Personally for me, I am part of those people that watched one episode of Lucky Star, blinked in the amount of "weirdness" in it and walked away from it... only to come back re-watch the entire series.
Originally told by my friend about this series, and she said it has a nice change of pace compared to Higurashi (which was what we were watching before she suggested we switch over to Lucky Star). After watch episode 7, and despite being HIGHLY amused by the characters' antics, I told her that it isn't my anime and I probably won't give it another shot.
How wrong I was, as two months later, I marathon'ed Lucky Star in my weekend. XD
It starts out very sudden, I think. Without any sort of explanations, you are kind of just thrown into the situation with our four main characters and kinda left to understand their antics by your own. It is what makes the show nice and simple however.
While the jokes and references were funny as well, I find it is the personality of the cast in Lucky Star that motivated it to becoming one of my all-time favorites. That and because of the show is generally ran by their personalities and its simpleness, it also has a rather high re-viewability. As one of the posters said, you can grab any one of the episode at any time and just watch it whenever you are bored and still get that same enjoyment.
I also rather despised Lucky Channel because I thought it was a waste of time. By the end of the series, I almost always skipped that part until Shiraishi went and destroyed their set, then I watched it again. XD
The only good thing about Lucky Channel however is that it is the only source of some explanation of what is happening with the cast. Though they never quite introduced Konata, but just introduced Kagami, Tsukasa, Miyuki, and the new characters that enter later in the series (I wonder why didn't they introduced Konata?).
Now, onto the more technical bits...
While the animation isn't great or detailed or fancy, and it is also somewhat different from KyoAni's previous works, I thought the simplicity of the animation fitted the anime perfectly. I simply cannot imagine Lucky Star to be drawn in the FMP fashion or anything likewise. Its lack of a story plot doesn't suit those kind of animations at all.
Music is also well-executed here, KyoAni seems to know when to just let the music stop or run. It is not FANTASTIC, except for the part where Kagami received her love letter and Kanata visits Konata and her dad, but it does its work perfectly. It is often happy-go-lucky and has a nice happy beat to it, and they also know when to just start letting it go in order to convoy the characters' mood towards the situation (it usually Kagami's mood, to be honest
).
All of those helped Lucky Star present itself as what it really is, but what really worked is the script. I personally found the script to be AMAZING... and I rarely say that.
So, I am a bit amazed when someone here actually gives the script a low score, but of course, all to their opinions. The script however really brought the characters' to life, while KyoAni's executions weren't always perfect, they are usually pretty close, and at times did hit the perfect mark (Again, the Kanata scene is absolutely one of the points where their execution was perfect).
In order to sum it all up, while I won't say Lucky Star is the best anime of 2007 or something like that, but it is rather one of the anime I'll remember and it'll stay in my mind for a long time. I am also definitely buying their DVDs too.
I definitely enjoyed watching Lucky Star. However, due to some of its errors at times and Lucky Channel, I give Lucky Star a 9.
