Aki-Sora and Aki-Sora: Yume no Naka 1 Review

Mm, sibcon.

I finally got around to watching Aki-Sora; the thing had been sitting around on my hard-drive for a while, which, honestly, isn’t the best of ideas, all things considered… anyway, the first episode of the second set of OVA’s for it showed up fansubbed earlier today, which made me think of it, so I bit the bullet and watched it.

Anyway, Aki-Sora is about three siblings, Aki, Sora, and Nami, who live with their mostly-absent mother. Aki and Sora were close as children, but aren’t as much as they used to be. However, Sora has begun to notice his elder sister Aki in a sexual way, something he’s uncomfortable with. Aki has been noticing Sora in a sexual way for a while herself, but she doesn’t really have a problem with that. After an awkward encounter in the bath, Sora begins avoiding his sister, and in doing so accidentally gets himself locked in a storage shed at school. Aki comes to his rescue, but Sora rebuffs her come-on initially; however, when she walks away sadly, he chases her, and they kiss in the rain. When they get home, the two have sex.

In the first episode of Aki-Sora: Yume no Naka, there’s more sibling sex. However, we are given a bigger look at Nami, Sora’s twin sister, than previously, along with her friend, Kana. Kana has a crush on Sora, and Nami attempts to pair her brother off with her friend, to little affect. However, Nami clearly has interests of her own – while Aki is giving Sora a hand-job in the kitchen, we are shown that Nami herself is busy with a photograph in her bedroom – a picture of herself, Kana, and Sora. While the show is evasive as to which individual she is looking at in the picture for a while, it becomes clear by the end of the episode that Nami has a crush on her friend, not on her twin. At one point she let’s her hair down while Kana is gushing over Sora and offers to be Kana’s practice kiss since she looks so much like her brother. But when she gropes Kana, her friend freaks out.

Meanwhile, Aki gets a cold, and Sora takes care of her – yeah, more sexy time here. At the end of the episode, it is Sora who has a cold, though, and Aki who comes to take care of him.

Aki-Sora was actually… pretty good. It was also much, much less sleazy than it had any right to be – after all, this is basically porn about incestuous siblings. I mean, really? How much sleazier can you get? But despite all the on-screen sex, the sex itself is depicted in a way that is fairly tame. Again, by hentai standards. There’s a lot of sex going on here, along with hand-jobs and oral sex, but there are no direct crotch shots during sex scenes, and moments when I expected things to just go into a full-blown sex scene don’t. I suppose maybe its best to say in the latter case that the characters here are actually characters as opposed to cardboard cut-outs fucking each other; in other titles, Aki and Sora’s handjob in the bathroom moment would’ve gone straight to vaginal sex; however, here they actually behave somewhat realistically, with both of them in shock and then Sora avoiding his sister.

I actually liked the characters in this show. Like I said before, usually hentai characters don’t really have any personality or anything beyond just being horny or some one-note trait like being an imouto or a tsundere or something such as that. But the characters here had more depth than usual, particularly Nami. I think it does help to have some investment in the characters, even if it is just a hentai show.

The decision to not show genitalia was actually pretty smart, if you ask me – all those hentai have to pixelate it anyway, so those shots end up just being weird and kind of jarring; why bother at all? I’m sure some people will take issue, but I myself thought it worked pretty well that way. It also helped reduce the skeeve factor.

Then there is Kana and Nami. Honestly, this is actually… good yuri. There is a moment where it feels exploitative (Nami tears open Kana’s shirt, and Kana isn’t wearing a bra – but Nami doesn’t do anything else beyond that), but its been handled very well so far. In fact, it’s handled so well that I felt sympathetic to poor Nami. Unlike in many other shows, Nami isn’t going the sexual harassment route, she gets that Kana isn’t interested and that to force herself on her wouldn’t work and wouldn’t be right, either. She knows her friend likes Sora, so she tries to pair them together. Under normal circumstances, this is shocking; in a hentai piece, this is basically AMAZING. And it inclines me to thinking that the next episode, which will focus on Nami and Kana, will actually be good!

By the way, the oral sex bits were fairly interesting in that Sora goes down on Aki before she gets around the blowing him. I was pretty sure she was about to in their first sex scene, but she limited herself to just sucking on his fingers and toes and chest. Of course, the inclusion of male-on-female oral sex is just pretty impressive, anyway; there are so few titles that do that.

Of relation to that, the sex scenes aren’t repetitive. We’ve got some hand-job scenes, some oral sex scenes, some vaginal sex scenes, and some that combine a few of those. So I wasn’t yawning my way through the sex… or laughing, for that matter. As hentai goes, this had a lot less of the moments in it where I just cracked up while watching, which is fairly impressive. I will note, though, that there are probably many people who will not consider this hentai since there are no close-ups of penis or vagina. Again, fairly subdued for a hentai piece, but I do think it definitely qualifies as such – come on, full-on thrusting moments and semen? Yeah, I don’t really think that’s just ecchi.

Also, the dialogue during sex scenes gives it away as hentai. Even if the lulz level was really low overall, much of the dialogue during those scenes was hilarious.

OKAY I REALLY LIKED THIS. I actually, legitimately think this was good. I’m feeling sincerely shocked, I was really expecting it to be extremely trashy and just bad. This is seriously something I would recommend to someone looking for a solid hentai title. I wish the second episode of Yume no Naka was coming out sooner than November. I realllly hope it can maintain its not-totally-sleazy atmosphere for Nami’s yuri adventures.

EDIT: Oops, forgot to include this when I published – I’m in a pretty good mood, so I thought I’d give all my dear readers a cheap thrill: