English Dub Review: Fairy Tail “Not Until the Battle is Over”

When will the battle actually begin?

Overview (Spoilers Below)

The Four Emperors of Ishgar have been soundly defeated by God Serena, despite them putting in a last-ditch effort to take Serena down with them. However, who should join them but Acnologia, drawn by the scent of a dragon. Serena starts to gloat, but Acnologia cuts him down in one fell swoop. His mission to kill all the dragons will not be deterred.

Back at Fairy Tail, Natsu is recovering from his fight with Zeref as his friends watch over him and wait for him to heal. Meanwhile, Gray, Wendy Erza and Juvie are out in the woods, moving into position. Gray comes across Laxus, who seems to be suffering from an affliction of his lungs. Laxus confesses he starting exhibiting symptoms after he sucked in all the particles released by Tempester in their fight one year ago. Despite this, Laxus affirms his dedication to protecting the guild, even if it kills him. Somewhere else, Gajeel and Levy share a comforting moment together amidst the chaos of war.

The next day, Dimaria continues her rampage through Ishgar, pushing the Alvarez advance. Gray, Juvie and Erza show up in time to take up the fight against Dimaria’s legion. Off in a nearby town, Laxus starts fighting Wall as well, not wanting to be left behind. His brutal fighting is able to push Wall back, but he transforms into “Attack Mode” to up his fighting strength. Meanwhile, Laxus continues suffering from his internal wounds and starts to get his ass whooped by Wall. He persists as long as he can, but he is still deeply injured internally.

Our Take:

Once again, Fairy Tail suffers from some odd difficulties in pacing and structure. Unable to craft an intense war that captures the epic scale that this conflict should be, it instead flails around in a series of scattered scene that don’t mesh well or follow a consistent sense of time. The episode lacks focus like a blind man lacks depth perception. The structure of the episode is so far gone that it’s hard to find a real story buried in here, just a collection of mish-mashed scenes thrown together to kill 22 minutes of run-time. That’s not to say that the episode is bad in an insulting sense, just that it doesn’t begin to come close to “immersive.” I rather enjoyed Laxus’s story here, but because it has to share all this screen time with other bits of plot, it loses it’s sense of importance. All this makes for an episode that’s simply unsatisfying. It doesn’t feel like professional, finished work. It’s more like a rough draft of ideas that needs a couple rewrites to get to where it needs to be.

For one reason or another, (But I’m guessing for budget reasons) Fairy Tail doesn’t want to show us any actual fights this season. The conflicts are so small and numerous that there aren’t any actual action sequences to make things exciting. Fighting with the Alvarez mages should be a riveting battle of wits, strength and magical prowess, but instead the most interesting battle, God Serena vs. the Four Emperors, gets done entirely off-screen. When we do see magical attacks, they’re in the form of blunt art stills that aren’t so much animated as they are stationary pictures.

This may also seem like a small complaint, but the sense of time in this war is completely off-kilter. I don’t know how many days it’s been going on, because day and night go by from one scene to another without showing us what’s been going on during that time. One wonders if Dimaria has been fighting with the assorted guilds of Ishgar for two days before Erza and Gray show up to fight her, since we last saw them camping out in the woods. Not to mention, how is someone going to take this battle seriously when we don’t see the many, many members of Fairy Tail duking it out like an army. The show’s meekness in this matter is unforgivable. This arc was touted as a war. It needs to feel an actual battle, not a LARP group fooling around in the woods.