Review for Fairy Tail: Part 8

Introduction

We’ve recently had the Fairy Tail movie come to the UK, a thoroughly entertaining stand-alone story set in the Fairy Tail universe. But if you’ve watched it, you might have noticed some unexpected familiar faces, and some unexpected new ones. That’s because the Fairy Tail movie is set some time after episode 123. You don’t need to know any of this stuff to enjoy the movie, but it might leave you with odd trivial questions. As this collection of episodes begins, we’re only up to episode 85, but this set will start to fill in the gaps when it comes to where the characters are, when it comes to The Phoenix Priestess, not least of which is a formidable cat, named Pantherlily who makes an impact in the episodes here. Anyway, back to the main storyline...

The Kingdom of Fiore is a rather special place, a nation of some 17 million where magic exists, is commonplace, and is a commodity to be bought and sold. Those who become proficient in magic are the wizards, and together they form guilds to serve the community, or serve themselves. The most famous, and indeed the most infamous guild of them all is Fairy Tail. 17-year-old Lucy Heartfilia is a wizard, or rather she wants to be a wizard. She’s already skilled in a Celestial magic, able to summon spirits to do her bidding using Gatekeys. Her dream is to be in Fairy Tail, and when she meets a travelsick young wizard named Natsu, and his talking cat companion Happy, it seems like destiny has brought them together. Now Lucy has joined the Fairy Tail Guild, and with its unique roster of wizards, including Natsu, the ice wizard Gray Fullbuster, and the armour wizard Erza Scarlet, and the flying cat Happy, they undertake the toughest, the most challenging, and the weirdest of missions.

Manga Entertainment release the next twelve episodes of Fairy Tail across two discs, and as this collection begins, the city of Magnolia and the Fairy Tail Guild had been ripped from the surface of Earthland, and converted into a giant lacrima crystal to fuel the magic of the parallel world Edolas. It’s a world where familiar faces play different roles, and where the balance of power belongs to flying cats called Exceeds, the sole beings in that world with innate magic. Hold on... flying cats? The secret behind Happy and Charle’s origin has been revealed and it isn’t a pleasant one. The Dragon Slayers, Natsu, Wendy, and Gajeel, along with celestial wizard Lucy remain free, and in a position to rescue their friends from the lacrima crystal. But they don’t remain free for long.


Disc 1
85. Code ETD
86. Erza vs. Erza
87. We’re Talking About Lives Here!!!!
88. For Pride’s Sake, The River of Stars
89. The Apocalyptic Dragon Chain Cannon
90. The Boy Back Then
91. Dragon Sense
92. O Living Ones

Disc 2
93. I’m Standing Right Here
94. Bye-Bye Edolas
95. Lisanna
96. He Who Extinguishes Life

Picture

Blu-ray should mean sharp, crystal clear, high definition animation. Not so much with Fairy Tail though, as while the show does get a 1080p widescreen presentation at the 1.78:1 aspect ratio, it’s clear that the show was animated at a lower resolution and scaled up. It looks little different from the DVD presentation, soft and with somewhat muted colours. I also get the feeling, given the odd bit of judder in pans and scrolls, particularly during the credit sequences, that it’s been converted to a progressive format from an interlaced source. However this was less evident in this seventh collection than it has been in previous releases. What the HD presentation does offer is clarity and smoothness of character artwork, with no aliasing to speak of, and compression artefacts completely absent. And you do get a 24 fps progressive presentation, without any of the PAL speed-up or pitch correction that you would get with a PAL DVD. That alone is reason enough to opt for the Blu-ray.


The image is clear and generally very pleasant too watch. It’s a bright, lively anime, and given that it’s a long running series, the character designs are understandably simplistic, the world design not overly complex. It’s full of primary colours, and the animation itself is energetic, especially through the various spell sequences.

The images in this review are sourced from the PR, and aren’t necessarily representative of the final retail release.

Sound

You have the choice between Dolby TrueHD 5.1 Surround English, and Dolby TrueHD 2.0 Stereo Japanese, with optional translated subtitles and a signs only track. You do get the added clarity and range of a lossless presentation, but it’s still pretty similar to the DVD, although I must once again reiterate that it’s at the native frame rate and without any speed-up or pitch correction. I sampled the English dub, and found it to be a typical anime comedy dub, high pitched female voices, and loudness and manic intensity substituting for humour. My preference as always was for the Japanese audio track with the subtitles. It too is adequate, although one slight point of annoyance for some may be the lead character of Lucy played by Aya Hirano, who simply supplies another variation of her stock Haruhi Suzumiya tsundere voice. Otherwise it’s a fairly run of the mill audio track, playing the show for laughs, with little yet to stretch the characters. More impressive is the show’s music, which with a pop Celtic theme supplements the show’s magical themes very well, although it is boosted by a wholesale plundering of the classical music archives. The subtitles are clear, well timed, and free of error throughout and with a nice smooth HD font.

