Fairy Tail: Review and Preview

If you’ve never heard of Fairy Tail, here’s a chance to get into it.  The anime is starting in Japan on TV Tokyo on October 19th. I’ll be mainly talking about the manga though, since the anime hasn’t yet started.  Fairy Tail is written by manga-ka (writer-artist) Mashimo Hiro and began its Weekly Shonen Magazine serialization in 2006.  Magic is not uncommon in the Fairy Tail world, and it manifests in a wide variety of different forms, such as gun magic, transmutation magic, card magic, elemental magic, and more.

The story centers on a mage called Lucy and the magic guild she joins, the eponymous Fairy Tail guild, which is filled with strange characters.  One of her friends there is Natsu, a fire-dragon slayer mage (meaning he learned his magic from a dragon), whose main weakness is motion sickness except when carried by the winged cat Happy.  Lucy also meets Gray, an ice mage who has a habit of taking off his clothes at random times.  And Erza is fierce equip-mage, meaning she can switch magical armors and weapons as she fight.  These four are the most recurring characters, but there are a number of others, all with distinct personalities.  However, some of the other Fairy Tail guild members are introduced in the chapter cover pages so readers will need to pay attention.

The story itself is not quite your regular shonen epic with your clear goal, constant battles and constant power upgrades on along the way.  Some arcs revolve around missions to solve people’s problems, and others involve conflicts with other guilds, including Dark Guilds, which have committed crimes such as assassinations.  These Dark Guilds bring in an over arcing plot of a possible looming apocalypse via waking a sleeping evil.

If I’ve interested you enough, you might have looked up the series’ Wikipedia page by now and noticed the artist similarity to Oda Eiichiro’s One Piece.  The claimed cause for this is that Oda and Mashimo both worked as assistants to Watsuki Nobuhiro when he was working on Rurouni Kenshin.  However, a quick Google suggests this is untrue; in fact, it seems Mashimo never worked as any manga-ka’s assistant before.

But try the Fairy Tail manga anyways, I think you’ll find the art still pleasant and not entirely similar to Oda’s art.  (I personally feel there are small but important differences, such as Mashimo’s eyes being rounder and noses smaller.)  Of course, if you choose to check out the Fairy Tail anime, which is being made by A-1 Pictures (Kannagi, Kuroshitsuji) and Satelight (Shugo Chara!, Macross Frontier), the similarities between the two art styles will probably be even less apparent.

The controversy doesn’t end there, unfortunately.  Readers familiar with Mashimo’s previous work Groove Adventure Rave (also know as Rave Master and Rave) sometimes complain that many parts of Fairy Tail are taken from Rave.  Having never read Rave, I don’t know if I can say agree, but you might want to keep the issue in mind if you’ve read it before or are planning to read it.

But if those you can get past those two major complaints, you’ll find yourself with a hilarious, good-looking and engaging series.  All the characters are strong and three-dimensional, even the girl protagonist who initially seems like a fan-service-providing damsel in distress.  The story arcs and pacing are a refreshing break from the constant power-ups and never ending battles that other big shonen titles feature.  Of course, it does features the shonen values of nakama but it seems to be the most strongly invoked to prevent characters doing cliché things like fighting till death.

Or alternately, you can try the anime.  It will include the voices of Hirano Aya (Haruhi in The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya) as Lucy, Kakihara Tetsuya (Simon in Gurren Lagann) as Natsu, Nakamura Yuuichi (Tomoya in Clannad) as Gray, Ohara Sayaka (Yuuko in xxxHolic) as Erza, and Kugimiya Rie (Alphonse in Full Metal Alchemist) as Happy.  With such a voice cast and great source material, I think the show will be worth checking out.

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All Japanese names mentioned are ordered family name then given name.
Del Ray has the rights to the Fairy Tail manga in the United States.