Review of Fairy Tail

I usually avoid long running action/adventure shonens, and I feel a bit late to the party watching this for the first time in 2019 but I very much enjoyed Fairy Tail. I've considered picking it up for over a year now, seeing how people have a lot of polarized opinions on it just made me more interested. After finishing the first series, I really think Fairy Tail gets a lot more hate than it deserves, although I don't see Fairy Tail by the nature of the type of anime it is appealing to everyone. As a newcomer, here's my somewhat long review of the firstseries:

Characters: (9/10)
I loved the characters, which is good because having lovable characters is important to keeping someone interested in a long running series. There’s quite a few of them and all the main ones have a great deal of character depth and interesting backstories that progressively get uncovered, especially Erza, my favorite character who in my opinion undergoes the most character development of the bunch. Once I saw that Fairy Tail had more to offer than just comedy/fighting scenes I got hooked to it. I even felt like I was able to relate to some of the characters in a few ways. There’s also the very strong "friendship conquers all" and “were one big family” attitude that everyone has towards one another which I ended up liking a lot.

Story/Setting: (7/10)
I very much liked the setting and overall theme. A story about a guild of wizards/group of friends in a world of magic, it’s been done before but I enjoyed it here. After a few arcs, Fairy Tail does start to follow a predictable pattern where usually Natsu is the one to come through and save his friends even if he starts off getting his butt kicked but the arcs are different enough in setting and objective from the past ones that it held my interest. Would have been nice to see a bit more relationship development too but there is some. In a nutshell, I thought the story was good but could've been better.

Music/Sounds: (10/10)
The OST is fantastic, Yasuharu Takanashi did an amazing job here. Has a great mix of heavy metal songs during the fighting scenes, celtic/folk-inspired epic music and mellow/emotional songs. I find myself occasionally listening to the OST when I work/study, it’s that good. Opening/Ending themes are great too with my favorite openings being the 3rd, 8th & 10th and favorite endings being the 2nd, 3rd & 14th. English dub voice acting was very good as well.

Art/Animation: (8/10)
I think the art style is great and sets it apart from most other animes. Loved the character armor/weapon designs. Perhaps there’s some moments I wished still images that were shown were fully animated but it’s not a huge knock against it. All the fighting scenes were very well animated.

Enjoyment: (9/10)
Overall, I had a great time binging this show over the course of a couple weeks. It cracked me up many times, warmed my heart and almost got me to cry a couple times. It certainly has a unique charm that separates it from other long running series, as its the 2nd anime that I've ever bothered to watch more than 100 episodes of. Plenty of episodes and arcs have their rewatch value, including some stand-alone filler episodes some of which I didn’t even know were filler until I looked them up. I did lose interest a bit during some of the filler arcs but they weren’t so bad that I considered skipping them, just not as good as the canon material. A few fillers added a great deal of character depth and further explored the characters pasts or just had some really sweet moments in them so I'd recommend not skipping all of the fillers, but you always can if you want to.

Whether or not you'll enjoy Fairy Tail depends on your tastes. If you just outright hate long running series, a little fan service or animes that aren't afraid to get goofy with humor at times (including right in the middle of a fight or after a really emotional moment) you may not like it but I'm glad I gave Fairy Tail a chance and would consider it one of my favorite animes now. Fairy Tail isn't perfect but it is a great show that hasn't aged poorly and if you like charming characters, humor, fighting scenes that are cool but aren't super drawn out with lots of heartwarming moments in between I'd recommend giving it a go.