The penultimate volume of Sister Princess arrives with a whimper like the last couple of volumes.  This series just doesn't have the kick it should:  It's not particularly funny, dramatic or mysterious.  The one saving grace that this volume has is that the overall story arc that has been ignored for the previous four DVDs gets picked up again.
 
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.

The three episodes in this volume are about average for the series.  The disc starts off with the resident inventor, Rin Rin, building a mecha-Rin Rin.  She programs all of her sisters best attributes into the mechanical doopleganger, but the programing is too intense and the robot malfunctions with predictable results.  She continues working on the mechanical girl in order to create the perfect aid for her dear brother.   Of course Wataru doesn't want a perfect robot, he's happy with Rin Rin the way she is.

In the next show, there is a mysterious series of thefts; some small objects are missing from the house.  When the music box that Wataru gave the sisters for Christmas gets broken, Yotsuba decides to dress up as a gentleman thief in order to hide the box's disappearance while it is being repaired in town.  This was a pretty funny show, with a lot of parodies of detective shows including Case Closed and Columbo.

The disc wraps up with something new happening.  After being on his own for a year, Wataru's best friend plans to visit him on the island.  The handsome and athletic Akio arrives, but the sister's can't take him on a tour of the island due to the fact that he has a previous engagement.  So Wataru and his sisters go to an amusement park, that they just discovered exists on the island.  Wataru promises to go on a ride with each sister, most of which are much more energetic than he'd like.

The whole background story, why Mami is spying on Wataru and just why he was sent to the island in the first place, is picked up again by the end of the volume.  Unfortunately by this time I'm not really interested in it anymore.  They've ignored this storyline since the end of the first volume, and this is just too little too late.

This show doesn't really live up to its potential.  I really like 'harem' shows, where a guy ends up, quite against his wishes, living with several attractive girls.  They are often pretty wacky and filled with laughs.  I just can't get into this show.  The humor is too gentle and just doesn't work very well.  The programs also 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.

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 pretty dull.

This DVD contains three episodes and comes in a clear keepcase with a reversible cover and an insert.  The insert has a letter from Marie 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, along with a ten-minute behind the scenes interview with Nancy Novotny (Rin-Rin), and Sasha Paysinger (Marie).

Final Thoughts:

When you get right down to it, this show just isn't as funny as it should be.  The humor is too gentle, and the plots are very predictable.  The cast of characters is way to big for viewers to really get attached to any of them which hampers the show, but the main problem is that there is no conflict.  The average episode of Hello Kitty has more suspense and drama.  If you've stuck with this show this far, the volume is worth a rental to see who has been giving Mami her instructions, but that's about all.  Rent it.