Once upon a time, there were three little children. They consisted of a set of twins... One male and one female... And a next door neighbor. All the same age, they played together endlessly, until they were all abandoned at the same time. Growing up as orphans, living very different lives in very different environments, with the only clue to their past being a photograph of two of them playing in an inflatable pool, the three of them set out to find the house they all remember from the photo. They meet at the house, the only thing any of them have in the world, but as they begin to share their lives together, and adolescent hormones begin to rear their ugly heads, they face a curious dilemma... Who is Maiku Kamishiro’s long lost twin sister, and who is the outsider? Between the tomboyish Mina Miyafuji and the refined Karen Onodera, one of them is destined to be the love of his life, and the other... Well, in a strange world full of aliens and UFOs, the strangest thing of all is this dangerous love triangle, and they’ll have to break more than just a few hearts to solve this mystery for good.

Please Twins was produced by Daume, a studio that had a tragically short lifespan from around 1993 to 2011. I’ve seen a few of their titles, and while there are a few I haven’t seen in a very long time, like Hanaukyo Maid Team, the few that I have seen that I have strong memories of look nothing like each other. Strawberry Marshmallow had an entirely unique look to it, as did Shiki, and Le Portrait de Petit Cossette looks more or less indistinguishable from its director’s other works. I don’t really have anything to make a comparison to, but on its own, Please Twins looks kind of mediocre. It has its strong points, like the beautiful background animation that succeed in conveying the aesthetic of a rustic, rural Japanese town. It also has its bad points, like the obviously barren animation budget that the producers clearly had to struggle to work under. Still, I’ve seen a lot worse out of low-budget anime before, and while Please Twins is by no means the pinnacle of budget management, they did an adequate job highlighting the strengths of their visuals and sweeping its weaknesses under the rug.

The characters, for the most part, are pretty generic, but they’re not bad looking. At the absolute worst, some of them look forgettable, like they would be a better fit for the background than they are for the side and supporting cast. This is a spin-off show, so it does feel a little off-putting seeing the main cast of the previous series return as side characters in this one... Something about their designs does not math the level of exposure they’re given throughout the story. Maiku looks like a perfectly fine discount harem protagonist... A stern face, short spiky hair and no real distinguishing characteristics... But Mina and Karin do steal the show from a visual perspective. I have it on good authority that these are the main sources of merchandise for the series, rivaling even the teacher from Please Teacher, and it’s easy to see why, they have very distinctive, pleasantly colored, and subtly attractive designs. Attractive enough for the entire male student body to be obsessed with them? No, but it's a low-grade ecchi, just go with it.That aside, characters are occasionally drawn off-model, but for some reason, nobody gets this worse than Maiku, who I swear must have watched the tape from Ringu before filming. His face goes to some incredibly awkward places, but despite it’s best efforts, it never quite leaves his body.

The music sounds like your typical visual novel fair, the sort of tunes that bounce along whimsically with every lighthearted instrument under the sun while you take your time reading dialogue, which is very strange, considering this show was NOT based on a visual novel. It’s fine at first, but it gets distractingly repetitive after a while. For the English dub, well, it’s hit or miss. Maiku is played by the ever-beloved Johnny Yong Bosch, and while I hate myself for saying this, he does not bring his A-game here. He doesn’t do badly, I honestly don’t know if he CAN do a ba d performance, but it just comes off like he took this job for the paycheck. He sounded more awake and alive while voicing Itsuki Koizumi’s monologue about the anthropic principal than he does here. It’s not a matter of range... I mean, for fuck’s sake, he played a God-loving violent bloodthirsty psychopath in Fate/Zero, and he sounded just as perfect as he did when voicing Vash the Stampede, after all... But I’m inclined to wonder, if you brought up a bunch of his anime roles to him at a con, THIS is one of the ones he wouldn’t remember. For the rest of the cast, there are a lot of well known names here, giving various levels of effort.

