The fifth season of Fairy Tail is 25 episodes long. After the big event of the previous season, of which there was a time skip, things are pretty much back to normal. As per usual, the season starts off with a bunch of filler and this continues until you search it up and realize that the whole season is technically filler. It’s a bit of a shame, especially since the earlier filler content were your typical self-contained inconsequential episodes. It does take the chance to have cameos of a few past characters but they weren’t memorable enough to make it exciting.
It takes six or seven episodes before the filler finally relents and the main filler arc of the season begins. Although that isn’t saying much given that the quality of the plot was never a strong point of the anime, it’s not going to change your mind here. Nevertheless, it is still good to finally stop the episodic plots and have something that spans longer. The story arc focuses on Lucy but unfortunately, it doesn’t focus on her good aspects. It just further emphasizes how weak Lucy is and how much of a comedic relief character that she is, which is a big shame.
The arc kicks off with one of Lucy’s relatives turning up to see her and giving her one of her father’s mementoes. Naturally, the season’s group of villains turn up and steal it as it is apparently something important. This also gives way for several fight scenes in which the members of Fairy Tail are easily given a thumping. If you were hoping for better animation quality then you’ll be disappointed as the fight scenes still mainly consists of minimally animated scenes with a lot of streaking effects to try and simulate some sort of fast paced action.
The tone of the anime is even more lighthearted than usual. There are a lot of silly moments even when it doesn’t make sense to have them. Each episode is filled with slapstick humor and gags but perhaps where this is most evident is in the fight scenes. Combat was usually more on the serious side, even if it was boring and static. In this season, they’re constantly punctuated with jokes and gags, which are seriously distracting and makes you take the anime even less seriously.
The plot didn’t have a promising concept to start with but eventually it settles for a lazy structure. It’s a big fetch quest where the characters split into groups to retrieve various pieces of an important plot item. It’s a race against the villains, so this gives the villains plenty of opportunities to turn up again and again as they clash and battle. In line with how the tone for the rest of the season goes, the villains are not credible. They’re a joke and this image is complete with their magical abilities. A lot of them have silly powers that are juvenile and worst of all, they don’t even have credible motivation.
The second half of the season introduces even more familiar characters with weak reason son why they have reappeared. They’ve leveled up in their powers so they’re a lot stronger, easily defeating even Erza. It’s weak storytelling though when they end up overshadowing the initial villains, since these newcomers are revealed to be the ones with the grander scope, thereby nullifying some of the things that the other characters had done up until this point. Battles are often built up and dragged on for a long time until the characters suddenly have some epiphany and knock the villain out in one hit. It’s such an anticlimactic way to end the battles and makes the build up completely pointless and irrelevant.
With so much of the runtime spent on fighting, you can’t help but think that it could have been better used to improve the story instead. As it is, it feels clunky. The next episode always feels like it doesn’t directly continue off from the previous one, jumping away or ahead just enough to feel off. The designs of the new original characters are lazy. Not only do they lean towards the sillier side but their designs also clashes with the existing characters. It feels as if they are visitors from another anime, not quite belong to this world.
The predictability continues all the way to the end. There were one or two things that might surprise you or were unexpected. However, at the same time, giving that this is a filler arc, they had to do something to allow it to be self-contained and not have any lasting effect afterwards. It was slightly more interesting in the final few episodes, thanks to the pacing better a little bit faster with a little bit more story elements rather than just a lot of shouting and punching.
Overall, this is an average season of Fairy Tail but on par with what you’d expect. Given that the anime thus far has been very average in quality, a filler arc such as this is actually fairly on par in terms of quality so it doesn’t completely feel like a pointless arc. Unfortunately, the anime relies too heavily on fight scenes at the expense of anything else in the story that might even be remotely interesting. The downside to this is that it’s too saturated and viewers become desensitized to it, and it doesn’t help that the low budget means that even the supposedly most action packed scenes are incredibly dull.
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