What happened to the aliens?!

In the opening salvo of Please Twins!, a young boy who's only tie to his past is a picture of him and a girl as children, sees the house in the background of the photo in a news report about an alien encounter. Two girls – both claiming to be his sister, and carrying the same photo – move in with our boy Maiku, and try to find out who's related to him, and, subsequently, who's going to bed with him.

Being the sequel to Please Teacher!, where the premise revolved around an alien teacher, I figured this ET arc would be hashed out at some point over the course of this show, and wrapped up in a nifty package in this fourth and final volume. But no, the only evidence of our alien friends to the end (other than the obvious one to those who saw Please Teacher!) is the little squirt alien wearing an inner tube, appearing randomly with little to add to the story; only the Please Teacher! faithful know what he's about. If you haven't seen the prequel, the alien background to Please Twins! reads like complete nonsense, because it's there, it's obvious, but it's never explained.

So the entire alien backdrop is completely abandoned, ignored, shoved off where promising side stories go to die, but at least we get other answers. We finally find out who's Maiku's sister. More importantly, we find out if anyone's finally going to get in bed together. It's been one big ball of pent-up sexual confusion so far, and, damnit, these kids need release! The girls – Miina and Karen – have a "love alliance," a set of five rules they swear to uphold until they know which one is Maiku's sister. When the truth comes out, those rules are going to be broken.

To open this final volume of the series, we find out something's bothering Karen. There's speculation it could be because it's that time of the month, but it could be that Karen has discovered whether or not she's Maiku's sister. She asks him out on a date, and reveals the truth to him. But the mystery isn't over just yet.

Miina isn't taking the news well, and she may just leave this entire mess behind. She won't speak with Karen or Maiku, and it will be up to Maiku to keep her around. Someone has a new brother. And someone has a new boyfriend.

The final episode of the series is an OVA that Bandai thankfully tacked on to the end of the series. It shows us how our trio is fairing two weeks after the truth has been revealed. It's also an opportunity to get every female character in the series at the beach wearing little clothing. All the characters are camping by a lake, and the girls share a ghost story about a spirit woman with large breasts, pale skin and glasses who "latches on to a nerd and sucks the life out of him." Hey, that sounds like Maiku's senpai.

The dialogue in this series is well done. It bounces between sexually charged ("I've popped a tent too" … hehe) to seriously romantic, and changes quickly. For a show as simply as this, good characters carry the series. They're accident-prone, full of optimism, and seem horny as hell. It wouldn't be a Please Twins! episode without one of the girls tripping and falling on Maiku, hand on breast, mouth on mouth. And …. cue blush!

You could say Please Twins is anime romance with fan service, closer to Sister Princess than Kimagure Orange Road. Maiku was mostly indifferent to the girls, until the end, leaving everyone else to wonder and dream about everyone else. He just wanted to get his work done. The sexual teases are mostly out in the open, though you'll never find anything teetering toward hentai. I think you'd have to be Japanese and 13 to get hot and bothered over this series, but you can be American and still enjoy it.

The fullscreen presentation for this DVD is sharp and free of problems. Colors are sharp and vivid, the blacks are deep and solid, and there's little in the way of digital problems. The characters meshed pretty well with the mostly bland backgrounds in Please Twins. The animation here was very, very simple, but hey, so was the tale.

I wouldn't mind having the soundtrack to this show, with nice opening and closing animation music and some fun background tracks. This show was really dialogue-centered, and didn't put the soundstage to too much use. The 2.0 Japanese and English options are both solid and error-free, from what I can tell. The Japanese voice cast sounded better throughout the series, to my ears. Not to take anything away from the English voice cast, but the too-childish voice of Karen really diverted my attention away from everything else.

I just hate it when I go to the extras option, and know exactly what I'm going to find: three music videos from the show, the textless ending of episode 12 (a unique, series-ending bit) and trailers. I think Bandai really missed an opportunity here to tease fans of this show back to its prequel, Please Teacher. Storyboards, cast and crew interviews, anything unique would have been appreciated.

Little in the way of special features and a ho-hum ending to the series make for an average DVD. I liked Please Twins, a fluffy, simple, pretty anime with sexuality, romance, a little bit of comedy, and a decent amount of fan service. Much to my joy, I discovered this series is 13 episodes, not 12, giving us three episodes (the final one being an OVA) to close out the series, not just two. This show ends softly, much the way it began, but Please Twins never tried to do more than its premise could handle, and what it did do with the sexual confusion managed to entertain a samurai-giant robot-sci-fi brutish fan like me. Recommended.