English Dub Review: Fairy Tail “World Destruction”

Overview (Spoilers Below):

After Natsu vanished at the end of last week’s episode, we weren’t sure what was going on. That chaos persists as this week’s episode begins with the sky starting to crack open. To their dismay, it’s Acnologia, breaking through the rift and back into normal time. Except the rift caused him to separate into two forms: his physical form in the real world and his spirit form trapped in the time rift. (Anna and Ichiya are spit out of the rift as well.)

Regardless, he’s back and he pulls all the dragon slayers into the rift with him while his physical form sets out to Magnolia. Erza goes to tell the guild members what happened, and together, they send their collective strength to their captured friends while preparing to face the dragon themselves. Natsu and the others hear their distant cheers, and break free of their bonds in order to challenge Acnologia to a proper fight.

Our Take:

I knew it! I thought it was weird how convinced Erza, Anna, Ichiya, and all of them were that pushing Acnologia into the time rift again would somehow trap him when it hadn’t worked when he flew through it the first time. Now that that’s out of the way, let’s talk about World Destruction more generally. It wasn’t the best episode. While I never found myself actively bored, a lot of the episode happened in the first half, and most of the second half was just spent on characters telling other characters what we the viewers already knew. This doesn’t make for the most exciting spectacle, and it’s the reason why I didn’t love this episode.

Saying that I still can’t believe they were surprised that Acnologia made a grand return. I couldn’t help but laugh at how shocked everyone seemed, spouting stuff about how they ‘couldn’t believe’ it. He’s the goddamn arcane dragon! Of course, a measly time rift isn’t going to stop him. It didn’t even phase Anna and Ichiya, as they return unharmed and confused. There were a few other unintentionally funny bits I have to mention. When Acnologia first makes Wendy vanish, he opens his palm just like a magician doing a magic trick, and Erza’s reaction really made me think for a second it was all an elaborate game. Then when the guild members were preparing to fight Acnologia’s physical form, they kept cutting to each group of people nodding, and they kept doing it a bit too long until it got comical. Like instead of animating the scene they just bought some bobbleheads and filmed them.

The English dub was very nicely produced this week, with some memorable lines from everyone. “I was a king before, but I’ve become a god!” Epic, but not what you wanna hear your arch-nemesis say after being banished to a time rift. “I refuse to let our world be taken from us!” Erza is definitely one of my favorites in the show, mainly because of how passionately she fights for what she believes in. “Honestly, I don’t know, but I’m grateful.” It’s plot armor, Ichiya. Plot armor. “Why the hell can’t I make any fire?” I can relate to Natsu’s anguished cry every time I go camping. “We can all hear the voices of peopling rooting for us out there. And that bond gives us our strength.” And that right there is the theme of the show in a nutshell.

World Destruction is a mediocre episode of the show that’s setting up for the next major conflict between Acnologia and the dragon slayers. While it isn’t so bad in the first half, the larger portion of the second half revolves around a lot of exposition we already are aware of and drags things down. I hope by next week I’m as pumped up for them to fight Acnologia as they were by the end of things.