English Dub Season Review: Fairy Tail – 100 Years Quest Season One

In Summer of 2017, after five hundred chapters, the Fairy Tail manga came to a fiery end, with the anime adaptation ending a couple years later. The many adventures and mishaps of the Fairy Tail Guild and its main focus characters of Natsu, Lucy, Gray, Erza, and Wendy all said their goodbyes to readers and viewers, closing the book on this legendary journey. Then, a year later, the publisher remembered they liked making money and decided to make a sequel! Okay, that’s not exactly how it happened, since they were already working on making a sequel before the manga finished. But after years of waiting, that sequel finally became an anime that we got to talk about! So, the big question: Is this a worthy successor to the story that came before? And the answer to that is…well, I guess? It is a sequel in the sense that it is a story that takes place after the original work, but it feels more like just…an extra thing that happened after the main story wrapped up. Specifically, it follows Natsu and his usual group as they accept a quest that has gone incomplete for over a century: Seal the Five Dragon Gods. Do they complete the quest? Well, obviously not since the manga is still ongoing, but how does this first season fare?

The season covers three arcs, all focusing on one of the dragons. The first few episodes see the group going to an undersea town ruled over by the Water Dragon God, Mercphobia, only to learn he’s actually a pretty nice guy, but are then attacked by the recurring antagonists of the series: Diabolos, a guild made up of Fifth Generation Dragon Slayers who get their magic from devouring dragons. The next arc brings the group to a town on the back of Aldoron, the Wood Dragon God who is by far the largest of them, as well as resolving another recurring villain known as Touka the White Mage. Finally, the last stretch of episodes take them to another realm entirely as they confront the Moon Dragon God, Selene, who herself is confronted by Diabolos. Each season tries to give each main character sufficient focus in plot and in fights, though at a certain point it becomes clear that things can only progress so far and most of it is spinning its wheels. Some characters get new abilities, others make incremental changes to their relationships with other characters, and there’s call backs to plenty of high points from the original series, but unless you’re invested in what’s happening at the moment, it’s a little hard to feel like there’s any tension.

I guess that’s ultimately what the biggest strength and simultaneously fatal flaw in this series is: It’s just…more Fairy Tail. Not the next logical step for these characters, not any big creative or thematic shake up, and not a handing of the baton to the next set of heroes inspired by the exploits of those that came before. Did you like Natsu and his friends just doing stuff and fighting bad guys? Well, here’s some of that, no more and no less. If you enjoy that, great, this may be a thrill ride for you to check back in with your favorite gang of magical misfits. But if you’re expecting more, like I typically do in my sequel shows, then you may be mildly amused but ultimately disappointed. Then again, they do end up making pretty good progress by the end of the season. One dragon has been sealed, another killed, and yet another having worked her way into merging with another villain group, with two more as wild cards for the story arcs to come, and I would be lying if I said I wasn’t a little bit curious as to how that will progress. So, maybe I’ll see you back here when the next season starts, but it’s not something I’m exactly excited about.