Invisible Stud
What happens when you give a stupid man the ability to become invisible? Nothing good, nothing good.
What They Say:
What happens when you take a powerful invisibility potion and place it in the hands of a total pervert?
Hapless loser Mie goes from dud to stud overnight with the ability to make all his hottest dreams come true! For starters, he can now ogle all the lovely ladies inside the bath house – heck, if he plays his cards right, he can even score a home run or two!
But that’s not all. With this magic medicine, he can peep around the women’s academy at will, get even with his slut of a manager, and even spend a hot and steamy night with the girl of his dreams. But he’s gotta be careful: each dose only lasts an hour, and who knows what’ll happen if he gets caught!
The Review:
Audio:
The audio presentation for this release is pretty standard fare as we get the original Japanese language track and previously created English language track in stereo, encoded at 192kbps. Like a lot of hentai shows, it’s mostly just dialogue with a bit of very minor music here and there so the audio doesn’t get anywhere near any kind of workout. While it doesn’t stand out, it does get the job done pretty well and there aren’t any real complaints to have about it. Dialogue is clean and clear throughout and we had no problems with dropouts or distortions during regular playback on either language track.
Video:
Originally released to video in 2006, the transfer for this series is presented in its original full frame aspect ratio. Invisible Stud has some good source materials to work with here and Critical Mass has done a good job with it by using their bandwidth wisely. Outside of a few scenes where there’s some minor noise in the background, it’s a pretty clean looking show. Beyond that there’s just one or two instances where some aliasing shows up during a pan but that’s it. Invisible Stud isn’t a standout show with its animation but it’s presentation here is pretty solid and essentially problem free for the most part.
Packaging:
Invisible Stud lets you know what kind of show it is just from the cover as we get the sequence with Fujisawa in the park as she’s being stripped down by her invisible partner. The logo is smartly placed along the bottom and the cover layout in general really just shows off exactly what the show is all about. The back cover uses the same kind of scenario as it has Fujisawa while she’s being groped by Mie while a few thought like balloons along the top contain shots from the episodes that aren’t all that revealing. The summary goes through the basic premise and what Mie will do with the ability to be invisible while also listing the bonus features on the disc. The bottom portion is filled out with a solid technical grid that covers what to expect from it as well as a small section with the creative staff credits. No insert is included nor is there a reversible cover.
Menu:
The menu design runs with the same artwork that’s on the front cover though it’s zoomed in a bit more. The layout is as decent as can be expected with this particular piece of artwork and they have a bit of fun with it by placing the navigation in word bubbles coming from the invisible Mie. The layout is easy enough to navigate and submenus load quickly while scene access is very easy to navigate. The disc correctly read our players’ language presets as well which was a big plus. While not the flashiest menu out there, it’s very functional and fits in with the theme of the show.
Extras:
The only extra included with this release is a brief art gallery video which runs just under a minute.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
Originally known as Toumei Ningen from its original release in Japan as a part of the Vanilla Series, Invisible Studio is a two part OVA series that actually has a start and a finish to it. What it also has is an awkward middle where the lead character really is an idiot. When he says it out loud once himself, you just want to reach through the screen, throttle him and yell, “Yes, you are!”
Invisible Stud takes place in a standard real world setting in Japan where we’re introduced to Mie, a somewhat slacker type convenience store worker who has a fairly typical situation. He’s getting picked on regularly by one of the other workers, a woman name Fujisawa that just doesn’t like him much. She calls him out on his shoddy cleaning and is generally fairly demeaning of him and his place in the world. In addition to Fujisawa, there’s the girl of his current mediocre dreams named Otonashi She’s the typical girl in glasses who is nice and sweet and generally defends Mie since he reminds her of her dog named Rick. There’s a ringing endorsement…
Where Mie’s life takes a strange turn is when he bumps into an odd gentleman who’s mumbling about traveling and the requirement of taking his medication in order to not be seen in the worlds he travels to. He barely even registers that Mie is there and doesn’t seem to care about the bottle he’s dropped. After he blinks out of existence, Mie realizes that he’s holding a bottle of invisibility pills that let him get away with whatever he wants for an hour at a time. His first instinct is to get revenge on a pair of schoolgirls who mocked him, so he… flips their skirts. That’s about the extent of it.
Mie does get a bit more creative but the real world physics can’t stay out of my mind which makes the show a bit more difficult to watch than it should be. When he spends time inside a nearby bathhouse that’s filled to the brim with cute young girls, his interactions with one of them doesn’t seem to have any consequence in the world itself. For example, he sits in the bath but when the girl walks in, she doesn’t notice all the displaced water since it’s just empty where he is. But now I find myself critiquing the implausibility of the science within a show called Invisible Stud and I feel really dirty.
The show does pick up a bit as Mie moves around town and tries to get past his idiocy in how he picks his targets. He does it in a cute way at times as he treats it like an attack, such as when he visits the school. He does unfortunately spend too much time watching girls in the bathroom for my tastes, but he does get to take advantage of one girl who is teased about there being a ghost in the school. Mie also gets to spend a good deal of time getting revenge on Fujisawa for all the slights she’s made against him by putting her through some amusing public humiliation in the park. Where the show really goes weird is when he deals with Otonashi and we find out that she’s apparently be screwing her dog for quite some time. In the end, just about all the characters in this show are screwed up in some way.
Invisible Stud has pretty standard animation and character designs so nothing here really stands out in that direction. The women are all decent enough though there’s a bit of flatness to them with the depth of their designs so they don’t stand out all that much. This is the most noticeable with their hair unfortunately. The animation itself in general is decent and there are moments of good fluidity to it but there aren’t any seriously good payoff scenes when it comes to it. The sex scenes avoid any serious repetition that would be bad and they’re all serviceable but again nothing really stands out with it.
In Summary:
Invisible Stud is the kind of show that has a great premise but is closer to mediocre than anything else, if not outright frustrating at times. It held a lot of promise but it just couldn’t carry through on it. Mie isn’t exactly the swiftest character out there and some of what he comes up with when he gains the invisibility pills just points to someone without any imagination whatsoever. Or even much in the way of common sense. The best moments comes in the off kilter humor as Mie narrates all of his “attacks” on the women by playing their roles and saying what he thinks they should be saying to him as he takes them down. With Invisible Stud, it’s the kind of show where you come away from it thinking of how what you would do in that situation would be so much better.
Features:
Japanese 2.0 Language, english 2.0 Language, Outtakes
Content Grade: B-
Audio Grade: B+
Video Grade: B-
Packaging Grade: C+
Menu Grade: B-
Extras Grade: C+
Released By: Critical Mass Video
Release Date: March 4th, 2014
MSRP: $14.99
Running Time: 60 Minutes
Video Encoding: 480i/p MPEG-2
Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
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.