Back to jwr4546's Profile jwr4546's Profile

What to expect from Fairy Tail:

- Obviously fake narrative stakes (think fake killing off characters which happens multiple times yet you're still expected to care).
- Repetitive long arcs with no plot significance
- Power system with no logic or consistency

To further expand on the power system, usually the strength of magic is that it allows for a large variety of options that increase the uniqueness of battle. While this is sometimes utilized, it is much more often that characters win through simply overpowering their opponents. Bizarrely, character strength can change dramatically within the span of seconds (think becoming 20x more powerful) through what I assume can ... only be some kind of emotional power up. This has very odd implications as it implies the main cast and villains simply don't care very much when they're fighting until the author decides they should. Which, looking at the story I can't really blame them as there's nothing in this world worth caring for.


Fairy tail is frequently compared to other shonen like naruto or MHA etc. But virtually every shonen anime including those listed are more competently written even if they generally suffer from the same issues. Just taking naruto as an example (which is not an amazing series, just used as a point of comparison) Naruto successfully creates narrative stakes by actually killing off important characters, having plot driving events like betrayals or terrorist attacks that lead to large losses of life. Maybe you could object that large scale destruction happens in Fairy Tail, but it almost never affects the plot and virtually all events are fixed with magic so there's no feeling that anything will ever pose a challenge to the main cast. I could argue that early Naruto and MHA fights are much more intelligently executed, but in truth it's a weak point for most of shonen (even if Fairy Tail is one of the absolute worst at it) and I didn't see Fairy Tail all the way to the end so I'd like to reserve judgement on whether any fight was executed intelligently.

Even if Fairy Tail had succeeded in creating a compelling narrative, it would only be bumped up to a generic shonen, it's just something that aspired to be decent/mediocre and failed because it's execution and writing are bad. If the writing was fixed, there aren't good details such as good lore/worldbuilding to bump the series up to greatness.

As for positives, there is a large cast of unique looking characters that provide a decent amount of variety even if most characterization is lacking. This is also a battle series that actually has a lot of battles, so it doesn't fail at the absolute most basic thing possible. The art and sound are passable as well.

In truth if I had to rate this series with 100% seriousness, it probably deserves more of a high one to low two than just a flat one, however seeing as people give this series a 10/10 because "worldbuilding/storytelling/plot/ are minor issues that all anime suffer from" I feel that leaving my review at 1 will help counteract that tragedy of illogic that attacked my eyes.

Putrid bile. Filth. Abomination.


The story starts promising with a death game premise where it is explained that 100 floors must be cleared in a game world to survive and in game death means real life death. This is a semi-standard death game horror premise. So when something like this is written in for the first episode, you expect there to be the threat of death looming and extreme danger right? Narrative stakes where characters could die at any moment and mistakes from other players showing their demise throughout the story?

A 100 floor virtual reality mmo with RPG settings. You would expect an adventure where the ... MC collects items and improves his stats and gear, has epic fights with a variety of unique monsters and uses strategy to overcome his battles right?

hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha....
hahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha

No. This is actually a harem romance anime where there is absolutely 0 threat to the MC. There is a time skip almost immediately where half the floors are skipped (because who would want to see the MC's initial progress and rise from weak to strong right?) and the MC is already fucking invincible for no reason. Oh sorry, there is a reason, it's just utterly retarded. He has the fastest reflexes so that means he can use 2 swords (*SOYFACE OMG DUAL WIELDING!!!*) and no one else can :), he's a beta tester (all the other players are first responders, you'd expect them to be hardcore gamers) so that means while every other person is failing and incompetent, this teenager is a God among men who can solo raid bosses. These bosses don't seem to possess any interesting abilities, drop no cool items, don't require any strategy to beat and have no sense of sentience.

The "characters" mostly don't exist. I mean there are people(?) that have names and stuff, but they behave mostly like NPCs. There are two characters (MC and Asuna) that have any kind of development at all. MC is gary stu cardboard extraordinaire and Asuna is his faithful sandwich making cumslut.

Sometimes the story moves, I think about 5% of the show moves the plot forward although that might be generous. Most time is spent on showing Kirito collecting harem members before forgetting about them or sexing woman slave #1.

The main overarching villain has a very deep ideology that drives him to perform his devilish actions. Think he smoke a joint and forgot tho, "yooooo dude I totally had like a crazy idea... what if I just trapped some people in the game and shit *puffs* haha that'd be tight bro." The MC is supposed to lose but God comes down from the heavens and revives Jesus-kun. I almost wanted to give this a 2 because I've never seen such a shameless deus ex machina in any story and I do love shamelessness, but sadly there is nothing to signify that this story is self aware at any level.

The 2nd part with the pedophile netorare tentacle rape and the dumb incestous teen who constantly gets fanservice shots of their crotch didn't even phase me at this point. If it leaned a little harder into these points I would've thought it was ironic and praised this story a bit more, but it seems to just perfectly be plausibly terrible enough that you know it actually is written just that badly.

I must admit this is the worst story I've ever sat all the way through. I have never been so perfectly baited into a story quite like this, so kudos to SAO.