A-Channel

A-Channel is like K-ON! or Azumanga Daioh if the characters sucked and there was no comedy.

It starts off well enough. It has a really nice OP to pump you up for the antics to come. Fukuhara Kaori is back in the fold voicing a character much like her Tsukasa from Lucky Star. Kotobuki Minako of K-ON! fame is here too. They've even got Madoka. This is a nice cast lineup. Four girls in a high school slice of life with a cast like this, can it seriously go wrong?

The major falling of A-Channel is that it isn't funny. It isn't a slice of life with ... a gimmick, so you can't latch onto one. Most of it isn't moe, so you can't just D'AWWW at it. This is an Azumanga Daioh, where the characters are the driving point and the *only* driving point and they need to play off each other. When all of your characters save one are this uninteresting and simple, that leads to some serious problems.

You have Run, who's ditzy and spaced out. You have Nagi, who's literally an inferior Yomi from AzuDai. You have Yuuko, who gets scared easily and has big boobs. You have Tooru, who's shy but aggressive.

For each of those characters save Tooru that's all there is to them. Tooru gets a little bit more to her in that she really likes Run, she has this conflict where Run and the others are a year older than her, and she's moe. And she's the most interesting character in this show.

Ugh.

This wouldn't even be so bad if the show was actually funny. But it isn't. It makes some awful attempts at comedy every now and then but they all fall flat. Oh, Yuuko has big boobs so Tooru flips them up for some reason. Oh, Nagi's qq'ing about her weight. Oh, Run's talking to guys so Tooru's coming to scare them off.

Hilarious.

The show couldn't stop there though. Bad characters and no comedy? They had to take it one step further. On top of that, they force insert songs into every episode. EVERY. SINGLE. EPISODE. And each time except literally once, in one of the later episodes, it's shoe-horned in so jarringly that it just feels completely out of place. And awful. With lazy animation. Most of the time it's just the music played to stills.

The best that can be said of this show is that some of the music is ok, the OP is good, and the characters at least look nice.

A-Channel is awful.

There were some fun moments, to be sure, but on the whole I felt like someone took a stock-standard slice-of-life template, but forgot to actually fill it with anything. If you wrote a few-sentence synopsis of this whole series without any names, it could be confused with any other slice-of-life, since there's nothing in this one that makes it different. It felt so much like just a blank template that I actually started thinking about how you could kind of view 25% of all anime as being the same characters stuck in some horrible purgatory shaped like a Tokyo high school, where every 3 years ... they get a slightly different body and have to start over again. And I usually *like* slice-of-life...

I liked the character designs, and there were some good ideas with the characters' backgrounds/personalities, though not much is done with it. I liked the ending song a lot. Each episode has a few funny and cute moments, surrounded by generic filler.

If you’ve seen any slice of life anime, you’ve already seen A-Channel.

I had strangely high hopes for this anime despite the average rating. However, after marathoning the series, I can safely say that my high expectations were hit with a swift kick of reality. A-Channel is basically Lucky Star…except without the cute characters and the comedy.

To start, the art style is only mediocre. The art style is often the driving point of any slice of life anime. Even with horrible writing and a cliche plot, at least the characters are cute and moe, right? WRONG. Every character in A-Channel looks the same, which ... makes it impossible for you to appreciate the characters when they’re all the same with one differentiating trait. The only character who stood out for me was Tooru. At least her protectiveness of Run gave some flavor to the plot. Otherwise, all filler. There were so many cliche scenarios in this anime that it could be presented as an example of episode plots to avoid when creating a slice of life anime.

Additionally, it was impossible to avoid being bored while watching this anime. It made me cringe seeing how hard they were trying to come off as funny and relatable. There were a very select few scenes that I actually found funny. The opening scene where Tooru was warding off a bunch of boys with a bat was one of the few redeemable parts of this anime! It gave us all high expectations, hoping for something different. However, all we found was meaningless schlock with tons of unnecessary fanservice and cliches.

A-Channel wanted to be Lucky Star. But it just didn’t work.

I like watching these generic slice of life bullshit shows where it is just highschool girls doing silly bullshit cause every once and a while you can find something actually pretty enjoyable, this was not very good. the only reason this show took me like 8 months to finish is cause I watched like half of it in one day cause a friend of mine bet me $5 if I could finish it up in a few days after I told him how much I didn't like this show. It probably would have taken me well over a year to get through it all if ... I didn't get 5 smackeroos out of it.

the thing that makes these shows actually good are the characters, if the high school girls in your high school girls show aren't silly and funny and quirked up and retarded then I don't think it's very good. see the thing about the characters in this show is that two of them are just lines moving on the screen. Yuuko Nishi is the boob girl and they make like two or three jokes about her boobs and those are her defining character moments and that's all I can remember, I had to copy paste her name from the character profile on this website. Nagisa Tennouji is the glasses girl and I cannot remember anything else about her. the other two characters which I don't care enough to go look up their names I can at least describe. the one that's short and has too long of sleeves is... I thought I'd be able to say something about her but I can't, I can only remember things she does. her personality is so bland I can't describe it other than she is protective over big forehead girl. Big forehead girl has a big forehead and one of the teachers thinks that's hot, I don't know why he only thinks her big forehead is hot cause everyone in this show has a big forehead and I think that's pretty funny and it's peak character design. other than having a big forehead big forehead girl is also stupid and that's all that their is to big forehead girl. the only reason I won't forget about this show is cause I got 5 doubloons out of watching it cause I wanted to prove a friend wrong

I think one of the silliest things about this show is that every episode has it's own song and for the first half of the series they slot it in the middle of the episode but eventually they stop doing that and the episodes very own unique song happens like a minute or two before the episode ends so that's pretty silly and funny

pretend I made this review a lot funnier, I only wanted to make this so that I could do the whole haha I only finished this cause I got a very insignificant amount of money out of it