May 05 2009
A Review of Slayers
One of my favorites from the ’90s. Slayers was just the first of four seasons to bear the title (followed by Slayers NEXT, Slayers TRY, and Slayers Revolution which follows an independent and original storyline). I’ll only be reviewing the first season (Slayers) in this review. Each subsequent series will have their own reviews. So, let’s get started.
Slayers follows the story of a young sorceress named Lina Inverse. Just after turning 16, she ventures out for Atlas City only to be drawn into a much larger problem. Along the way, she teams up with an unintelligent knight, a white-magic using princess, and a demon-golem-human amalgamation in order to fight a powerful sorcerer named Rezo who is bent on world domination.This anime is just awesome from the opening scene to the final showdown. There’s enough plot and character build to keep you intrigued and enough action and gratuitous explosions to keep you entertained. The characters are well developed (in personality, not physically), and the story actually makes sense most of the time. There’s very little deviation from the main plot, even though the main plot may not seem visible early on. Which is nice when compared to a series like Naruto where every other episode seems to be irrelevent filler.
As far as voice acting goes, the original Japanese is top-notch. Everyone sounds just as you’d expect them to, and everyone’s voice and speech patterns are distinct enough to become easily recognizable. The English dub, however, I find quite lacking. Lina is entirely too whiny for a powerful sorceres, and Zelgaddis and Rezo sound almost identical. And, they share the same speech patterns to boot.
One reason I love this anime is the world history and magic that the writers put so much detail and effort into creating. It’s like anime meets Dungeons and Dragons. A lot of the main elements of the show are very remniscent of the D&D Player’s Handbook given life and breath. Also, it does an almost seamless job of combining melee combat and magical combat through the use of weapon focuses and touch attacks. Although we don’t see as many fantastical races as we do in some fantasy animes (like elves and dwarves and the like), there are enough crazy monsters (trolls, dragons, etc.) to make this easily identifiable as a fantasy genre.
As far as drawbacks and things I don’t like about this anime? Well, I can’t seem to find any. Granted, it’s been a while since I’ve watched through the whole series, so I could be repressing bad memories. But, this is another must-have for any decent collection.
