Fairy Tail: Final Series

This is a pretty good final season for fairy tail that you'll likely enjoy if you somewhat enjoyed the previous 250+ episodes.

The story consists of a single arc that ties up the loose plotlines relatively well and unlike the previous seasons, this season has no filler. It's a pretty good story and it feels cohesive and well thought out. There's lots of cool fights but also a lot of good character development. The ending is pretty conclusive and it's nice to hear how everyone is doing one year later.

Some small criticisms is that the pacing is better than the previous seasons but ... still suboptimal with some flashbacks in fight scenes taking too long for my liking, taking away from a pretty exciting fight. Another point is that some of the scenes were unrealistic, even by generous fairy tail standards. I do not care how strong your feelings are, if your bones are broken, then you can't use those limbs.

Most of the characters from the previous seasons appear which is nice but there's also a lot of new characters that are introduced because there's an entirely new group of enemies again. The new characters definitely match the quality of the old ones. I also think it's kind of neat how the anime waits until the end to fully explain the backstories of its main antagonists.

The animation and voice acting were good and I liked the music, especially the main theme as always.

Overall it's a good season with a solid, action packed, story that's fun to watch. Most of the season is just good with no real reason not to watch this if you watched the previous two seasons.

The conclusion of the Fairy Tail series felt lackluster compared to its predecessors, Fairy Tail (2009 and 2014). The built-up to the final villain of the series was greatly portrayed as a solid villain and had some actual hype to it. However, the goal for the villain was kind of poorly written. The other big baddie had an actual reason and I could understand where the villain was coming from, but the OG villain of the show was written as "bad to be bad." However, this was not my only complaint. Some of the animation scenes were reused (a lot) and some scenes were stretched ... out to make the episode hit that time mark, or it felt that way.

To be clear, this review is made by an all-time fan of Fairy Tail. It is my favorite anime, despite it having this ending and having some bad moments, but it is still one of my favorites to this day. All in all, the show still gave me the feeling from its previous series but it was supposed to be so much more and it was kind of a letdown. I can only recommend people watch this to get the full ending of the series, but if you read manga, just read the manga.

I enjoyed the previous seasons, but not this one. I believe the major reason wasn't that they made any bad decisions with the story, but it is the fact that they didn't change anything at all.

It could also be the result of abusing the shounen loop of "get beaten up, remember your friends, stand up, and beat your way out". This is Fairy Tail in a nutshell. You will see nothing more than that.

So just before watching the final season; I sort of knew what I was going to see, but I still finished it just because I don't like to drop series and ... unfortunately everything went as expected.