AMAENAIDE YO!!

DESCRIPTION

CAST

ANIME ComedyAmaenaide yo!! Katsu!!
MANGA ComedyAmaenaide yo!!
SPECIAL ComedyAmaenaide yo!! Special

REVIEWS

• 

  Ciaora39

  43/100
  Massively forgettable.

  

  As a noted ecchi connoisseur, I always try to watch old ones that I never got the chance to see rather than wait for the two or three ecchi anime every season and pray they don’t suck. My experience started in the late 2000s with anime like Sora no Otoshimono and later To Love Ru seasons that morphed my obsession with this genre. I never fully experienced all ecchi before the 2010s except for a handful that many consider classics. This eventually led me to come across Amaneide yo randomly, or Ah My Buddha. After it was finished, I can safely say that this is not one that many would consider a classic.

  Am I saying this because it’s absolute trash, or does nobody remember it? A little bit in the former and the latter. Almost nobody I know who follows the genre even talks about this in the plethora of ecchi during the 2000s. There is a broad consensus that the decade was mostly terrible for the genre. It wasn’t until the tail end of the decade that things started to move forward in making a stand-out ecchi anime during the 2010s. With an ecchi like Amaenaide yo, it perfectly represents all of the bad ones during the 2000s. Is it outright garbage? I would not go so far as to say that there are far worse ones, but I can certainly say that this was just outright stale, formulaic, and boring in every sense of these words.

  

  As a setup, it does have one that is interesting on paper. You have a Buddhist monk training with a harem of nuns that each represents “the bosatsu of the six lower realms of the traditional Buddhist cosmology.” That sounds unique in an anime of this caliber. The problem is that they do not take advantage of the possibilities of this story setup down the road. It is just an excuse to have the main character look at their lewd bodies to gain his exorcism powers to defeat the supernatural entities inside of the girls. Usually, that would be fine as this is an ecchi anime, after all. But the issue is that the ecchi is incredibly tame and not all that exciting.

  How can the ecchi be tame and unexciting? Well, for one, the art design is so dated and unremarkable. The girls look painfully generic, and the animation is incredibly slow and not very flashy. There are a few points where it does work, but overall, it makes you realize, “Yep, this is obviously from 2005.” The design of the demons isn’t anything special either — just overall, not an exciting anime to look at aesthetically.

  

  What drags down the charm of the ecchi mishaps is that the female characters have little to no personality whatsoever. As I write this, I can’t even remember the names of any of them. Not just that, but also what archetypes they fit into your typical harem anime, what their likes and dislikes are, or how they contribute to the main story. The only one that I could point out was the main heroine, but that’s only because she was the one that suffered through most of the main character’s lewd shenanigans and acts as the main love interest. Other than her, I could not tell you the purpose of the rest except for the main character exorcising their demons in one episode. Even for supporting casts, you have to give them something else that makes them feel special to make them stand out, or I’m not going to care what happens to them or what they are doing.

  Nothing about the plot itself is even bearing a critique. To sum it all up in one word is dull. It feels like your typical episodic anime that all connects in some fashion but feels like your monster of the week anime that is already saturated enough as it is or was. By the time I watched episode seven, I had been up even trying to care about what was happening. It did not help that the characters were all completely wooden, both in personality and writing.

  

  I know this review may be a bit random because why would anybody have the urge to write anything this forgotten in the anime stratosphere? For some reason, I wanted to showcase an ecchi that was part of a by-gone era when harem anime was so saturated and mostly crap. This was when Love Hina and Tenchi Muyo became a hit, and many mangaka and anime studios were trying to create their hack versions of these two shows. Amaneide yo is far from a terrible example of this, but it is undoubtedly one that will most likely not be looked back on fondly; that is, if you can find someone who remembers its existence.

  Grade: C-

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• 

  PulpGodd

  75/100
  A straight down the middle 00s harem comedy.

  Amaenaide yo!! is a mid 00s manga-based harem/ecchi comedy that's neither an unsung masterpiece nor a total piece of crap. It's about as straight down the middle as one of these series can get, with some wiggle room for quite likable highs to specific elements that drag. This review will cover both 13 episode seasons of the series.

  The anime begins shortly after the male lead gets sent to a temple and begins living as a monk. The other 6 residents of the temple are girls roughly his age, and--you can see where this is going... That's about as far as the exposition goes. The story is just as simple, and follows a mostly episodic format where the main cast exorcises a restless spirit every week. A premise this basic isn't necessarily a show's death sentence however. With the right sense of identity and attention to detail, this approach can actually be an anime's charm. Amaenaide yo!! gets this mostly right.

  I think the art style is wonderful. Each of the heroines has a distinct look and this is part of what elevates their characters into something more memorable than cardboard tropes. Characters have big features and there's generally a lack of distant shots. This visual intimacy works well with the above-norm production resolution this show boasts. The color (hue, saturation, arrangement) in everything from the temple outfits, school uniforms, landscapes, and room interiors is very rich and warm. It passively breathes life into the anime while being muted enough to where it doesn't feel overly plastic or cartoony. The animation, however, is too frequently a downside to the overall visual experience. There are times when animation is definitely good, sometimes great, but a few too many times where faces are noticeably funny, etc. The higher resolution I mentioned works as a double edged sword in this anime: when animation is good, it's noticeable, and when it's bad, it's always going to be twice as noticeable.

  The story took a few episodes to find its groove, but once it settled into a nice episodic pace I had no complaints (as far as S1 goes). It's mostly ghost-of-the-week format, but these episodes also focus on a particular heroine in the mission. Each episode usually ends on an ever-so-slightly tender or charming moment that made me appreciate the events of the past 23 minutes. S2 still carries much of the positive over from the first season, but also explores a more overarching plot and actual buddhist concepts (at least on a surface level). This would be a good thing by itself, but S2 introduces another female character who simply did not have many likeable qualities and whose antics would often disrupt the pacing I liked in S1. She's an example of a character that clearly didn't need to be there and this definitely knocked my enjoyment of the entire show down a peg.

  The ecchi factor is light and playful in the first season and could be considered pretty typical for its time. Enough to give the anime some tasteful pervy humor, but nothing that will blow blood out your nose. This element is noticeably cranked up for the second season. I personally felt this was about as necessary as the added annoying character. There is no actual nudity (which I think is appropriate given the tone of the anime) except in the special episodes 13 and 26 (where it does feel like a fun payoff).

  If you enjoy harem-heavy romcoms from this era, it would probably be wise to give Amaenaide yo!! at least a few episodes of your time since it's a staple of this style and also massively over-hated.

  If you're looking to own this series, Nozomi Ent released a localized BD of this series that's very good. It's a full 4 discs (not squashed into 2 or 3) and the transfer and encoding look great. Worth it if you can get it on sale. No, they did not pay me to write this

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