Hey I ended up writing a longer one, so

tl;dr: if you're looking for something good, don't read fairy tail, if you're just bored and curious, then just read until you get bored, then just drop it, it does not get better afterwards. If you've already read FT, you didn't really like it and you want to pat each other's back about how similar and right our opinions are, then feel free to scroll down, you may also get a small erection.

DISCLAIMER: I swear a lot and there's a lor of irony and sarcasm in this review so yeah don't take me too seriously (the positive sides are mostly genuine tho).
Also I can't be bothered to grammar check this review/spell check it/re read it to see if it even makes sense, so please don't get triggered

Oh Fairy Tail, what a rough run it was. Guys I'm about to write a pretty long one so well, let's get going.

I first got into FT back when I first got into anime, it wasn't a long time ago and back then I was very new to the medium, back then I only knew classic shonen anime like One Piece, DBZ, Naruto and so on, but as a newbie, I got interested into this one character a friend of mine had as a profile picture on facebook, a guy with pink hair, wearing a scarf and with a pretty cool looking tattoo on his shoulder.
So past the cringe of me thinking that he was the main character of this one Bleach anime I heard about a while back, I figured out that it was actually Fairy tail and it already had quite a bunch of episodes already, so as a bored high school student with a lot of time to waste, it all started.

In the beginning, I really liked the series, the cool-steampunky-fantasy world was a cool setting, I had just seen FMAB and felt like this was the shit I wanted, just with a ton more episodes, let's go! What can go wrong?
It was all cool at the start, the guild felt like a really fun place, people were drinking and shouting all the time and it felt like there was a cool chemistry between all these characters, It kinda reminded me of the chemistry in one piece (nowhere near as good of course), but it was something I nonetheless apreciated. Few weeks of bingewatching passed by, I loved the Jellal (I still like calling him Gerard cuz come on) arc, I liked the Grey flashback and I also really enjoyed the Natsu vs Gajeel fight. I wouldn't really mind the ''power of friendship'' asspulls too much, it was annoying, but I just accepted it and went ahead.

It was after some episodes that I ran out of episodes and started reading the manga, bingereading until I reached the end and started reading FT weekly, and that's when the problems with the series started showing up. You see, when you binge read/watch a series, you often tend to miss out details and many instances of narrative failures, which you get to instantly notice and reflect upon while reading weekly, especially if you then check out reviews and opinions in forums/image boards/reddit/whateveryoulike, and that's when the downfall started for me.

I had a very similar experience with bleach and in a way Naruto, all three of these mangas made the one I consider the number one mistake in a battle shonen manga: fucking up the power scaling.
You all probably saw millions of videos where people explain why One Piece and Hunter x Hunter are better written series than the above mentioned ones and a frequent theme is the power scaling problem. While Bleach and Naruto started messing up with it by the end of the series, Fairy tail managed to fuck up right in the beginning (pretty much)!!
Now, power scaling is not everything in battle shonen anime and manga (we'll get to that later), but since battle is in the genre title and since most of the hype is focused on battles, it sets the most basic rules to follow in order to have more enjoyable fights. If you mess that up, you are creating loopholes in your own story, therefore losing all credibility in your fights!

So conclusion number 1: There is absolutely no credibility in FT fights and there's no real tension within the fights, since you already know that your expectations will be totally shat on by the power of friendship and Natsu eating like another element.

The second point I want to bring across is another huge mistake Mashima made, which is not setting up a real goal and the lack of consequences of the events in each arc. What does Natsu wanna do even? Meet up with a dragon? how will he ever need to become stronger or to become a better person to do so? literally the show could have ended at episode 1 with him just chilling and waiting for the chance to meet him (of course this plot line gets closed up by the end in a fashion for which my liking goes beyond how much time you have to waste reading this review so I won't discuss that). What I'm saying is that, just like bleach, the plot doesn't really go anywhere, by chapter like 400 (note that I'm throwing around random numbers, this series is not worth more time researching than all I've wasted reading it) we know pretty much the same about igneel as we knew at chapter 1! How am I supposed to enjoy a bleach-like monster-of-the-week formula translated to a villain-of-the-year without cool swords!!?? Bleach ultimately died because of that and so did FT.
The second part of the same mistake is consequences. I'm not going to explain this too much, cuz I'm sure if you read the whole thing I can see you nodding ''oh yes, consequences, that's right'', and if you haven't read the series yet, just go watch/read something that has real consequences you can feel, like the sbaody/amazon lily/impel down/marineford saga in one piece or FMA , steins gate, death note or anything that's critically acclaimed like that. Basically having established that in FT characters can't die, all enemies become allies and best buds eventually, if the guild is destroyed they can just rebuild it and the world won't explode cuz there's no dragon balls to bring everyone back to life, non of the fights have any tension and most arcs just feel totally useless, kinda like a dragged out one punch man fight but without the satire and the comedy. So it's shit.

