Lucky☆Star

"This is so BORING!" is what most of you will say if you watch it.
I'll admit, that is what I thought at first, and I stopped watching on the first episode when they were talking about which side is the head of a "chocolate cornet bread"... But after a while, I gave it another try, and this time, I watched patiently and watched through the entire first episode. I was still not impressed, and still bored. I moved on to the next episode, and as you can tell by my over-all rating of a 10, I loved the rest. Now here is why:
The story, is ... non-existent (as I will put no emphasis on story in this review). But that was one of the main reasons I loved it. There was no tension, no fighting, no drama, no heart-breaks. Just pure comedy.
Comedy? Well, there's nothing that will make you roll over. But, there are countless moments where it makes you smile, many times even chuckles if you get the jokes.
The comedy works in this anime by having the characters go through moments where you go like, "OH I feel you!", "I totally know what you mean!, or "Ah so glad I am not the only one who does that!". That's why it's really funny in a way, making this the most accurate "slice of life" I have ever viewed.
The English dub for this anime is pretty amazing (for once), the voice actor for Konata, the main character, does a wonderful job of bring her to life. The characters are all likable, but Konata is one of the best characters I have seen, and she manages to do all that without geass powers or sword skills, too. I don't want to spoil anything, so I will leave it up to you to find out more about why I find Konata so great.
Also, it's a huge plus if you are exposed to Japanese culture (real life), because many of the jokes is about the daily life there and you will only get the jokes if you have experienced it (there aren't that many, so don't worry).
To sum it up, Lucky Star is about the daily life of the girls, there won't be any conflicts like there are in many slice of life anime, this anime is very peaceful, and you can relate to many of the characters.
Give it a try! Watch a few clips of it! Type in "Funny Lucky Star Moments" on Youtube and see for yourself! If you like it, WATCH IT. Don't marathon it, in fact, watch an episode after a long day, or better yet, watch it to calm your nerves after something like Code Geass/Death Note. Thank you

I found this anime very difficult to get through. The comedy wasnt exactly funny, and the jokes and puns were more like
"oh, i relate/understand that, is my life also considered sad?"

using the rating breakdown, let me explain to you why I didnt find this anime particularly wonderful.

STORY: there was almost no storyline. Sure 4 girls are trying to get through high school. but that sums up every other anime out there, about kids at school. What this anime lacked was drive. Plot is one of the elements which create the drive, but there was none. Im giving the story a 5 just for the ... sake of the somewhat cleverly placed jokes. As well, many of the elements got tiring and old, such as Lucky Channel, which is a talkshow hosted at the end of each episode. The live action scenes at the end of the latter episodes also got extremely annoying and exploited.

ART: nothing spectacular. I understand that for this kind of show, beautiful art isnt exactly the most neccessary thing. However, a lot of the time, there was no background.

SOUND: sadly, there was hardly any background music. But the sole reason that I rated the sound so much higher than the other qualities is because the OP was just so amazing and addictive. Sadly, the energy and excitement of the OP could not be reflected into the show.

CHARACTER: The characters presented are all very different, and their interactions with each other are very amusing to watch. I would have liked if there was at least some character development, or at least some insight into the characters. Often, characters also give an anime series the drive it needs to go on, but there was nothing about the characters that made you want to know more about them.

ENJOYMENT: I must say that the enjoyment factor, for me, especially, was quite low compared to many other people. This show was extremely hyped, and many many people were saying how amazing it was, and how funny it was. When I watched, I was extremely dissapointed. I even sat the series through to the end to see if I was missing something, or if the "amazingness" came later on. it didnt.

Most of the anime I enjoy watching has some substance, and there are factors like plot and characters that make me want to keep watching it. Lucky Star didnt cut it.

If you also prefer animes with more substance, themes, plot, and character, I do not recommend Lucky Star.

There is nothing in entertainment worse than bad comedy.

Bad drama, horror, romance, or action at least has the possibility of being amusing, if only for purely ironical purposes, and watching something which is intended to be serious completely fail can be surprisingly fun (see MST3K). However, watching something try to be funny and fail is hardly ever amusing in the slightest, and amounts, for me at least, to the epitome of nauseating boredom. In the anime world, Lucky Star is perhaps the best (and at the very least the most popular) example of bad comedy ever made.

Now, it is more or less universally agreed upon ... amongst Lucky Star's detractors that the show is, quite simply, "unfunny." At the same time however, it is not always explained in detail why or how it is unfunny. But before delving into the specifics, I will freely admit from the outset that comedy is probably the most subjective and difficult of all genres (I myself have some bizarre comedic tastes) to review. Nevertheless, I believe Lucky Star merits special attention, along with a special place in Hell, for how unprecedentedly unfunny it is. This is also why I chose it for my inaugural anime review.

Basically, the "humor" of Lucky Star is derived from two sources: 1) Discussions about everyday life experience (e.g. food, homework, clothes), and 2) References (either verbal or visual) to other anime franchises and various anime-related tropes. As for the first, Lucky Star makes the awful mistake of assuming that simply because something is true or commonly experienced, it is funny. Thus the episodes are crammed with inane, excruciatingly detailed conversational gems like

Person 1: "You know how when it's cold outside, you want to stay inside for longer?"
Person 2: "Haha yeah, I've totally been there!"

or

Person 1: "You know how when you have a lot of stuff to do, you clean your room instead?"
Person 2: "Haha yeah, I've done that before!"

