Mezzo Forte is an anime I had known about for years but had never watched it all the way through. I first discovered the film back in my college days, where time in between classes was spent playing version 1.0 of Counter-Strike and downloading RealVideo format hentai clips. As it was then, so it is now: any casual search for hentai on streaming sites is bound to come up with clips from Mezzo Forte’s sex scenes, be it the red-haired girl getting fucked by two dudes or the same red-haired girl getting it from an older, dark-skinned gentleman. These scenes have been seared into my brain because I’ve fapped to them many a time. So it makes sense that I would finally, after all these years, sit down and watch the entire film.
In a lot of ways, I’m disappointed with Mezzo Forte. As it turns out, the two sex scenarios I mentioned above are the only sex scenes in the entire two episode (or one 70 minute movie—or 50 if the sex is cut out–film). The rest is a goofy and sometimes nonsensical story about a group of private detectives/armed mercenaries tasked with kidnapping a baseball team owner and powerful mafioso. We don’t get to know a whole lot about Momoi Momokichi except that he loves baseball, owns a team called the Peach Twisters, and will smash the fuck out of anyone who underperforms. Momoi is backed by his equally vicious mafia princess of a daughter. Spoiled, and self-serving, Hiroka is the type of person who shoots and kills and maims whenever she gets bored. Opposing them—solely for profit, of course—is a ragtag band of guns for hire led by Kurokawa, a former cop whose expose on the secret doings and coverups of his police department got him fired and ostracized. Under his care is Harada, a tech-savvy young guy who builds androids, and the red-haired Miruka, whose prowess with a gun and hand to hand combat would make Spike Speigle smile. Kurokawa’s crew is tasked by one of Momoi’s former hitmen to kidnap the mob boss and bring him to vigilante justice, though that ends up being far easier said than done.
Mezzo Forte is more or less a spiritual successor to Yasuomi Umetsu’s first adult film outing, A Kite, which featured quite a few sex scenes on top of violent action set pieces. Mezzo Forte distances itself from A Kite by reducing the number of adult scenes, which is a total bummer. Furthermore, these two scenarios don’t have too many connections to the overall story and don’t leave much of an impression once they’re done. That’s a damn shame because Miruka is a really sexy character. Be it cracking skulls or sucking dick, Miruka is awesome at what she does and it sucks that we don’t get much material out of her. Her sex scenes are pretty vanilla and not especially wild and weird for the curious masturbators out there. On the other hand, the animation is spectacular all around. It’s clear that a lot of time and effort went into making this little porno/action flick look good. The characters are expressive but don’t have that bendy and squishy animation look and the fight choreography is really fucking cool. I just wish there was more to it because there are a lot of story beats that don’t make sense and aren’t explained very well (do Miruka and Hiroka know each other? Why do they both have visions?).
As I take off the rose-colored glasses from my face, I find that I still can appreciate Mezzo Forte for its prowess in animation and instances of sex that has stayed with me since I first discovered the clips way back in the early 2000s. However, it probably won’t pass with much scrutiny against more deliberate hentai series that favor sex over storytelling. What I will say is that Mezzo Forte has aged really well and still looks great against its contemporaries. With its cool action scenes, fun sense of humor, and vanilla sex, this would be a great series to suggest to someone you know taking their first step into this beautiful cesspool of animated pornography.