Fairy tail

I started reading the manga when I was still "somewhat" liking the series as it paused after the Tournament Arc. I started with the "Tower" Arc which at the time was the first story-relevant arc with Gerard.

There are no deviations from the manga from the anime adaptation, i.e. the adaptation is at least true to the original. I can't say whether this is good or not. Because the manga would need a lot of mending.

If you let yourself through the old chapters, you can clearly see that the Mangaka had kept fan service extremely limited and only used it for minimal jokes with Lucy. He now uses it everywhere to compensate for his mistakes and lack of quality. The same is true with the humor. It's not the comedy of the year, but it had some amusing approaches and scenes at first. What turned out to be a forced rambling until the later Arcs.

The main story of Fairy Tail didn't sound promising from the start. It was this typical "One Goal" cliche, which should symbolize the motivations of the protagonist without any creativity. The fact that Natsu was looking for his father was generally forgotten by the chapters and he only took it up again in the Tartaros Arc, until then he didn't seem to care. The actual background story of Fairy Tail only became apparent towards the finale. Also the background of the antagonists and their motives. Basically, nothing happened until Chapter 400. Only the monotonous fights against opponents were repeated and the process was always the same. And you shouldn't expect positive words, because the finale was completely messed up. It even seemed that his own mangaka hardly felt like it anymore, since he had already been working on his new project on the side.

The drawing style isn't bad, honestly, I liked the drawing style and the presentation. However, it is daunting how unbalanced his creativity is for male and female characters. The men looked mostly individual, especially the antagonists and their shapes. The women, on the other hand, looked like the simplest copy and paste. Only their hairstyles differed.

The characters themselves ended up being a disappointment.
Natsu has never been my favorite, but somehow I could live with him. But the Mangaka decided to treat him like a hollow nut until the end, who gets nothing but aggression and talks about the power of friendship. Gray, on the other hand, was much more of a protagonist. Even if his character had just as little depth of character.
Lucy was the definition of fan service and a failure of a "weak to strong" protagonist. The magic she had learned and obtained was to prove useful later on, but it backfired. She had nothing but fan service.
Erza was by far my favorite at the beginning of the manga. She had a dominant and at the same time nice charisma, a lot of armor, different shapes, and weapons. Her personality was okay too. Now she is just a fan service grenade that is no good, has no personality and wiggles around with her double-D breasts, and is naked for half the screen time.
The remaining supporting characters are not worth mentioning, apart from Gajeel and Gerard. Which two of the most important characters have been in character development. At least the will was there, even if the implementation failed here. Laxus, however, was a disgrace. I don't know what the mangaka was trying to do with him, but his whole existence was built on a bad joke that didn't make any sense. Likewise, his character development was a complete waste of time.

Most of the antagonists all looked interesting and cool, but that was it. They could hardly have been emptier and flatter. According to the scheme, strong and threatening but hollow in terms of content.

The magic in the work disappointed me the most. Fairy Tail built on the magic/fantasy setting from the start. And yet you got to see less creativity here than in 20 minutes of the first Harry Potter film. The characters use magic with no approach or system and then mostly monotonous grits like "Avatar elements" and some small "Esper skills" and that was it. Maybe there is a dragon or a talking cat and tada, the magical world is ready.

I don't even want to start talking about the power of friendship. Especially the Finale Arc with the Zeref / Acnologia fight took the whole thing to an unimaginable level. As if this had already become a One Punch Man parody.


In the end, Fairy Tail is a work that had potential, massive potential. Unfortunately, the creator seemed to be too inexperienced or disinterested.

Story -3
Art -6
Character -3
Enjoyment -4
Overall -3