Midnight Panther

The anime follows the traveling musical group "The Pussy Cats" are the hottest thing around. Lou, Kei and Sonya are three, sexy singers with a legion of screaming fans in every town. But these pussycats have claws. Singers by day, assassins by night, unbeknownst to their fans, The Pussy Cats are also The Midnight Panthers, female assassins who will kill anyone if the price is right. Their next target is a despotic king who rules by fear and crushes dissension with an iron fist. But for one of the Panthers, it's not just another job, it's personal.

There aren't a lot of sex scenes, and the ... sex scenes there are are short and are there to push the plot forward. Looking back at them, they're pretty quaint considering the amount of high quality explicit porn that we have these days. There wasn't much in the way of hentai to see back when this was released in the mid 90s, so the few short sex scenes that Midnight Panther had to offer had to do. This series only technically counts as a hentai since the sex is explicit to some extent.

But on the other hand, this 2 episode OVA is actually pretty fun watch. The animation is actually pretty good, the action scenes are are fun to watch, the English dub is actually enjoyable to some degree, and all of the characters feel fleshed out, and even have some character development, which I'm pretty sure has to do with the fact that it's based on a 4-volume manga, where the characters and world have a lot more going on.

In fact, this anime reminded me of another favorite, Words Worth, and lo and behold, the director, script, and storyboard artist for this was Shigenori Kageyama, who also did the same on Words Worth, sans directing, along with Rinshin, who was the Animation Director, Character Designer, and Key Animator on that series, along with doing the art for the manga. So I guess if you like Word's Worth, this is probably worth checking out for you.

If you don't mind putting up with an occasional semi-explicit sex scene, I can recommend Midnight Panther as something that you could watch outside of it's wank material, which is rarity for a hentai series. I know that is not something that you would expect from your jerk off material, and it feels weird recommending a hentai for something other than it's intended use, but I'd still recommend Midnight Panther as a short fun watch.

This is one of the more obscure titles. Laying hands on uncensored version took abit of time, but it paid off in the end.

It was fun to watch. It combines some dark comedy, fairly gory violence, hilarious plot twists, adorable main characters, stereotypical bad guys (which somehow don't even irritating despite being cliche as hell) and some decent vanilla sex scenes, all in a fantasy setting.

If you in for some fap material though this probably won't do.

The only really bad thing with this - it's only 2 episodes. It really felt they could've done whole 12 episodes series with this, which could result in higher ... score.

I do not normally watch Hentai, in fact, most times it’s because someone has asked me to review it. There is a lot of Hentai out there that is made for shock value and I am normally grossed out by how the woman are treated as sex objects or the whole anime is revolved around some guy or girl getting laid. This one however had a very interesting plot element and story. I think I have to thank the fact that this was a 23 volume manga before it became an OVA.

Let’s start talking about the characters. Just a small warning that spoilers may end ... up being part of this review as it’s a very large portion of the OVA. There isn’t much that we know about Sonya and Kei, we probably get more in the manga but I never read it. All I know is that both of them are rather sexually active in their job, one turning into a leopard and the other using her hair to strangle the men. We also don’t get much on the Old Hag who has no name. She seems to be like how Charlie’s Angels had Charlie, the boss who told them their orders, took care of them, and gave them what they need to do the job. Unlike Charlie, we see the Old Hag whether we want to or not, mostly not for me. I just always felt very uneasy when she came on the screen, partly because her mouth looks like she has a mustache and partly because she seems to be the comedy in this. She forces Lou to hunt down ingredients for her alchemy while sending the other two out to kill.

Lou is the most interesting of the group in my opinion. Her story begins long before the Old Hag found her and saved her from dieing when she was a child but this is the point where it becomes a bit of a spoiler. While they do lay down most of the story for you in the first episode, I still consider it slightly spoilers. She used to be the ‘brother’ of King Bad a long time ago, until he killed off his mother and Father for the throne. He would of killed Lou too if not for her falling off the side of the castle. They never explained how Bad ended up going crazy but from glimpses of the past, you can piece together that he was extremely in love with Lou.

Hentai’s don’t do it for me because I’m more interested in stories then to just here the slap slap slap of two people banging. There was rarely any sex in this even if there was a lot of fan service and sexual descriptions so it opened up a lot for the story to come out. That and I did like how the women did not just want to have sex, they had a reason they were seducing them.

The animation is… well it isn’t the greatest but it isn’t bad. It reminds me a lot of the first season of ‘The Slayers’ in that it is a very old style. The characters are pretty well detailed with shadows and colors that are bright and set the mood. This goes also for the backgrounds which were mostly medieval style castles and forests. The only gripe I had with the main characters designs were their proportions being a little off like the women’s legs being way to long or the hips of the men look like they could break in half with how thick their chests are. The Old Hag is the one I really wish we didn’t have to see. She seems to be like rubber in how she bends, talks, and even jumps. Sometimes it was so fast that it looked like she was a slide show like the frames couldn’t keep up with her. I can understand the comedy in the way she and Lou react to each other, but she didn’t feel like she fit at all in the story.

For those that love subs, I did watch the sub version of this OVA and found it to be not that bad. The voices were rather decent and fit he characters well but I could not fully grasp the emotion of the translation. The only one that seemed to stand out was if a character was turned on or trying to be sexy… which I guess is all you really need for a hentai. The music didn’t stand out to much for me so I really don’t have much to say on that and the sex sounds were pretty much what you would expect for a hentai, loud and sloppy…

This was one of the better hentai’s I have seen more so for the story then for anything else. It’s a ok one to check out if you want a good story with a small bit of hentai.