Amaenaide yo!!

"Buddhism turned extreme ... in an erotic way ..."

What happens when you put a monk and a bunch of nuns together in a temple? Performing exorcism all day and night? Not really ... performing perverted, ecchi stuff all day and night? O yeah!

Amaenaide yo! is an anime that can easily get faithful Buddhists ticked and non believers wonder "what the heck" is Buddhism. While this is only half of the story (you need to watch Amaenaide yo!! Katsu!! to get the complete picture to the story), it does serve its purpose quite well as a building block to the sequel.

Story:
The show is very episodic by ... nature, thus one can watch all the episodes in whichever order one pleases (except for episode 1 and 12) and will still be able to follow the story. Nearly all episodes contain some sort of ecchiness (rated R) though they can hardly be compared to Kanokon. In terms of plot, the story is rather simple and easy to comprehend throughout the series. In fact the story is so simple that if the ecchiness can be taken out of the anime, the show is actually more suitable for children than young adults. (Ecchi Power Rangers, anyone?)

Art:
When I first started watching this show, the characters looked very awkward to me due to their unusual round faces and marble-like eyes (especially Chitose the main female lead). The animation quality is very consistent throughout the series and the transition from scene to scene is also very smooth.

Sound:
The OP and ED are nothing very spectacular, however that is not to say they will make your ears bleed. There are a few notable CV:

The main female lead, Chitose, is voiced by Mai Nakahara who is known for Nagisa in Clannad, Mai in Mai HiME and Mai Otome.

Ikkou the main male lead, is voiced by Chihiro Suzuki who is known for Kouta in Elfen Lied, Luke in Tales of the Abyss.

Character:
It worried me at first (since all the girls seemed to play quite a major role in the story) that in 12 short episodes, the female characters will not have enough time to fully develop themselves as a unique character. But much to my surprise, all the females have pretty much equal screen time and most of them matured overtime as the series progresses. On the other hand, Ikkou (despite being the main focus in every episode) did not really change much from the beginning to the end.

Enjoyment + Final Thought:
While not the most ecchi anime you'll ever come across, Amaenaide yo! will not disappoint you if you are looking for perverted anime. Personally I watch it because I have been exposed to Buddhism ever since a young age and I was curious to see what it might lead me to. The anime certainly pissed off my Buddist-self, but at the same time it was entertaining with its light comedy.

*It should be noted that the anime does include a lot of Buddhism terminology, so I recommend getting some definition out of the way first while watch it (else it'll be extremely confusing)*

This review is written purely for fun (because of the words used to describe it) but it does summarise the show well.

Basically, this show is like ecchi "Power Rangers", each episode features a new enemy beaten in the exactly same way.
The only things that change are: the enemy, setting and the girl who gets her clothes taken off.

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-