Review of Fairy Tail

Fairy Tail was the first anime I had ever seen and when I look back to it, I have to say it was a great gateway to the world of anime. But that is about it. The main building blocks of any anime, plot & character could have been executed a lot – when I say a lot I really mean a lot, better. The plot is quickly summarised as generic. The main team of characters, Natsu, Lucy, Gray and Erza come across some evil activity that has to be stopped. They are later joined by Gajeel and Wendy. When they find out who isbehind this evil activity they have to stop them, by beating them. The first round they get beaten, but then the group will summon the bonds of nakama’s or the willpower of Natsu will be found and he beats the people who do this certain evil activity. End of story, repeat.
I fear that I have summed up and summarised every arc, including the fillers. The repetitious plot is also accompanied by jokes that get old very fast, like Natsu’s and any other Dragon slayers vehicle sickness.

Outside that the characters are flat, to the extremes. They are cliché stereotypes. It is defanatly not a good sign if you can summarize the characters in one word. You have the rival Gray, the over manly man Elfman, the pervert Makarov, the fangirl Juvia, the OP main character Natsu, the Damsel-in-distress Lucy, just to name a few. It also has inconsistencies, where Natsu at first is shown to the viewer as an user of an extremely rare kind of magic. Later you find out that there are three generations of Dragon slayers. So it is not that special after all.
The thing I dislike most about this show is that the story revolves around Lucy, but she rarely gets any screen time compared to Natsu. I sometimes wonder; “Why do these things always happen to Lucy?’ to then be reminded again, ‘Oh yeah!, she is the main character’. This is easily forgotten because of the immense emphasis put on Natsu.

The art however is not bad at all. The animations of magic are well executed and the characters look appealing to the eye. The art is solid, just like the sound. The voice acing was alright and Fairy Tail did have quite a few good OST’s.

Overall, I would say that Fairy Tail is a great gateway to the wonderful world of anime, but other than that, it is not worthy of being watched. If you had quite the history of anime that you have watched, I would suggest that you skip this show. The art and sound are the only real upsides of this anime.