the bother of player generated subtitles, about formatting them correctly, timing them accurately, and have instead opted for subtitles burnt into the print. Sentai in the US have been locking even DVD subtitles of late, but you can get around those with certain software players, or those DVD and Blu-ray players that let you shift the location of subtitles on screen. But not here! We’re back to the bad old days of subtitled VHS tapes, and you’re stuck with them.


So I Can’t Play H is available on Blu-ray in the US only, locked to Region A, not that this show actually merits it. The image is clear and sharp at times, detail levels are occasionally impressive, and colours are at least consistent and strong. But this is a show that opts for the soft focus look far too often. It’s usually when there’s some supernatural battle going on between the rapidly disrobing Shinigami, and whatever beast may be threatening them at the time, but even in the non battlefield moments the ‘camera covered in Vaseline’ look happens too often for comfort, and I began having doubts about my eyesight. On top of that, the final three episodes look like someone has sneezed on the screen. It would have been a decent looking anime, but the post-production mars it. Can you imagine watching it on a streaming site, where all the nudity would have been censored on top of that!? The icing on the cake of depression is that these discs don’t scale up all that well, merely emphasising the blurry look of the thing, while the burnt in subtitles reveal jagged outlines.

Sound

So I Can’t Play H has a DD 2.0 Japanese audio track, with burnt in English translated subtitles. The audio is adequate, the action comes across well, although it does tend to push the dialogue down, otherwise the dialogue is clear and audible, and the show’s music does what is required to move the story along. The actors are suitably cast for their roles, and the subtitles are timed accurately and free of typos. But I’ll say it again. They’re Burnt In!

Extras

The discs present their contents with static menus, episodes are numbered, not titled, and Madman have stripped the usual translated credit sequences. The extras are on disc 2, and merely listed at the bottom of the main menu, textless credits and a couple of minutes’ worth of Japanese promos and TV spots.

Conclusion

Burnt in subtitles, Madman’s authoring, the awful look of the show, it all could have been an almighty headache if I actually liked So I Can’t Play H. Fortunately for me, although not so much for the final grade, this show really is quite naff. If you like your ecchi anime, a little ‘seaside postcard, Adventures of a Window Cleaner’ sauciness, with plenty of soft focus nudity (a little too soft focus in this show), then So I Can’t Play H will fit the bill. There are plenty of naked, bouncing breasts in this show, with the nipples that most broadcast friendly anime shy away from, and you could even call it full frontal too, if you accept Barbie Doll levels of anatomical detail below the waist during the credit sequences as full frontal.


The show isn’t actually that bad during the first half of its run, an entertaining supernatural harem comedy, light on the story, heavy on the daft hijinks. One difference from the usual harem shows is that its male protagonist knows what sex is, and he wants it. He’s no blushing milquetoast, liable to trip and fall into a girl’s cleavage only to apologise profusely and back away whilst bowing, trying and failing to avoid the inevitable beating. Ryousuke’s the kind of guy who’ll trip and fall into a pair of boobs, and stay there to get acquainted, accepting the inevitable beating as a price worth paying. There’s something reassuring in see a teen heterosexual male anime protagonist behaving like a teenage heterosexual male. Of course this could make for a short, messy, and quickly cancelled show were it not for a couple of story points. One is that the all except one of the girls he encounters think of him as a pervert and keep a discreet distance. The one exception is his childhood friend, and while he does appreciate the size of her breasts, she’s still a childhood friend.


The second thing is the mechanism for his encounters with the female Shinigami once they start appearing. Incidentally, if the Shinigami in Bleach were a lot like the Shinigami here, I would have watched that show with a lot more attention. The model for this show is set when the first Shinigami, Lisara appears, looking for a source of great power, and forming a temporary contract with Ryousuke to do so. He’ll serve as a temporary battery, and at first it looks like he’s pretty weedy as a Shinigami power source. Lisara hasn’t counted on his perverted nature though, and when it’s erotic power that builds up, he could run an Energizer Bunny-girl.


It isn’t surprising to see the following pattern ensue. Lisara goes into battle with a denizen of the other world, and low on power she gets beaten pretty quickly, which causes her clothes to disintegrate. Such a vision of S&M quickly enthuses Ryousuke so that his ‘Kingdom Stands Tall’ a euphemism for the obvious off-screen development. Lisara recharges her powers by draining said Kingdom of energy (Get your minds out of the gutter! She has a magical bracelet to do that), and then she beats the monsters. The show takes a leaf from Freezing’s book in that respect, allowing the Shinigami to be stripped naked by their foes as often as required, with a recharge regenerating their clothing only to be stripped again.


The first half of the show is fun, with Lisara and Ryousuke forming a contract so that she can find her target, somewhere in the human world, which evidently lies somewhere in Ryousuke’s school. It’s complicated by the arrival of other shinigami girls of varying breast sizes, and the occasional attack by a supernatural beast. But it plays like a silly harem comedy for the most part, with plenty of compromising situations, and Ryousuke getting the appropriate beatings.


Then around the halfway mark, the show suddenly gets more serious, and generates a story. There’s one twist that seems particularly contrived with Ryousuke’s ancestry suddenly tied into Lisara’s world, and the stakes are raised as a villain advances his agenda in Grimwald, with grave consequences for the real world. Ryousuke and the Shinigami girls have to go back to Grimwald to do battle against this menace, and from this point the quality of the animation plummets, going constantly soft-focus, instead of for just the battle sequences in the real world. The silly harem comedy is pretty much forgotten in favour of battles to the stripped, and Ryousuke has to draw on his ultimate power to save the world.


Except that it doesn’t quite work like that, and the final three episodes are spent with them coming to terms with the consequences of Ryousuke’s actions. These are global consequences, but the story neglects to show us any of that, sticking instead with Ryousuke and his harem at home.


If So I Can’t Play H had stuck with the goofy saucy comedy through its run, it would have been a lot more enjoyable a show, as it certainly isn’t shy with the fan service, and it isn’t too constrained by television broadcast standards. It’s just the kind of naughtiness that works as a harem comedy, and at least the show has a creative take on keeping its male protagonist as sexually unfulfilled, beyond just keeping him as a neutered wimp. But the minute the show starts getting serious with its story is the point where the fun levels diminish, and there’s nothing there to compensate for that. But, it does have naked girls in!