Amaenaide yo!!

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-

Anime such as this are so formulaic, repetitive and predictable to the point you know what they will be about by just reading the categories. It’s as if there is an Echidna out there (the mother of all monsters one, not that rodent) which gives birth to these shows with very similar traits, no matter who the father is. I am willing to place some harems above some others. Ah My Goddess and Love Hina were amongst the first, still pure and untainted by the ridiculousness of all those which plagiarized them later on, with far less quality and badly thought out settings. Well, hello, ... check out the name and the character attributes and then tell me it ain’t Ah My Goddess with a Love Hina lead. Watching them and their successors clearly shows how much the genre degenerated from romantic comedy with erotic innuendoes to pure fapping material without a shred of humor or taste.

Yes, I used the “T” word, indirectly calling all those who like such disgraces idiots. Well, excuse me for making a point here which goes beyond their egocentric selves and shows a sub market of wasted potential that diminishes the anime industry instead of flourishing it. But more on that later. Let’s first nerdraeg at the different sections of this dreadful thing which some did the mistake of making and others followed on by buying.

The story. Oh Sweet Mother of Jesus, the thing which this genre never cared about. Most comedies are the same as well but harems seem to not even bother TRYING to have anything other than a premise. In this case, the excuse for the endless fappingness is eastern monks. The setting is the same like in most others of this kind, a fail of a male specimen is surrounded by various super hot chicks, who have a really hard time staying dressed, covering their privates, or bumping on his crotch as if it is an ultra powerful electromagnet. Yeah, that sounds familiar; if it didn’t it wouldn’t be called soft porn disguised as comedy, aka harem. It’s as if all these shows need to do is have this premise and a random set of clothes to set themselves apart from the other, practically identical, shows. Which is double as lame, since down to it these shows use clothes not to define personalities but only to define fetishes. Maids, sisters, nuns, in this case priestesses. Plus, they finally aim to remove said clothes to provide even more cocktease, leaving the viewer staring at breast sizes and not people with a personality.

Anyways, the excuse here is that dork being sent to get close with Buddha while being accompanied by chicks who help him trigger his hidden potential. How? By making him horny! WTF? A priest getting better at holy magic by being tainted by lustfulness? Does that mean a psychotic killer who performs a mass (not the murder type) at some church will be ten times as crazy? What bullshit is this?

Crappy premises aside, the actual story is as per usual almost entirely fillers. The first episode is there to tell you the basics and the final episode of each season to provide a supposed closure, only for it to be as open and useless as the premise itself. The rest of the episodes are nothing but excuses for the girls to expose themselves. So if I am to give the story a score, that would be 3 episodes out of a full season, basically 1/7th of the total duration. There you go, a generous score of 2.

Then we move to the cast. Oh God Almighty, the section which is as looked upon as the story. The lead is the usual fail for life arsewhole who is incapable of even looking at a girl without having a nosebleed or not be beaten to a pulp by some neurotic bitch every 5 minutes. It was funny the first 100 times I saw it in Love Hina, but now it is nothing else besides lame. Seriously, are we supposed to identify with this ding-dong, who is good at nothing? Or to NOT identify but rather self-insert because of how bland he is? What kind of people would like such an archetype?

None. Nobody likes beta cucks. They can make them seem to be chick magnets because they have a good heart despite being wastes of space and still nobody will like them. Because they are never the main focus, they are the eyes of the viewer. The naked bodies of the girls are the highlight and the protagonists are losers just to prevent the story from becoming hardcore porn. WELL WHY NOT? How much frustration can a man stand before his weenie falls off from the constant blue-balling? This isn’t healthy for Pete’s sake. It’s just about drooling all over 2D girls without ever getting any boon.

Anyways, at least we have personalities to notice here besides boobs and underwear. Each girl has her own unique psychology, goals in life, reasons to aspire being like her… YEAH RIGHT! HAREM GIRLS WITH DEPTH; NICE ONE HAHAHA! They are solely defined by their breast size and the color of their underwear. Their clothes are not there to give them personality; they are there as a fetish for the fans of this dreadfulness to like. If they ever change clothes, they don’t become different people but rather a DIFFERENT FETISH! Being undressed is just the default state.

So these characters (which in this excuse of a story are some generic eastern monks in some generic temple) are nothing you wouldn’t expect. They don’t really develop and you have no reason to remember something about them, besides perhaps the boners you got out of them. I give them the score they deserve. A nice fat bottomed ace.

But you know what? As lame as these shows are, they can still have good animation and a brilliant soundtrack. Nothing holds them back from doing that. Love Hina and Ah My Goddess had wonderful artwork and superb music scores, and they are harems as well. Remember the magic world of the gods and their divine music? Naru’s singing at the concert? So why not have something similar in this show? BECAUSE THE PRODUCERS DIDN’T CARE! If it weren’t for the constant worm view of the camera angle just so we can see pantsu without a reason, there would be nothing to look at. And you can watch this anime in mute for all I care; the dialogues are retarded and there isn’t much of a plot to distract you from the main theme of this show; which is fapping excuses.

This turd has no message, no artistry, nothing out of the norm. It doesn’t even try to be different, it is a clone of the set-in-stone formula. Doesn’t worth it! Keep away! Try something else, preferably not harem.