Nichijou - My Ordinary Life Episode 0

I give this scrawny little OVA a 70/100 We all know Kyoto Animation, don't we? The famous anime production company quite well known for making Key's visual novels (namely Air, Kanon, and Clannad) and ridiculous slice of life moe manga (Lucky Star, K-On, etc.) into anime, all of which become their cash cows. Quite honestly, I prefer them when they're doing visual novel adaptations, not adaptations of moe/slice of life manga. To me, Lucky Star was great, K-On the first season was okay, K-On the 2nd season was just tedious to get through, and now there's this anime, Nichijou (My Ordinary Life as dubbed by Crunchyroll). Iswear, the premise for this is as dull as dishwasher. Little girls living their lives and going to school with animals and otherworldly creatures while they consider everything that's normally considered abnormal to be normal. Simple enough, yes? Well, that's pretty much what bothers me. The premise is just plain boring. Even in this OVA it's boring. I was expecting epic fights between animals and humans or people just doing random things for the fun of it. But THIS IS BORING! Boring boring boring! The characters are pretty much the only good thing about this show. I thought the robot girl (Nano) and the little kindergarten aged professor with the orange hair and blue eyes were the best ones. Their antics were pretty cute, though I don't see the point in calling a little kindergarten girl a professor. The rest of the cast were acceptable too, but that's just about it. The animation and music were pretty nice too, but that's all I have to say about it. There isn't that much WHAM to it all. But the thing that annoyed me the most about this show? The logic. Particularly with the first part of the episode, when the blue-haired girl (Mio) finds out that her friend the brown haired girl (Yuko) gets a 1% on a test. Okay...WHAT!? A FREAKING ONE PERCENT ON A HIGH SCHOOL TEST!? Seriously!? How can you get that kind of score without being totally mentally retarded or even getting expelled!? Shouldn't a teacher have called her parents and disciplined her about it!? How come nobody sees this as appalling or horrid! ?My God! That's just...insulting. So yeah, that's about it. Forgive me if I was blunt, but I mostly watched this so I could hear the voices of the characters, most of which I haven't heard before. To be perfectly honest, I do not see myself being able to tolerate watching 26 long episodes of these without being bored (or lambasted at) to death. That or I'll probably watch the parts with the robot girl and the tiny professor. I'd rather watch Anohana or Hana-Saku Iroha than this. But hey, if you like it then that's okay. If you want to watch it, go ahead. I'm not stopping you. This is just my opinion and I'm entitled to it.

Welcome to Nichijou Beta! "Episode 0" is a fairly accurate title for this OVA, as it's a part of the Nichijou series yet oddly unfamiliar in many ways. You're certainly not wasting your time by watching it, but don't expect the same experience going into the main series. Quite a few things stood out as dissimilar to me. For starters, the episode was way slower than your standard Nichijou experience, with less events, skits, and transitions involved. Rather than the episodic division into several "parts", only three events were shown (one with Yuuko & Mio, one with the Shinonome family, and one with the entire Trio Sucharaka).Granted, while the three events were great and captured the spirit of the characters well, they felt drawn out and lacking much of the series' energy. In many ways the episode felt like, as implied before, a trial run, with the various primary and secondary characters introduced visually throughout the duration. The "Nichijou Part X" transitions were replaced with "Everyday Y", and the animation itself seemed less polished. While the characters largely remain the same, everything felt somewhat misleading, though not particularly less enjoyable. While I can recommend spending the twenty minutes to enjoy another slice of Nichijou, I don't recommend watching this episode prior to the series, regardless of it's "prequel" status. The initial episodes of the main series do much better to engage you in the world of Tokisadame than what seems to be a sampler for what's to come.

I have no idea why this is titled Episode 0, as that just seems unnecessary and confuses the timeline, but still I’m happy this exists. More Nichijou in whatever form I can get will always be a good thing for me. This continues in the same wonderfully random, illogical vein as the series, but somehow plays out slower and takes its time more. It’s as if this is Nichijou Light, a more palatable version of the main meal, and maybe that’s the reason for its existence. To test the waters. To prep the audience. (I’m just speculating, of course.) If you like the series, thenyou’ll like this OVA.