Kari Wahlgren plays Mina, and she is the exact opposite of Bosch. She’s energetic, charismatic, outgoing, and she’s clearly putting every ounce of effort she has into the performance. Lara Jill Miller does her best as the more waifish and diminutive Karin, but I can’t help but think Stephanie Sheh would have been a better choice for the role, as this is the sort of thing she’s always been typecast as, and for a good reason. For Miller, I’m honestly not too familiar with her history as an anime voice actor, but even when she is appearing in something from over-seas, I’ve always felt she was better used in more nasally pitched and off-beat characters, like she did in Beastars and The Loud House. The teacher character who’s returning from the previous show is Bridget Hoffman, who kind of deserved more screen time, but I understand why she was used so sparingly. The most interesting performance, though, is probably Crispin Freeman, someone who clearly read the assignment. Playing an ambiguously gay classmate who may or may not have the hots for Maiku, he drenches every line he utters in cheese. I have no issue with the dub that didn’t exist in the sub as well, you’re fine with either.

I should be clear, before I go any farther, that I haven’t seen Please Teacher. I was initially attracted to Please Twins because it had a memorable appearance in AMV Hell 4, and my road to hell is paved with AMV Hell clips. This was a long time ago, and while I don't remember specifically why, I skipped Teacher and went straight to Twins. I don’t recall what I thought of it at the time... I remember calling it trash, but that’s not necessarily an insult... But it did stick in my memory just enough so that when I saw the DVD available as part of last year’s Rightstuf Holiday Sale for around five dollars, I decided I’d purchase a copy. I figured it was so bad that if I found ,myself in a rut and I wanted an easy target to review, I could always bust it out, and guess where I am? Yeah, if you haven’t noticed, it’s gotten a lot harder to get upvotes on Anilist right now. Unless you’re reviewing seasonal anime as it’s being released, you have to time your uploads precisely to stay up long enough to break double digit upvotes.

And I know, you’re not supposed to let that bother you... Even if only a half dozen people vote on your reviews, that’s still a half dozen people who love your work, and that SHOULD be all that matters, but hey, everyone’s a little petty sometimes. I’m at an impasse, but I figured rather than jut dropping off the map I could just have some fun shooting fish in a barrel. And Please Twins is a big fish in a small barrel. I don’t feel like I need to watch Please Teacher to appreciate Please Twins... Yeah, some characters carried over, but none of them are important enough that they couldn’t have been replaced with original characters. The previous series might explain the presence of aliens, but I don’t care. It also might explain why the teacher is married to one of her students, and the less I find out about that, the better. Teachers falling in love with students is barely acceptable in a college setting, let alone high school. Then again, it worked in Scum’s Wish... Except no, it really didn’t, that was the worst thing ABOUT Scum’s Wish.

So where do we begin? Not on the right foot, I’m afraid. One of the first interactions with these three occurs when Karin is riding the train, sees Maiku on his baiku... Mike on his bike? Some distance away, and remarks that they have the same eye color. Which she can totally see from the train. For something like that to happen early in the first episode, it’s a big red flag that the writers don’t give a shit, and I don’t mean the fun kind of don’t give a shit, I mean “Just write whatever so we can get our paychecks faster.” They meet, they all have the same photo, linking their childhoods together, and while it’s thought to just be two kids in the picture, it’s revealed that all three of them knew each other back then. If this sounds familiar, it’s because they used a similar concept in Love Hina, just without the incest. For those of you wondering why they don’t just get their DNA tested, it’s sort of hand waved off as being too expensive... That’s it, that’s all you need, all efforts stop there, no point trying to raise the money or asking for help, we’re just not going that route, please stop mentioning it. The three potential siblings spend their first ten episodes together going through the motions of a moe harem series, and they do it in the most annoying way possible.

“There’s two of us in the photo, and one of them is Maiku, so who’s the other one? Between the two of us, one is Maiku’s relative, and one of us is a stranger to him. So who’s the relative, and who’s the stranger? Am I the relative? Am I the stranger? Is she the relative? Is she the stranger? If I’m Maiku’s relative, then my feelings for him will never be realized, but if I’m the stranger, I can’t live here. Whether I’m the relative or the stranger, finding out the truth will change everything. So am I the relative, or am I the stranger? Am I a relative to Maiku, or am I a stranger to him? A relative... A stranger... Which one of us is the relative, and which one of us is the stranger? Am I the relative? Am I the stranger? Is she the relative? Is she the stranger? If I’m Maiku’s relative, then my feelings for him will never be realized, but if I’m the stranger, I can’t live here. Whether I’m the relative or the stranger, finding out the truth will change everything. So am I the relative, or am I the stranger? Am I a relative to Maiku, or am I a stranger to him? A relative... A stranger... Which one of us is the relative, and which one of us-” SHUT UP!!!

