Is Saint Young Men Overrated? A 6.80 That Rides a Premise and Two Halos Into Numbers Two OVA Episodes Won't Actually Earn

Saint Young Men posts a 0.67-point gap between MyAnimeList's 7.47 and the Codex 6.80 because the crowd is grading a logline — Jesus and Buddha share an apartment — not the two-episode A-1 Pictures OVA that services it.

There is a particular kind of anime the internet loves that nobody actually finishes rewatching, and Saint Young Men is the cleanest specimen of the type. The premise does the heavy lifting, the OVA does the minimum, and the score inflates on charm alone. On the rubric, that ceiling shows up as a 6.80.

The gap between reputation and rubric is the story

MyAnimeList sits Saint Young Men at 7.47. Anime Codex sits it at 6.80. That 0.67-point differential is not noise; it is the exact space between grading a concept and grading an execution. The consensus position — that a Hikaru Nakamura gag manga about Jesus and Buddha getting into low-stakes trouble in a Tokyo apartment is a warm, distinctive minor classic — is not wrong on vibes. It's wrong on weighting. The crowd is scoring the pitch, the two protagonists' odd-couple chemistry, and the goodwill of a franchise that later stretched into a live-action film and a 2024 Netflix series. The rubric is scoring what A-1 Pictures actually delivered in 2013: two OVA episodes, competent, unambitious, and structurally incapable of the escalation seinen comedy usually earns its scores on.

Name what the crowd is rewarding that the rubric won't. That's the whole post.

The premise is the ceiling, not the floor

World-building lands at 8.0, and it deserves it — this is the single criterion where Saint Young Men outruns almost everything else in its weight class. Jesus and Buddha as flatmates in a Tachikawa apartment is a genuinely original conceit, and Nakamura mines it with real theological specificity: Buddha's ushnisha reads as a hair problem, Jesus's stigmata reads as a bleeding hand at inconvenient moments, and the internal logic treats divinity as a set of everyday domestic inconveniences rather than a source of spectacle. That's clever writing, and the OVA preserves it.

But world here is doing something narrower than the number suggests. The setting depth stops at the apartment, the neighborhood, the amusement park, the public bath. This is not a universe. It is a single joke setting rendered with excellent granularity. The 8.0 rewards conceptual originality, not scope — and once you've watched a public-bath scene and an amusement-park scene and a landlady-mistakes-them-for-yakuza scene, you have seen most of the moves the premise has to offer. The rubric doesn't punish a small canvas, but it also refuses to inflate one.

Story is a criterion, and there isn't one

Story lands at 6.5, which is generous for a work that is deliberately, explicitly plotless. The two OVA episodes are strings of vignettes — Jesus impulse-buying, Buddha budgeting anxiously, both of them being oblivious to how much of their behavior scans as suspicious in modern Tokyo. There's no arc. There's no escalation. There's no moment in the second episode that requires the first to have happened. This is by design; Nakamura's manga runs on the same episodic engine. But a rubric that weighs story cannot pretend a vignette reel is doing what a two-cour seinen comedy is doing.

Compare the shape of this to how the same problem sinks other reputations. Sgt. Frog's 358 episodes buckle under the same critique — gag structure at scale, no cumulative payoff — and Saint Young Men gets a partial pass only because it stops at two episodes before the format's ceiling becomes exhausting. If A-1 Pictures had greenlit a cour, the story score would drop, not rise. The brevity is protecting the number.

The animation is fine, and fine is the problem

Animation at 6.5 is the honest read on what A-1 Pictures delivered. The character designs are faithful to Nakamura's soft, rounded linework, the deadpan reaction shots — Buddha's tiny, dismayed pauses when Jesus overspends — carry the comedic timing they need to carry, and the palette is warm without being distinctive. That is the entire compliment. There is no directorial ambition in the framing. There is no visual set piece. The public bath, the festival, the apartment interior — these are staged competently and forgotten quickly.

A seinen slice-of-life doesn't require spectacle, but it requires a director willing to do something specific with the compositional space. Look at what Shinichirō Watanabe does with static kitchen scenes, or what Naoko Yamada does with a single hand. Saint Young Men has none of that grammar. The OVA is a delivery mechanism for the manga's jokes, and its animation grade is the grade of a delivery mechanism.

Themes are polite, and the rubric notices

Themes land at 6.0, and this is where the crowd's affection and the rubric's cold read diverge most sharply. There is a real idea in Saint Young Men — the sacred enjoying the ordinary, two religious icons finding secular joy in convenience-store snacks and manga volumes — and it is handled with genuine warmth, no mockery, no reverence, no edge. That is charming. It is also emotionally low-stakes by design, and the rubric weighs emotional resonance the way it weighs everything: on what actually lands, not on what is politely gestured at.

The comparable case is how Dr. Slump gets capped by a 5.5 on themes despite a strong Toriyama scorecard elsewhere — gag comedy with no thematic backbone can only climb so high. Saint Young Men clears that specific bar because there is a backbone, gentle humanism, but the bar it clears is low and it doesn't push past it.

The steelman: character work is real, and it carries what it can

The strongest defense of the 7.47 consensus is that the character grade — 7.5 — is doing exactly what the crowd feels. Jesus and Buddha as characters are sharply drawn. Jesus is impulsive, easily-delighted, catastrophic with money. Buddha is frugal, anxious, secretly drawing manga in the apartment. The running gags are not decoration; they reveal personality every time they recur. The odd-couple domesticity is genuine and affectionate, and the voice performances sell it.

That is real, and the rubric grants it. But character in a two-episode OVA with no arc means static characterization by definition — these are eternal beings, they are not going to grow, and the supporting cast (the landlady, the neighbors) exists purely as straight men. Character carries the show as far as character can carry a show without story, themes, or animation pulling their share. The MAL 7.47 is essentially a character score generalized across the entire scorecard. The Codex refuses that generalization. This is the same mechanism that inflates Kamisama Kiss past its structural ceiling — one strong criterion, four ordinary ones, and a fandom score that averages upward instead of honestly.

Verdict

Saint Young Men is a pleasant, specific, minor OVA with one excellent premise and one excellent character dynamic, servicing a manga that deserves more ambitious adaptation than A-1 Pictures gave it. The 6.80 is not a hit piece; it is the honest arithmetic when you refuse to let a logline and two protagonists carry four other criteria they were never asked to carry. The crowd is grading the pitch. The rubric is grading the episodes.