Luffy..... oh, sorry, I mean uhh.... Natsu prepares for the big battle!!
Truth be told what had initially gotten me to want to give this series a watch was how similar I've heard it was to One Piece. And given that I am a pretty darn huge One Piece fan, not to mention shounen fan in general, I naturally felt the need to check it out. Even though certain people had specifically used the word "ripoff" or "plagiarism" in regards to it's similarities to One Piece, I essentially disregarded them as the typical shounen fare in the sense of complaints about one shounen series being way too similar to another.
But to tell you the honest truth, from what I could tell just off of this one episode, I really didn't see that many similarities to One Piece in the first place. Not to say that there weren't any, because fact of the matter is there were indeed quite a bit. A lot of the character traits, especially that of the main hero's, were quite similar to characters from One Piece for one, and of course as you can obviously tell the art style of this series is practically right off the page of Eiichiro Oda's style. Plus that and I guess I can sort of see the whole Wizard's Gild = Pirate Crew thing as well. But other than that, it did seem to be very much in a lot of ways it's own thing with it's own ideas. Clearly inspired by One Piece no doubt, but hardly a ripoff save for possibly the art style.
All in all though, I actually found this episode to be quite enjoyable, which apparently makes me a dribbling idiot unfortunately.... (yes, I did read Andrew Cunningham's rant review. :P ) Was it necessarily one of the better shounen series I'd ever seen? Oh heaven's no. If you're looking for a good shounen series to indulge yourself on then quite frankly there are plenty of far, far better, far more well made ones out there that you could do so with. Was it so mind-numbingly terrible that it'll make you dumber for having watched it? Not by a longshot. Basically at it's very worst, it's kind of just a standard typical generic shounen series that doesn't really have anything all that particularly special about it, and that's about as bad as it gets. The comic relief in it I will admit is probably a lot more annoying and cliche than it was funny, and the animation and the overall execution of the episode were quite fairly unimpressive, if not really, really poor. But other than that I didn't find anything too particularly terrible about it. I will say though that even though neither the OP or the ED were particularly anything special, I actually did like the BGM for this thing quite a bit. If anything, it's worth watching at least for that anyways.
Granted keep in mind that most of what I'm saying about this thing is pretty much limited to just one episode. It could get better, it could get worse, who knows. What I can definitely say for sure about it though is that based off the first episode, I see it as at least a fun little enjoyable shounen series that I feel entertained enough by it to at least keep watching if nothing else.
2 comments:
Personally, I found Fairy Tail to be much too generic for my tastes. Felt too much like One Piece, just not nearly as good. Animation quality is way below my expectations too, given the two studios involved. The opening theme made me laugh (and not in a good way), and the humor felt very forced too, making much of it unfunny.
As you can probably guess, I won't be continuing this series. It's a shame, because I love the voice cast. :(
Yeah, it doesn't surprise me, to tell you the truth. In fact it doesn't surprise me the overall negative attitudes most people are having with it. I guess it's pretty much just the massive shounen fan in me that keeps me enjoying it anyways. Knowing me though I probably won't for very long.
From what I understand though, I do hear the manga is not nearly as poorly handled. I just think about Carlo's review over on ANN. He said something about something the manga-ka does with his panels and frames that's actually quite unique that you don't see at all in the anime. Probably doesn't mean it's any more worth checking out, but it is an interesting thought.
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