English Dub Review: Fairy Tail: 100 Years Quest “A Bitter Choice”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Natsu and the team manage to force Diabolos to retreat, at least for the moment, but are then faced with the might of Mercphobia’s Water Dragon form. His assistant Karameel admits that she contacted the White Mage to take his power in hopes he would no longer be hunted, but that only helped her to control him, so the team gets ready to have to put him down if need be. Meanwhile, the White Mage is revealed to be possessing Touka and incapacitates everyone in the Fairy Tail guild hall.

OUR TAKE

Hm, this kinda got a little stupid, but still in a textbook Fairy Tail way. Feels like we were headed towards something where Mercphobia would, I dunno, step up even with the lack of power he head and try to reclaim it from the White Mage and then…I guess they’d determine whether he needs to be sealed or killed later. But apparently we were leading to this, where it turns out, pretty much out of left field, that his right hand woman actually SOMEHOW got ahold of the White Mage (who just has her insta handle out there for public use apparently) and was ALSO dumb enough to believe that said mage would just take it away for completely innocuous reasons instead of using it to control him and cause horrific and untold destruction. Oh, and as for the Diabolos guys, they just get to run off and do a big Team Rocket come back another day, which I’m sure will not be diminishing returns at allllllll. But at the very least we get to see a big dragon fight next week, which was kind of what we were sold on in the first place, so it all evens out, I suppose.

And yet, I am strangely buying into this weird and precarious drama for some reason. Again, I gotta wonder if this has to do with my retained nostalgia for this show from my younger years, or maybe it’s because Fairy Tail is still at its core a brightly colored and action filled shonen battle story that I eat up and will continue to eat up until I am dead. But for whatever reason, I do find myself invested in what’s happening with this weird sea dragon man and this weird white haired lady with a genocidal ghost inside her head. Plus, we’re slowly creeping up on the end of this arc, which will then determine if the past five or more episodes truly was worth it, and indeed reviving Fairy Tail at all. I mean, for the creator and publishers, it’s already worth it, since the made a whole bunch of money, but will it have been worth your TIME? Well, you’ve probably already committed to watching the whole thing before you even become aware of this review, so the tension is more about if I will determine if I wasted my own time. And the answer to that is…yes, absolutely, I will never be as young as I am now and it is all the fault of Fairy Tail.