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F-Force
Yeah, I watch it for the plot. The old classic gag about someone insisting that they read Playboy for the articles (and not for the porn) has always been funny to me, because that's more or less exactly what I'm doing with this whole 18+ Anime Review section. I'm watching animated sexual escapades for the explicit purpose of writing up an article, breaking down its story, highlighting its merits, and sharing my thoughts on the work as a whole. I literally watch porn for the plot because I'm interested in how the characters ended up in these compromising positions, and take just as much pleasure in analyzing their stories as watching them get it on!
Porn plots make perfect sense, you just have to get a good grip on them. F-Force is a weird entry in the hentai section, because it clearly contains more than enough fuckin' to be classified strictly as a porno with only some minor semblance of plot, but there's also a surprising amount of screentime dedicated to characters simply vibing in between each lascivious encounter. It makes me question whether or not the show was originally written as a fantasy adventure that got absorbed into a hentai production, or just a porno that needed more plot and got fleshed out into more of an adventure story. This in-between result - combined with the almost Slayers-esque team of characters - creates a strangely endearing hybrid of likeable characters and nasty juicy action.
Sorry for always comparing everything to The Slayers, but it was such a genre-defining show that it's inevitable sometimes, even where hentai is concerned! Okay, I have to preface this next part, cause it's strong opinion time. Ever since I started watching it, I firmly, beyond a shadow of a doubt, feel that all hentai anime should be watched dubbed in English. Fighting words, I know. But in every single hentai I've watched to this day, the Japanese voice cast all play their characters completely straight and to the letter, while the English dub already knows its audience will be virtually nonexistent, and casts caution to the wind, allowing the voice actors to ham it up with their silliest, most unhinged performances. F-Force is a prime example of this, calling on petit French accents, campy gay lisps, and a show-stealing Brooklyn swagger that elevates the whole show from being a predictable tentacular fuckfest to a laugh-out-loud tentacular fuckfest, and honestly makes the whole thing worth watching.
With such a memorably out-of-place accent and performance, literally every scene with Elliege is a 10/10, even if she is a liar liar pants on fire. Alright, let's actually read the smut for its articles for a moment. Here's the story: monsters are roaming the countryside, capturing random young women and bringing them to their Demon Lord masters. The Lords are searching for a very specific girl with a magic emblem on her chest, and every girl who does not have that mark is discarded for the monsters and lower Lords to do with as they please - likely something involving tentacles. A wandering monster hunter for hire (Ash) saves one such girl (Alicia) from the brutish hands of her captors, and escorts her back to her village, where he is offered a job as her personal bodyguard against the beasts.
It is duly explained that because the monsters have tasted human pussy, their desire will be all but unquenchable, and they therefore must be stopped at all costs. According to the village elder, the entire country is in jeopardy, as the four Demon Lords have erected magical pillars in each corner of the land, and are threatening to submerge the whole continent underwater, just as they have allegedly done with other lands across the ocean. Seems the only way to truly protect Alicia is to go hunt down the Demon Lords and destroy their pillars, a task for which Ash calls upon a group of his best friends and most powerful allies, the titular F-Force.
This scene is one of precious few non-recycled or panned-still fighting animations, and we must cherish and protect it for all it's worth. Each member of F-Force is a different type of weapon specialist, and they all share a certain camaraderie, as though they've already been on countless world-saving missions together. Their connection to Ash is never really explored, but it's understood that they're all pretty close friends, despite Ash's frequent panty ogling. From the moment they arrive, the show spends a surprising amount of time allowing them all to rest and ready up in the village JRPG-style before embarking on their demon-hunting quest. You would think a hentai series would focus on maximizing its storytelling time to set up for as much sexual debauchery as possible, but we get to watch F-Force sharpen their weapons, do some calisthenics, shower gratuitously, and even hustle a poker game at the local bar before any more violence or fuckery takes place. This whole scene could have been cut in favor of more fuckin', but it really drives home the question of whether this series was originally envisioned as a plot with porn or a porn with plot.
I'm not offering this show up as some kind of masterfully-woven or meaningful story that just happens to have sexual content, I'm just shocked that this kind of normalcy even exists in a hentai like this. Anyway, back to the smut. A surprise attack from the monsters derails the fun and Alicia gets kidnapped. Our heroes make haste and blaze through a series of enemy encounters on their way to confront the Demon Lords, racing against the clock to rescue her before the show's meager three episodes are over. The villains themselves are a strange bunch: a pair of foppish panty collectors, a pyromaniac with a disturbingly long tongue, and of course, a bountifully boobular sword-wielding hypnotist. The final boss, sword lady's elf-eared lover, traps Ash in a trippy cuckold-laden hallucination where he and the Demon Lord trade places having sex with sword lady, and gets the last laugh when she runs him through during their moment of pleasure, leaving him dead on the scene as the monster horde eventually overpowers F-Force through sheer number and get that extended orgy they wanted so badly.