For fuck’s sake, get these people a fucking thesaurus! Say sibling! Say friend! Say family! I swear to God, I feel like Samuel L. Jackson being told “What?” over and over again. Say relative or stranger again, I dare you motherfucker! That entire paragraph is a highly accurate rendition of what watching this anime is like, minus the constant barbie doll bath scenes and a deeply homophobic sub-plot where a male supporting character is constantly sexually harassing Maiku, and when you find out why he’s doing it, it makes about as little sense as ANY of the misunderstandings in this show... For example, Karin crying in Maiku’s lap, and two other girls thinking he’s forcing her to go down on him despite the fact that he still has his fucking pants completely on... And the resolution he reaches is just as infuriating. Even between all these standout moments, though, the majority of the material is just tedious and boring. Most of the series just follows either silly hijinks at school, weird non-sensical misunderstandings or the domestic coexistence of our three main characters, which is incredibly unfortunate given that in most cases, their dynamic feels more akin to a father and his two child daughters, rather than three similarly aged adolescents.

If you were to remove all of the pointless fluff in this series, all of the repetitive crap, and every single instance of the characters whining about their situation through both shared laments and voice-over soliloquies, you could easily cut this series down to six episodes, and it would be better for it. You’d just have to cut the first ten episodes down to four, which shouldn’t be too hard, and as for the final two episodes... Well, I wanna be careful about how I phrase this, but the last two episodes of Please Twins are actually kind of good. Not all the way good, but a noticeable improvement over all of the BS that precedes them. One of the girls finds a pretty clever clue that’s been hiding in plain sight all along, and she figures out the truth. She isn’t sure how to deliver the news at first, but when she DOES, the reveal is actually pretty emotionally satisfying. On top of that, I think the right choices were made. The right girl was the sister, and the right girl was the friend(See? I didn’t have to say stranger OR relative there, take a fucking hint!). In the final episode, their reactions to this news and the resolutions they make are, if not always great, at least understandable. Keep in mind, I’m not saying this ending is worth watching the series for, but if you have to, it’s a nice little reward in the end.

Please Twins was originally available from Bandai entertainment in both a series of individual disks and an Anime Legends collection, which was... Let’s say generous of them. Nowadays, the DVD and Bluray are available from Rightstuf, and the same could be said for Please Teacher. No matter which release you find, it’ll also include a special episode 13 OVA that throws away all the good will that episodes 11 and 12 were able to obtain by reminding you exactly how painful the series was before that. I’ve never seen Waiting in the Summer, but apparently that’s also connected to this franchise, and it’s available from Section23 Films. The manga and light novels are not available stateside.

I know that out of the handful of people who are going to read this review, a portion of you are going to insist that I’d like this show a lot better if I had seen the first series, and I don’t want you to think I don’t respect your opinion, but I’m sorry, Please Twins is a chore to get through, and I can’t think of any prior knowledge that could have made it easier to get through. It runs on a weak premise that isn’t anywhere near strong enough to support twelve entire episodes, and it really would feel stronger over-all if they’d cut all the meandering bullshit and shortened the episode count down to six. The majority of the plot runs on logic that crumbles under even the most gentle scrutiny, and while the concept of “If I pick the wrong girl I’ll be engaging in incest” should make for some hefty(albeit ridiculous) stakes, the characters barely register it as anything other than an inconvenience. Things do pick up in the final two episodes, but I can’t in good conscience say that the ending actually justifies the rest of the experience. It’s a relic of the past, and while I do appreciate the companies that are out there rescuing older anime, this is one they could have just as well left behind.

I give Please Twins a 3/10