Hentai Review: Happy Girls

Happy Girls
Author: Zukiki
Digital Manga Publishing/Project-H
200 pages

Don't hold back if you want it that bad and let your inhibitions run wild! Let these impulsive beauties take the reins and help you to experience pleasure like never before! Come and have some fun with the four lovely sisters-Haru (Spring), Natsu (Summer), Aki (Autumn), and Fuyuko (Winter)-and experience all of their love. This book is packed with 10 sexy stories that will definitely make you happy all year long! (Source: Goodreads)

Content warning: The following post is a hentai review, covering a manga meant for 18+ audiences. Although hentai reviews will not include images, they will be about materials that involve explicit scenarios and may go into detail about certain H scenes. Please read with caution!

First of all, forgive me: how does one review a hentai manga? I suppose like any other manga - but hentai's main purpose is to get one's rocks off, and I usually don't review materials like that. Still, for Project-H and the efforts of manga-ka Zukiki, I shall do my best!

Zukiki's Happy Girls is a good enough start into English language hentai, as it is a collection of short stories with 'happy' endings. The stories in the first half of the book are loosely collected and don't have a shared theme; however, the stories in the second half actually share a core cast of characters, the four 'seasonal' sisters described in the book's summary. While the first half is entertaining enough, the second half is where the strength of the book lies.

I don't want to say that the first half of Happy Girls is about women hooking up with dudes and banging but - um - it is. A lot of them involve missed connections and second chances, like Hidaka, the woman who comes back to her teacher Takeuchi five years later, determined to impress Takeuchi and win his affection. Then we have soccer ace Haruka, whose drive for a 'special move' draws her closer to computer nerd Kawakami, whom she shares a surprising connection with.

My favorite story not associated with the season sisters would have to be Big and Small. An overweight chef at a popular restaurant, Maebishi, finds an unlikely friend and ally in the very petite waitress Hatsune. Despite her always hanging around him, Maebishi doubts that such a cute girl would like him in such a way as that - until Hatsune proves him wrong! As someone who adores unusual romances and major size differences in couples, the story of Maebishi and Hatsune hits all the right notes and manages to be both sweet and spicy.

Then we get to the actual happy girls of Happy Girls, and a story arc actually emerges through all the costumed play and fluid-drenched sex. We have four sisters who are finding their own separate paths, moving away from each other as they create their own stories with the various men in their lives. One is married, one will get married, one's hung up over an old flame and one's chasing an old boyfriend, but they all somehow find time to have dinner together like sisters - but this, too, maybe be over sooner than later.

It's a surprisingly poignant angle, considering the majority of the pages are spent on the sisters getting physically acquainted with their boys. I found the most interesting of the sisters to be the married sister, Haru (the spring), the one who sometimes forgets to put her skirt on and is the cute klutz of the group. For references' sake, she's the Mihoshi (Tenchi Muyo, y'all!) of the four sisters, only with more gratuitous fanservice.

The artwork for Happy Girls is pretty average, although Zukiki has a good handle on facial expressions and none of the women seemed disastrously out of proportion, nor did any of their chest sizes strike me as being on an inhumanly large level. There seemed to be an unnatural amount of fluids and Zukiki seems to have a thing for having their women ejaculate directly at the reader's perspective, like some sort of sleazy 3-D manga effect. But hey, guys use condoms in this manga! And that's pretty cool! Practice safe sex, y'all, it's the smart thing to do.

As an introduction into the world of Project-H, who is striding to become North America's leading provider of English language hentai manga, it's not a bad way to start. As with all one-shot collections, some stories work better than others and a few really don't do anything for me at all, but overall it's decent and it grabs the attention on multiple levels. And really, for a hentai, if the reader doesn't stop reading before the happy participants on page 'finish', than it's a win. Add to that some surprisingly entertaining stories and an H-manga take on family dynamics, and Happy Girls is a textbook win.

For more information on DMP titles, releases, and the latest news, visit the Digital Manga Inc.'s website: http://www.digitalmanga.com/

You can find more information on Project-H titles at the Project-H website: http://www.projecth.xxx - please notice the domain type used!