Despite all the hairy snatch on display, mouthplay seems to be the show's bread and butter, for butter or worse. Seeing her friends defeated, Alicia's powers - which we have now discovered were Demonic in origin all along - finally click into place, and she breaks through her magic barrier prison, rushing to her hero's side. Thinking quickly, she makes a beeline for his dick and starts going to town, much to the amusement of her captors. As anyone smarter might have guessed though, it was her untapped sexual energy that was the real catalyst needed to charge up her powers to their maximum. And through the power of necrophilia, Alicia reaches orgasm and unleashes a hail of holy piss that waters the dead wood and makes Ash's tree stand tall once again, bringing him back from the dead to - quite abruptly - finish the job. And with the evil defeated, the final pillar falls and everyone floats down in a magic bubble as Ash and Alicia promise to love and protect each other forever, followed by a hard cut to credits. Just barely made it!
Look, I get that this is supposed to be "squirt" or "love juice" or whatever people call it, but come on, squirt is just piss. This is clearly a revive spell that manifests in silver shower form! And that's that! As far as the porn aspect goes, F-Force is comprised almost entirely of tentacle scenes, with an oddly specific focus on mouthplay. Even the pyro villain uses his absurdly long tongue like a tentacle appendage, literally shoving it down Fromage's throat while his dick mostly languishes in the background. As with most hentai, nearly all of the sex scenes are comprised of very limited (and sometimes recycled) animation loops with a slow pan across them so you have time to watch and listen to the moaning while you take care of your own needs, but they're lovingly rendered nonetheless, so if you've ever fantasized about getting tentacle fucked, it's not bad in that regard.
Porn is the only capacity in which you'll ever hear me praising something for being "pro-bush". There are two scenes in particular I want to highlight, though. In the last moment of downtime before the final assault on the villain's stronghold, Ash and the ax-wielding half-elf Asti have a heart-to-heart about Ash's feelings for Alicia, now that they know of her Demon heritage. Asti tells him the story of her mixed human and elf heritage, and how even though neither side ever fully accepted her, she always believed in the power of interracial love because she knew her parents were genuinely happy together. She encourages Ash to continue pursuing Alicia despite her Demon blood, since it's clear he's into her. And, in a bid to cheer him up and get him pumped for the final battle, she does what all good friends do and gives him a loving 69. It's one of the only sex scenes in the entire series that isn't outright rapey (the other is a blowjob between villains Lucretia and Lavialos), and felt genuinely kind of sweet? I dunno, I liked it a lot.
Although it's just fantasy races and the two characters are basically the same skin tone anyway, it's still nice to see interraciality acknowledged as normal and worth fighting for without painting it as "taboo" or "exotic" as porn so often tries to do. The other scene I want to draw attention to is the heroes' ultimate team attack to defeat Lavialos, which plays out like a henshin action sequence. After Ash is revived by the power of Alicia's piss revival spell, and F-Force pick themselves up from their exhausting orgy ordeal, they all band together for one big blast of energy, reprising their cool action shots from earlier but in the nude this time. And although Ash's mighty peen was bizarrely black-bar censored in an earlier scene (despite plenty of visible pussy everywhere else in the show), it's finally allowed to flop and flail around in full monty during this scene, and it's glorious. More hentai could learn a thing or two from this scene, and give dicks a chance to bounce around like a Gainax girl's titties.
Anime in general just really needs to let more heroes rock out with their cock out. And there's really not much else to go over. The music is a fun mish-mash of brassy 80s adventure fantasy keyboards and pumping electronica/metal during the action scenes, and the art style can be a bit off-kilter and unpredictable in that typical early 2000s way. Again though, the English dub script is a riot, and really adds a lot to the Slayers-but-horny feel. And I can't really fault the series for ending where it does, as the whole thing successfully completes its story while allowing for plenty of tentacle fuckery along the way, but the extra wackiness added by the dub made the characters strangely charming, so I think I would've liked sitting through more adventure porn with these chuckleheads!
No one is immune to the whims of the panty collector. NO ONE. The most obvious follow-up recommendations here are other, more well-known fantasy hentai titles like LA Blue Girl and Urotsukidoji. But F-Force frequently gets packaged and sold alongside other Critical Mass media titles like Magic Woman M and Hooligan, which are both titles I'd probably put in the same boat as well. Hooligan especially, since - if memory serves - it also has a hilariously over-the-top English dub that cracked me up way more than it made me horny. For a less explicit but still horny pseudo-fantasy adventure, you could also try Iron Virgin Jun! Now to see if I can find any other JRPG-esque hentai out there that can match F-Force's energy...drop me a line on Twitter or Email if you know of any I should check out!
I would be remiss not to close out with what may be the single greatest gif of all time, ever.
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