Sunday 22 April 2007

Pic of the day: It's Konata! And she is not only super cute, she reads manga and watches anime all day instead of doing her homework, then spends her nights playing online games and dating sims! Even I would marry if I could have a daughter like her. *love*love*love*

Anime: Lucky Star

Number of episodes watched before review: 5

This cute anime looked at first glance to be the next Azumanga Daioh (in so far as anything could approach that masterpiece of innocent insight in the adolescent psyche). Like Azumanga, it is about a bunch of young high school girls and their conversations with each other, mostly. And like Azumanga, there are a lot of funny and thought-provoking ideas popping into young heads. The characters are slightly more stereotypical than in Azumanga, but not enough to make the characters simple cliches or cardboard cutouts.

In the first episode we are introduced to four girls. Two of them are twins, and have the same hair color, but otherwise they are quite different. One of them is ambitious and energetic, the other is unconcentrated and sleepy. They spend a lot of time with a third girl, who is an all-out geek and gamer. This girl, Konata, is my favorite character (of course); more about that soon. The fourth girl is also a close friend but not spending as much time with the twins. She is pretty, mature, polite, getting good grades and is a living encyclopedia of useful knowledge. Even her flaws are cute, according to Konata, who knows this because she has been playing her father's dating games. (Her mother is dead but her father has not remarried. If he is anything like her, the mystery is how he got married in the first place...)

That's it, really. Well, their teacher makes an appearance occasionally. She is also suspiciously similar to the ditzy homeroom teacher in Azumanga Daioh, at least in personality. But of course she too is upgraded to the 21st century: She spends her evenings playing MMORPGS together with Konata, except the teacher falls asleep earlier. As such, she does not have much faith in Konata's various excuses for coming late or calling in sick.

I love Konata like my own daughter. OK, not quite, but I have a feeling that if I had a daughter, she would be like that, only without the long blue hair. Konata is super smart, but her knowledge is mostly about things nobody understands. She never does her homework, but crams the night before tests, and get top grades. In between tests she just copies from her friends. She spends all her time reading manga, watching anime and playing games. (Hence the "like my own daughter" part. ^_^;) Konata has a particular love for online multiplayer games and can talk about them in great detail to her friends who don't understand a word, and sometimes have no idea whether she is talking about games or real life. And thanks to her father's dating sims (a genre of games in which you try to woo various members of the opposite sex and get varying results depending on how appropriate your choices are for their character – very Japanese) ... thanks to these, Konata has a high awareness of what men are looking for in a woman. Unfortunately none of those traits are hers, and those who have them don't know. She is also the only one who has even a vague interest in boys yet, but she is also the slowest to develop physically of the bunch.

The first couple episodes I enjoyed greatly. It was nice to finally see a successor to Azumanga, and the very chaste and family-friendly atmosphere combined with lots of verbal humor made me feel at home. Unfortunately, by episode 3 I realized that it was still the same four girls talking, and mostly the three of them. Even though they are somewhat interesting personalities, variation is the spice of anime. Only with episode five do we meet a new main character. Now, I hate it when an anime dumps a whole town of characters on you in episode 1 and you don't know which are important and which not. But this goes overboard in the other direction. Honestly, bring on a new character each episode, darling darling please!

(That last phrase was from the crazy intro song, a super fast tongue twister which made no sense to me and probably wasn't even meant to.)

In conclusion, I love Konata and I enjoy the series, but it could have been so much more. I will definitely want to keep watching it, as long as I can download it for free. I would even if I had to rent it (which I may well do at some later time). Buying it... not so sure, at the insane prices anime sells for. It is not quite Azumanga Daioh after all! But it was a honest attempt.