Balthus: Tia no Kagayaki

Glorious... just absolutely glorious...
Someone one day back in the 80s spent their time writing this right? ...and drawing the characters and imagining the setting and all that and finally decided to animate it.
The story and all is great except it's a little too rushed and you got like 15 minutes of your OVA left with nothing... quick what shall you do???
Put porn in it of course.
Look at this fucking cover! Go watch the first 5 minutes... you would never ever be able to tell this was a hentai... you'd let your kids watch this if you didn't know.
I applaud the creators for writing ... a story and coming up with a setting and all that but this could've seen more success if they hadn't put random sex scenes every few minutes.

In the village of Le-jeute, all is not well. The city is over shadowed by the mysterious factory city called Balthus, and the peaceful little village is lured into a similar way of life with the promises of pleasure that await them. But when the workers realize this, it's too little too late.

Did you get that, because the plot that this hentai does have is completely rushed through to fit the 30 minute length of this OVA.

As usual, all of the voice actors in the English dub sound bored, which was standard lot of low budget anime in general pushed out to shelves from the ... late 80s to early 90s for a lot of direct-to-VHS features. Nothing surprising there.

But surprisingly, both the art style and animation is really good for this hentai. It's not amazing by any stretch, but there was clearly some effort put in here, especially with the background paintings and character designs. The plot and characters are actually mildly interesting, which is a shame, because the whole thing rushes through it less than 30 minutes.

But when it comes down to it, this is still a hentai. So are the sex scenes any good? For a retro hentai, the sex scenes are pretty decent, but there are barely any sex scenes to speak of. If anything, the sex could have been easily removed entirely, and nothing would have been changed. It's almost like the creative team had a vision of what they wanted to do, but the whole thing was had to be a hentai to be able to sell it to audience, so the sex scenes were forced into it. Which is a shame, because the rest of it is actually quite good.

Even the music has some heart and soul to it, which is not what I was expecting at all going into this. I was just looking for something to jerk off to.

Would I recommend Balthus - Tia`s Radiance? Surprisingly, I would recommend this hentai entirely on the strength of it's art, plot, and characters. The sex is barely there to begin with, so it wasn't like you were going to crank one out unless this was your only exposure to anything scantily clad at the time of it's release.

Sure, it's not going to win any awards and it isn't what I would call a classic, but when you get something genuinely heartfelt, along with an awesome scene of your main character crashing through the large stain-glassed window of the bad guy's hideout with a small zeppelin to save the person that they just fell in love with, it's hard to not give it a recommendation, even if it is a lukewarm one.

This was described to me as a porn parody of Castle in the Sky, so I checked it out for laughs. It's definitely loose, but I can see the Ghibli inspiration at the edges, especially in the shapes of the hats that the workers wear and the characters' faces. Additionally, the voice actor who played the villain went on to play the Nine Tailed Fox in Naruto.

As porn, this doesn't really work for me on a couple different levels. One thing is that the pace of Japanese porn is too slow and they payoff isn't necessarily as visceral because of their laws against depicting penises ... and vaginas. Weird rule, but OK. It has resulted in a media culture that emphasizes almost completely different aspects of sexual experience than anywhere else. Now that I have lost your respect for knowing that little about Japanese porn, the more important part of why this doesn't work is a bit more personal. It doesn't align with what I tend to enjoy in this sort of story because the characters' emotions aren't at all relevant to the sex. There was no cycle of anticipation then release, and pretty much nobody was openly happy about it. They were only allowed to be happy about it if they were pathetically calling after someone who was in the middle of discarding them (so it's more pathetic) or they were a rapist. It is, proverbially, not my bag.

Oh, also, there was a story about a labor revolution and a big robot in there. Honestly, even though I didn't find the sex very interesting at all, that plot was even less interesting and barely mattered.

So, then, why a 4? Because it's surprisingly well animated and the scenes between the two main good characters were nice, as few as they were. They never had sex, which was a weird decision, but OK. There are some pretty landscape shots at the end, too. It was nice to look at when nobody was having sex, which is not really what you want from porn, but which is something I like to see in general, so sure.