Lucky Star OVA

The hugely anticipated Lucky Star OVA has been released, and you can learn everything you could ever want to know about it below. Possibly more.

The basic structure is comprised of the usual unconnected scenes, running for 42 minutes including the live action ED.

Since this is a merchandising venture as much as an entertainment title (if you don’t believe it, check the horrendous thing they did with the covers for the normal versus limited edition Japanese DVD releases), there are plenty of extras if you care for such, as you can see below (or the source).

You may have seen these before.

On to the anime itself.

Player 1

A segment of what you can expect, which seems to have survived on Nico for longer than any Sunrise production ever did, so I can only assume it is approved of.

The MMORPG parts are likely rather entertaining to anyone with experience of such games. The actual graphics are a bit lazy though…

Ever levelled so much you couldn’t party up with your old comrades? Strangely, this happened to me a lot…

Prince Misao!

The cosplay parts are rather underwhelming – you had better go and look at Kagamiku in gallery form, because she does absolutely nothing Vocaloid-like in the OVA apart from grip her negi, and her costume passes almost without notice. In fact she only appears standing in the dark for one scene, and sitting in the other two.

There is no story as such (not that any is really expected), these are just random dreams – it’s as though someone crossed an OVA with a MAD, though I think making the comparison might be doing the MAD creators a disservice at times.

Talented seiyuu Kujira (Orochimaru, of Naruto) reprises her role of providing distressingly gravelly voices for all the non-entity characters. Delightful.

Kerorofication.

They said that Tencho was going to “feature”, but this turns out to be complete disinformation – he appears for a single shot. Not that anyone will be disappointed by the news.

The ED is one of the usual live action affairs which would make anybody involved in film or drama blush; this time at least we get live action Akira-sama. However, no animated version…

To paraphrase: “All you dirty fansubbers had better not translate this! Same to all you P2P bandits!” Surely there won’t be any subbed versions after such a rebuke.

Production values throughout are a little higher than the main anime, with the usual excellent voice acting and character design and clean, if unexceptional, animation. Zetsubou Sensei or Ghost in the Shell it is not, but it doesn’t have to be, so that is forgivable.

I think fans will find this a worthy experience, although some may be put off by the level of hype which has attached to what we could be forgiven was going to be a Kagamiku cosplay MMORPG extravaganza (in fact half the time is spent in normal scenes which could be straight from the TV series).

Perhaps as an OVA it is lacking, in that it is not really “special”, as we might expect, and would pass almost unnoticed in the main anime apart from the strong otaku culture references.

Personally speaking, I am inclined to think Lucky Star (and for that matter, Haruhi), are highly overrated for what they actually contain, though likely nobody could reasonably accuse them of actually being bad titles.

Lucky Star seems a particular offender in this regard, really having quite average credentials in many respects, particularly with the lazy production values, focusing more on marketing than anything else, and a stultifying sense of humour which is seemingly successfully camouflaged by an endless stream of otaku culture references. It may have its moments, but I can think of similar anime which are nothing but moments…

Of course, let us not rely only on my opinion alone to ascertain whether this title was any good or not. Cast your vote and leave your thoughts below.

[poll id=”15″]