So conclusion number 2: The fights are meaningless, there's no positive and/or negative tension driving the plot forward and each arc just feels like the same soup of ideas that get stirred around until they are all eventually funeled through the same conclusion of the power of friendship.

My third point that I wanna make is that 99% of the characters introduced are completely pointless/bland/niche (like that one proprietary screwdriver you used that one time to build that one thing you broke few years back, so now it's been chillin in your toolbox for like 5 years with no use). At the top of my head I can think of like very few characters I really liked: Mistogan, Gerard, Gajeel, Ichiya, the black cat that chills with gajeel, shanks, mira (just cuz that savage demon took me by surprise) and maybe like ultear? Idk iirc but she seemed kinda cool right? Everyone else is either just the copypasta of various different tropes or just nothing at all, like who the fuck is cherya and who even remembers her? Boy why can I instead remember clearly everything about Lt. Fullbody from one piece who only showed up like half a time in the series? Mashima my man your characters suck!

so conclusion 3: Characters are mostly garbage.

Now that I've made 3 conclusions that makes it sound like this is the worst series ever and you may wonder why I'm still giving it a 6, I'll blast you with some more opinions and your question is still not going to be answered, in fact it gets more confusing:

The one thing I HATE the most about FT, the one thing I can't stand at all, is that, even though it had an interesting premise, with a cool fantasy world, with dragon slayers, keys to alternate dimensions, magic circles, an unknown history to learn about and potentially interesting backstory of cool looking characters that could have been interesting, Mshima decides to waste our time focusing more on boobs, stupid shipping and shitty fanservice meant to rise little preteen penises, while totally forgetting that if he wrote an interesting story, he'd probably also get the same amount of reads if not more! Every time a new chapter came out my thoughts were like ''why am I wasting precious time out of my limited lifespan to watch boobs bounce? Is this 545 chapter story really just a pretext for Mashima to achieve his middle school dream of drawing 10k pages of boobs? Is it just like how Andy Warhol drew a dick and sent it to the moon?(check it out btw it's really funny)''. The whole thing felt like a waste of time. For some reason, I swear bleach didn't feel like one, DBZ didn't, Naruto didn't. A manga doesn't have to be perfect to be enjoyable.

So in conclusion, this is why I'm overall giving FT a 6 and not a 1:
FT, having done all the wrong in the world, still has accompanied me through my initial phase of getting into anime and I definitely enjoyed many moments, this series is mostly terrible, but not 100% terrible, there are a lot of cool moments, especially in the beginning when you haven't caught on on what bullshit pillars this series stands on. Some characters do look really cool (call them generic or whatevs, but gerard's tattoo is very *cough* Dragon *cough* badass, natsu's design is not too bad, ichiya is fucking funny, the girls are all pretty much eyecandy (erza looks like makise kurisu which is a plus imo), the exceeds are cute, certain moves like Gerard's or mistgun's, natsu's, shanks', laxus', or the weird guy with runes were cool, certain gags are fucking hilarious, like I rember one with happy and erza when she's heartbroken that got me laughing for days.

Overall I'd like to thank fairy tail for showing me what's wrong in anime and in shonen especially, because of you I get to appreciate one piece even more and I'm so glad you actually concluded in a somewhat less-rushed-than-bleach way.

I hope for the best for Mashima and hopefully all the money you made will be enough to sustain you forever, otherwise if you need more, please just make a decent series next time, there are countless good series, just copy elements from all of them and you'll be fine (the good ones this time tho). JK no disrespect, you've worked hard for 11 years, enjoy life.

Cheers everyone, for the end of another pillar of shonen anime and manga (this one was a pillar of salt, pillar of sand, though), let us all hope that the new generation learns from the mistakes of the old one. But keep this in mind you shonen manga readers and writers: no matter what you believe/do/think, one piece will always be shitting on you from the heights of heaven, where Goda resides.

Peace.