Amaenaideyo, Season 1 Review

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before:

Loser guy with secret power lives under the same roof with (multiple) total hotties, who consider him a pervert and often abuse — what? You say I should have stopped at "Loser"? Really, I wish I had. Either I’m getting really jaded or I’m getting a lot pickier about my animé. Three minutes into the first episode, and I’m telling myself, "Oh yeah, now I remember why I never downloaded this series before. It sounded stupid and unoriginal. Well, it successfully lived down to those expectations.

Left to right:

Ikkou Satonaka, age 16, first year Buddhist monk trainee. Secret power: turns into super-monk capable of mass exorcisms…when exposed to a mostly or entirely naked female.
Joutono Kawahara, age ?, Ikkou’s grandmother, high (and apparently only) priestess of the temple, also vice-principle of the high school attended by the older trainees.
Haruka Amanagawa, age 17, second-year trainee. Unofficial leader of the trainees. Rather carefree and a bit "liberated" for someone who calls herself a priestess.
Chitose Nanbu, age 15, first year trainee. (Very) small-town girl, likes horror movies. Of course, being a redhead, she’s the resident (mild) tsundere that won’t admit to herself she really likes Ikkou. Constantly and unwillingly loses her clothing to power-up Ikkou. Probably has the most sincere calling of them all.
Hinata Sugai, age 14, pre-trainee. Younger sister of Sakura. Resident semi-autistic genius, of course. Seen here without her pet flame-breathing demon, about the size of a small bobblehead figure.
Sumi Iuina, age 16, first year trainee. Sweet girl, has power over and empathy with animal spirits.
Sakura Sugai, age 16, second year trainee. Secret life as online "Dr.Sakura" where she dispenses advice (often abusive) to losers who write her with their problems.
Yuuko Atouda, age 15, first year trainee. Physical adept, the big eater, yuri tendencies, more dirty-minded than Haruka, and insanely jealous of the other girls’ larger breasts. Generally responsible for Chitose’s loss of clothing.

It’s not even 2 minutes into the first episode before Yuuko strips Chitose to power-up Ikkou and save the day. It’s only two minutes after that until he walks in on several of the girls in the shower. This series strings a fairly thin plot between all the scenes of Chitose (or one of the other girls) losing her clothes. After the first couple of episodes, it tended to follow a pattern of the gang encountering a spirit in human guise, which somehow none of them realize is a spirit (excpet Hinata, of course). Chitose gets jealous if any other girl shows interest in Ikkou, but abuses him as a pervert. Somone gets nekkid, and Ikkou saves the day. All the girls abuse him, despite the fact that it’s Yuuko that is always stripping Chitose. Seems to me, she’s the real pervert.

There are a couple of times where Chitose gives in and does it herself, and once when Sumi accidently got stripped, but after the third episode, I found myself jumping through the episodes just looking for the fanservice, of which there is a lot. Sadly, that means if Haruka ever got stripped, I missed it. Oh well. The eyecatches at the break are downright ecchi at times, and the final (DVD-only) episode is fully ecchi, with a lot of nudity in the latter half. The dialogue is uniformly suggestive throughout the series; in fact the fansubbers (I watched Mendoi’s version) state at the beginning that the writers used "come" and "awaken" interchangeably, but they chose to go exclusively with “awakened.” The point of that becomes obvious when you hear lines like "So, you lost your concentration and awakened, eh?" Making this all the weirder, the girls don’t refer to themselves as mikko, but as nuns, though that might be Mendoi’s choice again. It’s all the more bizarre during the required school festival episode, when the girls in different classes compete to have the best booth — and both of them blatantly use sex appeal to bring customers in.

Ikkou is the completely lame and loser center of the harem. He’s whiney, self-centered, and irresponsible — but hey, he’s a nice guy despite all that. In other words, the typical harem loser-male. He appears to have gotten something of a grip by the end of the series, but he’s still too whiney, and the girls still abuse him. And of course, so does grandma, whose real job is to see to it that Ikkou masters his wild power.

The art isn’t all that outstanding — in fact, it’s fairly mediocre, and the character design isn’t terribly original in a couple of cases. I wish they’d put half the effort into the art that they did for the ED scene of Ikko and Chitose on a bicycle. Yet somehow, despite all the negatives I cite here, they managed an OVA and a second season in addition to the episodes I downloaded. . It had to be on the strength of the admittedly excellent fanservice, because I really didn’t see much else to this show. I couldn’t see spending the time to watch it all, even for the purpose of doing this review.

And that is all the time and words I’m going to waste on this.