Extras

The discs get animated menus, and appear to be the Funimation discs repackaged, given the FBI warning and the US trailers. No localisation here from Madman...

Disc 1 autoplays with a trailer for Kamisama Kiss, which for a simple animation actually doesn’t look too bad in HD.

You get a commentary on episode 89 with ADR director Tyler Walker, and voice of Faust (and Makarov), R. Bruce Elliot and voice of Gajeel, David Wald. You can guess with my recent comments about the quality of Funimation commentaries, that this was another that failed to appeal. In fact it put me right to sleep. Fortunately episode 90 woke me up again, and woke me up in a big way!


Disc 2 autoplays with a trailer for Dragon Ball Z, the plastic version.

You’ll also find the US trailer for this collection of Fairy Tail, the textless credits (2 openings and two closings, and further SD trailers for One Piece Season 5 Voyage 6, and Fruits Basket, and HD trailers for the Fairy Tail Movie: Phoenix Priestess, Robotics;Notes, Wolf Children and Evangelion 2.22.

The commentary on this disc accompanies episode 96, features Tyler Walker and voice of Natsu, Todd Haberkorn, and to my chagrin, I slept through the whole thing again. It is there on the disc though.

Conclusion

I had the same sense of enjoyment and engagement with Fairy Tail Part 8 that I did way back with Part 4, what for me is still the best that Fairy Tail has delivered when it comes to storytelling and satisfying character development. It comes down to pretty much the same reason, both Part 4 and Part 8 offer conclusions to significant story arcs. The stakes are raised, revelations are made, and heartstrings are tugged at. That’s all with the trademark comedy and zaniness that I have come to expect from the show. It isn’t quite as emotionally satisfying as the Tower of Heaven arc, and the Battle of Fairy Tail arc. You’ll have to go a long way to top Erza’s back story, while Laxus as a character had more weight and impact when he “turned to the dark side”. One of the drawbacks of parallel universe stories is that they never feel quite real in comparison to the main story universe, and also the Edolas arc in its closing has a couple of issues.


The main story here focuses on the fate of Edolas, a world declining in magic, and with the humans trying desperately to hold on to what little magic they can get. For the king, Faust that means using Anima spells to harvest magic from the ‘real’ world, Earthland, and to plot against the Exceeds (flying cats like Happy and Charle) who are the only beings with innate magic in Edolas. His latest harvest has netted the whole of Magnolia, turning it and its inhabitants into a giant crystal to fuel their magic. But Faust has even more nefarious plans in store for that crystal. It’s up to the few Fairy Tail wizards who survived the transition to Edolas unscathed to fight for their friends. That would be Mystogan, Lucy, and the Dragon Slayers, and later on they are joined by Gray and Erza.

The story follows the usual shonen recipe of back and forth battles with each side revealing new strengths and determination, the advantage switching from one side to the other, in a series of imaginative and ever more impressive and high stakes battles. Of course the trademark Fairy Tail sense of humour is never absent, quick change Lucy is one such moment. And along the way, several truths are revealed, about Edolas, about the Exceeds, and about Mystogan and more. It’s all great fun to watch, highly entertaining, and it keeps you invested in the story and the characters. It also manages to grab you by the throat and set those lips a-quivering, force a little mistiness in the eye, such as when the Exceeds finally fight back against King Faust’s ultimate plan (not the ultimate, ultimate plan, as that comes afterwards). And of course there is the big home-coming in the penultimate episode of the collection. If you aren’t moved by that episode, there’s something wrong.


It’s afterwards, when you’ve finished watching these episodes that you realise that they dropped the ball in one or two ways. The first is the Erza vs. Erza battle. You’d expect that to be significant if they named an episode after it, but it actually doesn’t feature much in that episode, and what you do get afterwards is always cut away from, you never get the full impact, or any sense of emotional drama between Erza Scarlet and her doppelganger Erza Knightwalker. Then there is the missed chance of bringing the whole of Fairy Tail into Edolas. Gray and Erza were rescued from a Lacrima crystal when Gajeel used his Dragon Slayer magic on it. A lot of the subsequent episodes are spent trying to free the rest of Fairy Tail as well, but in the end that doesn’t happen, and you don’t get to see the other Fairy Tail wizards run into their counterparts.

But that’s a disappointment that strikes after you have watched this collection, not while you are watching it. The Edolas arc ends in a satisfying way that has Fairy Tail, if not quite at the peak of its powers, certainly in top gear at this point. The final episode in this collection appears to set into motion the next story arc, with the introduction of an enigmatic figure with ominous abilities. Roll on Part 9!