Review of Fairy Tail

Fairy tail isn't an anime. It's a psyop meant to condition you to cry to the theme song and I can personally attest to its effectiveness. There's a lot of good and a lot of bad things about fairy tail. To start with one of the good ones; the magic system is very fun. There's a huge amount of characters and basically all of them have different unique forms of magic. If you can imagine a form of magic, it probably exists in fairy tail. All these different forms of magic are powered by magic power which can run out but can also be drawnfrom strong emotion which lends some credence to the "Good guys somehow beat stronger bad guys with power of family/friendship" trope which most certainly is present.
The story revolves around a guild of wizards who deals with a bunch of problems that are all related to an ancient dark wizard called Zeref. It's not too complicated and the world seems interesting enough with important details provided well in advance so you can piece the story together yourself.

Some bad things are that the anime struggles with properly dealing with countdown timers, of which it has quite a few. For example, a timer is at seven minutes and the characters are talking (scene switches and switches back), the characters are still at the same point in their conversation but now the timer is at four minutes and they start fighting (scene switches and switches back), the characters have just started fighting but the timer is at 90 seconds. They same problem exists with speed where some characters get to a location way faster or slower than they're supposed to compared to other faster/slower characters. This seems like a minor thing to point out but it happens a lot and can be annoying.
Another important thing to note is the amount of "fanservice" in this anime. The anime is absolutely overflowing with it and you need to be able to tolerate or enjoy it or it'll get painful to watch real quick. On the other hand there's a few episodes in which the "butt jiggle gang", which revolves around butt and fart jokes makes an appearance which makes me very confused about what the target audience of this anime even is.
There's also a lot of comedy which is sometimes funny.

There's a lot of different characters in the anime which is nice because you can see all the different kinds of magic they use. Most of the characters are very one dimensional and only have one real trait or speech quirk that defines them. The advantage of the length of the anime is that the important characters get lots of development with fleshed out personalities the further you go. The way in which the characters develop is well paced and they don't just traumadump their entire backstory all at once. One of the characters is quite confusing though, if you watch the anime I wish you the best of luck figuring out who jellal is.

The animation is a bit old compared to more recent anime but is still very much suitable for the fairy tail. It isn't super pretty but it is very expressive and the fights are dynamic with lots of cool looking magic. A neat quirk of the animation is that in some random shots there are unrelated colourful creatures in the background and it's fun to look for them while watching the anime/reading the subtitles.
The voice acting is good and the music is often great. As I was trying to indicate with my first sentence, the music adds a lot to the anime and you start to associate epic/sad scenes with some of the themes which has led to me basically being able to cry on command when listening to them which is pretty cool.

Overall I think that fairy tail has an okay story with cool magic and lots of cool moments with a pretty fun cast of characters. There are a lot of things that can put someone off from watching fairy tail though such as the excessive fan service and some parts of the comedy like the butt jiggle gang (seriously look up an image of these guys) so it's clearly not for everyone.
If you do end up watching this then I highly recommend skipping the huge variety of different openings that the anime has since this will save you about 4 hours and tons of spoilers.