Episode 0 – Daily Life – 日常 (Nichijou)
It feels like it’s been a while since Kyoto Animation made a TV series, and as usual KyoAni seems to be following the moe formula that has proven so successful for it in the past few years. In a way it’s disappointing to see Kyoani adapting such an unambitious series, with Nichijou feeling much like a reiteration of Lucky Star, though with a few more quirky characters and gags. Creativity certainly isn’t the selling point to this series, especially if this OVA is an indicator of anything. I mean, the episode has silly cute humor, but at the same time it feels like a rehash of previous moe comedies. Admittingly, this preview episode was not nearly as weird as I had expected, with the first few manga chapters that I had read earlier having left off a really strong impression (not necessarily a good impression) on me.
The thing about Nichijou is that, like other comedies of this style (Azumanga Daioh, etc al), the main characters literally do nothing special. The entire episode pretty much consisted of one girl acting strange or saying something odd, while the other simply reacts to it; then rinse and repeat. Yea, that’s pretty much a summary of the entire episode; not exactly the epitome of creativity here. There are some character quirks here, such as the “robot girl” and the talking cat, but in the end their traits were skin deep at best, and really just felt like tack-ons to try and make the characters more quirky than they already are. The characters themselves have fairly generic personalities, which makes them rather uninteresting sometimes.
The gags and jokes themselves sometimes got a chuckle out of me, but for the most part they were surprisingly bland. I had expected more considering this was supposed to be the intro to the series, but I guess I had too high expectations. The flaw to the humor is that it’s overly reliant on the quirkiness of the characters, so if that doesn’t appeal to you, then neither will the humor. For a comedy series, that’s a pretty huge issue.
The art style is very reminiscent of KyoAni’s Lucky Star series, though right off the bat I could say that the Lucky star cast had much more personality than the Nichijou cast here. Due to the nature of the original source material for this show, the pacing and comedic timing certainly feels off at times. For now, Nichijou seems to be your typical generic moe comedy series with some quirky characters and little else beyond that. The perfect words to describe this adaptation would be “meek and unambitious”; KyoAni seems to be rather compliant with churning out moe series as long as it turns up a profit, which rather is a shame.
Overall Enjoyment: 3.4/5
P.S. For those that haven’t checked our Spring Season Preview, Nichijou is one of the announced shows for this spring season.
Screenshots are later in the post.
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Distant Paradise 
