I get the feeling that Mahouka Koukou no Rettousei (The Irregular at Magic Highschool) really shouldn’t have been set in highschool. It’s right there in the title sure, but the characters don’t really do a lot of typical highschool activities, making it seem like a compromise for an audience that perhaps wouldn’t as readily accept “The Irregular at Magic University”.
The “magic” part of the title though is different from all the other magical highschool based anime (throw a dart at a list of modern anime and there’s a high probability you’ll hit a similarseries) by being technological rather than, well, magical. Modern day wizards tote around electronic devices looking like anything from mobile phones to guns in order to summon pre-programmed spells. The explanations for this magic are laid on thick, with talk of psions and eidos and phenomena when really all I want is for mages to beat the tar out of one another with their own brand of magic. It’s an uncomplicated desire and in some ways Mahouka gets that part right. In a whole heap of others, it gets things quite wrong.
It's hard to describe Lucky Star without using words such as "meta" or "proto", or comparing it to similar all-female high-school comedies such as Azumanga Daioh or School Rumble or perhaps drifting into expletives about the circular Suzumiya Haruhi references by Kyoto Animation. The concept to take away from Lucky Star is that it is relevant to compare it to all of these things, and brutally unfair.
some of the late-to-the-party characters seem ignored compared to the tried and tested Kagami x Konata tiffs
Lucky Star shines because it manages to not so much parody but lampoon modern otaku and anime by, paradoxically, being a fan pandering anime itself. The first episode was divisive in that many wrote off the long soliloquies as boring or blatantly obvious as to their purpose, this weaned off the Haruhi refugees like a brick wall. In retrospect the meandering script changed little in delivery or tone from the last episode to the first episode, unlike the aesthetics which, while universally well animated, showed how much the animators settled in to drawing the characters. The first episode did brilliantly in laying down the foundation of the rest of the series, characters were expanded upon and new ones introduced, but the humour and pacing remained.
