Review of Fairy Tail

Fairy Tail is an anime with nothing special or groundbreaking. If a character is in a dangerous situation, power-ups come to their rescue. If they want to give a motivational speech and get even stronger, they talk about the power of friendship and save the world. Their plot armor is so thick no god can kill them. This is a sin shared by many anime, but Fairy Tail overdid it. The anime successfully creates its own world, introduces characters with different abilities. One Piece has pirates and devil fruits, Bleach has Soul Society and bankai, Naruto has ninja villages, and Fairy Tail offers a guild system.Guild members work shoulder to shoulder trying to save humanity once again. Where the anime fails is the execution.

Fairy Tail’s biggest sin is power creep. Characters continuously power up, beat their foes, save the day, hot girls with boobs of the size of the moon fall for them. Any difference between characters in terms of power is sacrificed for plot convenience. In HunterxHunter, for example, we at least know the limits of characters. We know that even main characters cannot mess with certain enemies. But in Fairy Tail nothing is impossible for the main character. The reason? One of the characters says about Natsu, the protagonist: “Natsu-san gets more powerful when facing strong foes.” This means that there’s no point of enemies and other characters. Natsu just needs to face the enemy in order to defeat them. There is no point to the story.

Fairy Tail tries to compensate for its shortcomings with endless fan service. Big silicon-filled boobs embellish every scene. This is the most fan service filled shounen out there. Unlike One Piece where female characters miraculously grow fatty glands in later episodes, in Fairy Tail they are there from the very start. We are showered with lots of skin. Lots of buttock shots, lots of sexy women. The anime treats its fans like testosterone factories.

Another problem with the anime is that it has a lot of pretty-face characters that don’t contribute to the story. After watching all 175 episodes, I still don’t get why most of the guild members are there. Go and kill half of them, the story will lose nothing. Go kill the remaining half and the anime will improve.

Fairy Tail does everything in the book, throws every gimmick in the book at your face. It fails at most of them. It ends up as a caricature of itself, with lots of wasted opportunities. Plus, it has 35 filler episodes. In other words, one episode in every five doesn’t contribute to the story in any meaningful way.