5.8
This anime is a tough one for me to give a score, because it really just isn't my style, and that has affected my perception of it. I have a huge personal issue with the sloppy fantasy, especially a lazy magic system, and Fairy Tail, with oblivious prid, sports one of the laziest magic systems I've ever struggled to understand. This anime is not a failure, but I find it fails in many respects. My main gripe with this anime is it's use of idiocy and lawless, reasonless magic as a cheap plot device. I can't count how many times I almost put this series down and walked away because an incredibly contrived but tense plot came to a resolution at the hands of some magical something or other that came out of left field and had no explanation. It was frustrating. I wouldn't even call Fairy Tail's magic system soft, but rather a volatile liquid. Gaseous might be an even better descriptor. However, the anime does have a very unique charm, driven home with a stubborn theme of friendship through all. The folk-rock score adds to this charm quite well, without feeling overly cheesy. Every other aspect of this series-animation, art style, dialogue, etc.-is frankly only worthy of a passing grade.
If I may linger, I dislike how this anime refuses to kill anybody we would actually care about, and yet still has death scenes because they're fun. They have a whole death scene: every character expresses their grief, they run the happy memories montage, and then the character(s) who was supposed to die will just be miraculously A-okay, or whisked away by some magical whatever, without proper reason. They add new characters so damn fast, yet refuse to get rid of old ones.
This anime is a tough one for me to give a score, because it really just isn't my style, and that has affected my perception of it. I have a huge personal issue with the sloppy fantasy, especially a lazy magic system, and Fairy Tail, with oblivious prid, sports one of the laziest magic systems I've ever struggled to understand. This anime is not a failure, but I find it fails in many respects. My main gripe with this anime is it's use of idiocy and lawless, reasonless magic as a cheap plot device. I can't count how many times I almost put this series down and walked away because an incredibly contrived but tense plot came to a resolution at the hands of some magical something or other that came out of left field and had no explanation. It was frustrating. I wouldn't even call Fairy Tail's magic system soft, but rather a volatile liquid. Gaseous might be an even better descriptor. However, the anime does have a very unique charm, driven home with a stubborn theme of friendship through all. The folk-rock score adds to this charm quite well, without feeling overly cheesy. Every other aspect of this series-animation, art style, dialogue, etc.-is frankly only worthy of a passing grade.
If I may linger, I dislike how this anime refuses to kill anybody we would actually care about, and yet still has death scenes because they're fun. They have a whole death scene: every character expresses their grief, they run the happy memories montage, and then the character(s) who was supposed to die will just be miraculously A-okay, or whisked away by some magical whatever, without proper reason. They add new characters so damn fast, yet refuse to get rid of old ones.