You get the idea. The whole "funny because it's true" thing in my experience only works if it is comingled with an adequate amount of absurdity or exaggeration (for an example, see Mike Judge's films). Lucky Star, on the other hand, aims for pure realism in all its dullness. With this "comedic" logic, they may as well assume that simply because I have eaten food before, I will think that watching people eat food is funny; furthermore, I will think that people talking about eating food is also funny. What makes this method even more ridiculous for Lucky Star is the fact that one must be rather extensively versed in Japanese culture to even "get" a lot of these "jokes," let alone find them funny.

As for the anime references, this is where the annoyance factor truly rears its ugly head. Typically, an outside reference to another anime is funny because it is unexpected and well-timed. Lucky Star on the other hand, crams in as many references as it possibly can, many of which are to other works from Kyoto Animation. As one might imagine, this not only gets incredibly dull, but also unbearably irritating as the show progresses. By far the most frequent and most facepalm-inducing are the references to the Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. Granted, this trick was somewhat amusing the first time, but by the end of the series, the Haruhi references become so frequent, so bland, and so obvious that I literally began slamming my head into my desk. Thus like the reference to "everyday life," the references to anime make the assumption that just because we have seen the shows referenced, that we will find the references funny. Are we really supposed to pat ourselves on the back and quietly snicker to ourselves for being "in the know"? It seems like the real reason for all these anime references is a) a clever form of product-placement and b) riding on the success of vastly superior franchises (Full Metal Panic, Haruhi Suzumiya, the Key-game shows). The only reference that actually made me chuckle a bit (and not immediately roll my eyes or want to punch my computer screen) was the part in episode 13 where one of the shop employees uses his "Geass" on Konata to get her to buy a DVD, only to find that she is three yen short.

Now typically, in order to use reference-parodies like this successfully, one ought to find a way to integrate them in a creative and subtle way, and there are many examples of this in anime alone. Lucky Star, on the other hand, particularly when parodying well-known anime tropes, squanders its comedic potential by feeling the need to tell you exactly what they are parodying. Therefore, whenever Miyuki trips or turns off the light by accident, or Yutaka mentions that she is frail and "sick all the time," we are sure to have Konata not far off to immediately comment how incredibly "moe" she is. Ha. Ha. Ha. There is a similar delivery style with "tsundere," "fanservice," and other related terms and cliches. Watching this is like listening to someone tell a joke only to quickly explain the punchline before the audience even has a chance to laugh.

Aesthetically, there is not terribly much to say other than I find it amazing that even here Lucky Star manages to add yet another layer of annoyance. The characters were clearly designed to resemble the (equally unfunny) manga as closely as possible, and the result is not pleasing. The foreground and background art is lackluster and totally generic, not to mention the core girls all look waaaay too young (and not just in a typical "moe" way) for being in high school. Such failure in this department is all the more surprising knowing that this show was produced by Kyoto Animation, a studio which, among other things, is particularly well known for its beautiful and groundbreaking visual styling. In Lucky Star, there is no such evidence whatsoever that this is the same company who did Full Metal Panic: The Second Raid, Air, or Kanon. I suspect the real reason Kyoto took this project on was because of potential legal issues surrounding the ludicrous amounts of references to their other works. Other than that, the music consists of bland, forgettable five-note pieces typical for this kind of show. Except worse.

Setting aside for a moment what Lucky Star has brings up the important issue of what it does not have. In fact, one of Lucky Star's most subtle and yet most serious detriments is the almost complete absence of visual humor of any kind (the stock anime-facial-expressions aside). The show is quite simply a bunch of talking heads, and as something in the medium of animation, Lucky Star feels incredibly out of place; 99% of the show consist of dialogue and dialogue only. Suffice it to say, this show was a complete and unfortunate waste of Kyoto's talent.

All in all, my biggest problem with Lucky Star, and the reason why I have been compelled to write this review, is that it basically gives slice of life comedy a bad name--something which is all the more compounded by its rabid popularity. It is not at all unlikely that someone who has never seen a slice of life show will first see Lucky Star and then assume that the entire genre is of similar quality. After all, comments like "nothing happens" and "there's no plot" are fairly common amongst complaints from Lucky Star haters. Unfortunately, I believe people may be missing out on a lot of great, funny, clever slice of life shows "where there's no plot" (Fumoffu, Azumanga Daioh, Minami-ke) if Lucky Star does indeed manage to taint them so severely. It is interesting to note that Lucky Star is perhaps most often mentioned along with the classic Azumanga Daioh, and the comparison is not at all unmerited: both shows are based off of a four-panel manga about a group of quirky high school girls and their antics. However, once the stylistic similarities are brushed aside, you are left with two anime which could not be more diametrically opposed. That is, whereas Azumanga Daioh represents the pinnacle of comedy done right, Lucky Star represent the pinnacle of comedy done wrong; whereas Azumanga Daioh uses "random conversations about food" in a broader, situational context to give them humorous contrast, Lucky Star takes this device to a ridiculous extreme--it makes an entire show out of it to the expense of nearly everything else. The difference between Azumanga's Osaka and Lucky Star's Konata is that the former is one character amongst many, whereas the latter is only an otaku-pandering, watered-down Osaka amongst many other watered-down Osaka's, without any significant personality contrast. In Lucky Star, there is no one to sarcastically say "wow, you have a really vivid imagination..." but rather the one-note "joke" of "randomness" continues on into senseless oblivion. If Azumanga Daioh is a bright beacon of joyful, energetic laughter, Lucky Star is a dark pit of disparaging, cynical boredom (if you'll excuse the melodramatic language). It basically takes the slice of life genre but does not fill it with any real content, leaving naught but an empty husk.

In conclusion, if you want a creative, genuine, funny slice-of-life comedy and not simply a long otaku in-joke set on repeat, avoid Lucky Star like the plague.