Night When Evil Stumbles

The folks over at Adult Source Media sent over a couple sample copies from their catalog of erotic anime for me to review. The first disc from the stack to get a spin was Night When Evil Falls volume 1. After watching it, I can’t call it flawless, but it’s not difficult to understand why it’s one of AnimeNation’s best selling adult anime titles.

Since the first episode is pretty good, I’ll start by discussing its strengths. The first episode’s animation quality may be far from fluid, but it’s adequate for mid-range adult anime. The fairly attractive character designs and good (but not outstanding) color design and backgrounds help to make the episode nice looking and enjoyable to watch. The first episode, originally titled “Ma ga Ochiru Yoru episode 1: Demonic Princess,” is fully uncensored and contains three scenes of fairly graphic sex. Ironically, while there don’t appear to be any edits within the main body of the episode, the original Japanese title card appears to have been removed. As a result, oddly, the episode doesn’t actually have a title sequence. Rather, it dives directly into its first of three sex scenes.

The first sex scene involves an un-named woman and a monster. The episode’s remaining two scenes are girl on girl. All three scenes involve some form of tentacles. Revealing the OVA’s limited budget, the sex scenes do tend to recycle a lot of animation, but keeping individual shots brief and shifting shots frequently keeps the looped footage from being too monotonous. A mere three sex scenes may not sound like much, but with each scene running several minutes, and the entire episode running only 25 minutes, the sex actually accounts for quite a bit of the episode’s run time.

Rather than concentrate attention strictly on its sex scenes, the first episode of Night When Evil Falls comes across as an enjoyable, dark, adult fantasy. This OVA is probably more likely to please viewers interested in a sexy supernatural action/adventure anime than viewers simply looking for a quick thrill. However, it’s lamentable that the first episode ends feeling like little more than a prologue. Even with some rather obvious and poorly implemented exposition, the story development feels like it’s just barely gotten started when the first episode ends.

I mentioned discussing the positives first. That naturally implies that there are also negatives – more significant ones than those already mentioned. The ASM DVD is dubtitled, which may or may not affect different viewer’s appreciation of the anime. Thankfully, most of the translation adheres fairly closely to the original Japanese dialogue. In fact, as far as I can tell with my very novice Japanese comprehension, even some of the episode’s rather silly lines of dialogue are actually straight from the original Japanese script. However, the dialogue diverges significantly during the sex scenes. Unwilling girls in the original Japanese dialogue are turned into wanton sluts by the English dialogue and subtitles. For example, when Meduna molests Shilis (translated as “Sheliss” by the subtitles), “Dame!” gets translated as “More!” and “Yamenasai!” is translated as “Do it more!”

Continuing on about the subtitles, I also noticed that “Kerberos” is consistently misspelled as “Kelderos,” but otherwise the dubtitles are free of grammar and spelling errors. They’re rather small, though, and they’re placed so close to the bottom of the television screen that if the subs were any lower, they’d partially appear below the bottom of the screen. While that’s not exactly a problem or a flaw, their placement does make the subtitles slightly difficult to spot and easily read.

The Japanophile part of me is pleased to see that the episode retains its unmolested original Japanese ending credits, but I’m slightly disappointed that the DVD doesn’t include any English translation for the production staff credits. The DVD also includes an English dub, but no credits for the English localization staff. The DVD includes a “bonus feature,” common to many of ASM’s adult anime releases, which consists of an untranslated Japanese short that’s closer to a slide show with voice acting than actual full animation. While it’s not a particularly thrilling addition, I appreciate the consideration of including it. I also respect the inclusion of a reversible DVD cover with “hardcore” and “softcore” sides, although the difference between the two is minimal.

The first episode of Night When Evil Falls doesn’t fall into the realm of top tier adult anime in either production or localization quality, but I’ve seen much, much worse. Viewers interested in a pleasant, non-taxing, light horror/tentacle hentai should find this an enjoyable and worthwhile purchase.

Adult consumers can purchase the DVD here.