We reach the half-way point with this fourth volume of Sister Princess.  The show started off with a pretty good concept, but the interesting ideas have dropped by the way side, and the show has devolved into all fourteen main characters being nicer and nicer to each other.  With the show half way through, I'm having my doubts as to whether some of the mysteries of the show will ever be explored.
 
Poor Wataru.  He was the best student in his class, but due to a computer error reading his test, he fails his entrance exam to high school.  Going home depressed, his butler informs him that he's been admitted to a high school he's never heard of that is on a mysterious island.  Before he knows it, he's thrown in the back of a truck, dropped off at a wharf, and ferried across the sea to Promised Island.   Things start looking up there as he encounters several good looking girls who all seem interested in him.  However his luck turns sour again when he finds out that all of these women are his sisters!  They often drive him crazy, and he sometimes has to remind himself that these lovely girls are his sisters, but Wataru ends up enjoying living with his numerous sisters.

This volume opens with a recap show.  The summer break is almost over, and Wataru introduces all of his sisters and tells a little bit about each of them just before the new school year starts.  If you've seen the previous volumes, you won't discover anything new in this episode.

Wataru starts feeling guilty that his sisters do so much for him in the next episode, so he ask each of them what he can do for them.  Karen asks him to change a light bulb, but little does he realize how hard it will be to find a replacement bulb.

In the third show Aria loses a ribbon that Wataru gave her and wanders around town looking for it.  She is aided by a mysterious old man who has some strange abilities.

The volume ends up with the school sports festival.  Some of the funniest episodes of Azumanga Diaoh were the sports competitions, and I had high hopes for this episode.  Unfortunately, the show focused on Kaho feeling that she wasn't a good enough cheer leader and promising Wataru that she'd try really hard for him.

This show is a gentle comedy.  Not the type of show you really laugh at, more just smile along with is.  The situations Wataru finds himself in are cute, rather than knee slappers.  The most humorous aspect is the running gag that every shop keeper on the island looks exactly alike.

The down side to the program is that these shows all have a sameness to them.  The sisters fawn over their brother, spending all of their time thinking of new ways to please him.  There isn't really much to these episodes.  There isn't a lot of comedy, and though there are some interseting aspects to the show, they are never examined.  Someone is spying on Wataru, taking orders from an unknown mastermind via e-mail, but why she's spying, and how is ordering her to is never explored.  Instead of exploring the mysteries of the island, the shows are just empty fluff, which is quite disappointing.

The fact that all of the sisters just adore Wataru gets a little dull after a while.  In most other 'harem' shows the women either fight with each other, or with the single male.  In this program, no one fights at all.  The sisters all get along with each other and the fall over each other to be nice to Wataru.  The biggest goal in their lives is to make him happy.  Besides being unrealistic, this lack of conflict  and extreme admiration of Wataru makes the show a little dull.

This DVD contains four episodes and comes in a clear keepcase with a reversible cover and an insert.  The insert has a letter from Sakuya to her big brother and a series of images of all the females from the series.

Audio:

This DVD comes with the original Japanese track in stereo, and a 5.1 English dub.  I watched the show with both audio tracks, and I liked the Japanese audio much better.  The English dub was hard to take after a while.  The two youngest sisters have high pitched squeaky voices that really grated on my nerves.  Several of the sisters have foreign accents, and these sounded fake in the dub track.  Since I don't speak Japanese the accents didn't bother me in the Japanese track.

The sound quality was very good in both tracks.  There wasn't a lot of use made of the sound stage in either track, though incidental music and some effects were thrown to the rear speakers in the English track. In any case, they both sounded clear without any hiss or distortion.

Video:

The full frame video looks pretty good overall.  The image was a little soft, with the lines being not quite as sharp and defined as they should be.  This wasn't a big deal though.  Aliasing and other video defects were evident, but not bothersome.  The colors were bright and full, but they did chose some odd hues for some things.  At sundown they put an orange hue over the whole picture and colored the sky purple.  This just made everything look strange.  This wasn't a problem with the transfer though, the show was certainly created this way.

Extras:

This disc includes a clean opening and closing, a three minute reel of production sketches, and an sixteen-minute behind the scenes interview with Monical Rial (Sakuya), Shelly Calene-Black (Chikage), and John Swasey (Jeeves).

Final Thoughts:

Though it started off being a strangely humorous show, Sister Princess has lost a lot of its steam.  The episodes are all very similar, with one of the sisters having a problem and Wataru giving encouragement.  I was really hoping that the show would have progressed by now, but the mysteries that popped up in the first volume are no closer to being solved.  This would be a good one to rent.