Magical girl anime are one of my favorite sub-genres in the medium, but I have to admit that I never quite investigated their hentai counterparts. I associate the magical girl genre with younger protagonists; Sakura Kinomoto, Nanoha Takamachi, Madoka Kaname, you get the drill. It didn’t seem very porn-compatible to me, but here we are anyway with a review of Beat Angel Escalayer.
Obviously, I underestimated the ingenuity of Japanese perverts.
The story is based on a hentai game that I haven’t played, but I got the gist of it quickly. Sayuka is an innocent-looking college student who is also secretly the magical girl Escalayer. Using the power of the Doki Doki Dynamo, Sayuka can transform into her superhero form and battle against an evil organization.
The trick here is that the Doki Doki Dynamo is powered by sexual arousal; something that is severely lacking in Sayuka’s life. She lives together with her android partner Madoka, but them not being gay has made it difficult to generate power. Enter Kyohei, the school’s resident sex machine who is currently dicking a whole laundry list of fellow students and even some of the staff.
In his more innocent days, Kyohei had a crush on Sayuka that he never got to confess before she mysteriously vanished. Now he finally gets to be with her and, potentially, save the world by plowing her silly.
The premise of Beat Angel Escalayer does kinda work as a mahou shoujo story if you squint. Sayuka is a costumed hero who fights evil creatures and villains, but the magical girl stuff is just a cosmetic touch to what is otherwise pure hentai. They pay homage to some tropes related to the genre, but it never gets in the way of cramming in sex scenes wherever they’ll fit. Episode 1 sort-of tries to marry the two halves, but episodes 2 and 3 are just full-on hentai with short plot bits between.
Sayuka has sex to power her engine, she is raped by monsters, raped by villains, she has erotic scenes with Madoka. On top of all that, Kyohei also has his friends-with-benefits from school who he keeps seeing, even after he commits to helping Sayuka. It’s a lot of erotica, is me point. Great for the majority of people who come just for the porn, less so for any hopeful individuals that were gunning for an actual story. Maybe try the visual novel?
The frequency of sex scenes is both a blessing and a curse. Beat Angel Escalayer touches on a variety of different genres; lesbian scenes, futanari, rape, vanilla, tentacles, it has a lot of different appeals. However, none of these scenes ever last long enough because the OVA has to rush through all its content in less than 90 minutes. Even if Beat Angel Escalayer has a scene that you’re really into, chances are it’ll have moved on before you’ve even ripped your trousers off.
The story it does manage to tell between all these sex scenes is alright for hentai standards, but feels incomplete. You never quite get a full grasp of what Escalayer‘s universe is about. Similarly, it feels like you only get a half-hearted summary of just who these characters really are. None of them undergo too much growth and that which we do see feels cut & pasted together.
Those wanting a more complete experience with this magical girl/hentai hybrid may want to check out the remastered version of the visual novel sold at MangaGamer.
