As a female friend puts it, Dirty Thoughts is like being excited over your hunky new guy, only to find out later that he’s a premature ejaculator.
Production-wise, this title offers beautiful artwork and nice backdrops. The plot is also quite promising. While the main relationship featured is about a teacher and her student — which would normally make me shudder since I am a professor myself — the details behind Sayaka’s affair are so touching, you’d want to forget that they’re actually violating campus rules. Shin and Sayaka are truly in love. One might get teary-eyed over Sayaka’s friend telling Shin, “If you still love her, you should graduate.” Another tear-jerker happens near the end, as Shin desperately asks Sayaka to show her face once again.
Unfortunately, that’s where the nice story ends. The conclusion is bleh. Just when you think that Sayaka may be saved from her disgrace, the writer had to make things convoluted by allowing Sayaka to blow her chances at happiness. At this point, you’d be evaluating the snippets of unnecessary (yet abundant) sex plus the scenes where Sayaka plays a non-consenting slut. See, Sayaka is indebted to a lot of people, which makes her subject to blackmail. It doesn’t matter that she’s like the ideal woman — she cooks, communicates well with her students, she’s attractive, and painfully demure. She still suffers from one major drawback: like all other ill-fated hentai women before her, the creators forgot to install a brain inside her pretty head. After losing her virginity to the one she loves, she then proceeds to fuck everyone but the female students. That her reasons (for whoring) are flimsy just adds insult to injury.
There are many interesting characters to see in Dirty Thoughts. They don’t get much character development, though. For instance, Yuuki, the cute new student who finds himself smitten with Sayaka, completely disappears from the story after he makes love to her. Shin’s classmates, two co-eds crushing on him, are only shown briefly. Why bother introducing their backgrounds if they aren’t really going to do much?
The two volumes can actually be merged into an hour-long movie, especially since volume 2 has a lot of scenes that have already been shown in volume 1. The flashbacks are well-done, but they weren’t given any real purpose. They could’ve used the flashbacks to flesh out the conflicts that could add dimension to the otherwise engaging storyline.
It’s a shame. Dirty Thoughts, originally titled Private Emotion, has the makings of a quality hentai title. It’s just too sad that the delivery could be so flawed.
Individual Rating: Art/Animation: 9 Story/Plot: 6 Characters: 7 Sounds: 7 Ecchi Level: 9
