Many years ago I got Slayers volume 2,3 and 4 on VHS from a local Goodwill and a couple of years later I found the first two volumes of Slayers TRY from the late great Movie Trading Company (I loved that store, I'd say 80% of my anime collection was purchased there). I had always been curious to watch the whole series and over Christmas I bought the 3 season set from Funimation in Best Buy.

Slayers is considered one of the greatest animes of all time, so I thought I would review it without all the hype or overrating tendencies nostalgic animes (like Sailor Moon and Gundam) tend to get.

Follow up:

For those who have who have never seen Slayers before it is fantasy/comedy series following the exploits of Lina Inverse, a teenage master of black sorcery and self interested magician-for-hire and her adventures. There are several parts to this series, including 5(!) seasons and over half a dozen OVAs and movies. It's based off of a novel series written by Hajime Kanzaka and Rui Araizumi and the first season is based off of the first 3 (I *think*) novels.

The actual plot of the first season is this: after raiding a bandit stronghold Lina Inverse, the gluttonous, smart aleck and incredibly powerful sorceress ends up with several treasures. Along the way she teams up with Goury, an extreme strong, but spectacularly stupid swordsman who has decided to escort her to Atlas city in an act of well-meaning, but misdirected chivalry. It turns out Lina has stolen an incredibly powerful magical artifact in addition to the other treasures and the 'rightful' owner is willing to do anything to get them back--including kidnapping Lina. Then there is a conspiracy involving a chimera named Zelgadis, a holy man named Rezzo the Red Priest and a demon lord named Shabernigdo (I'm pretty sure there is no right way to spell that).

The second of the half of the series involves Lina, Gourry, Zelgadis and a princess named Amelia on the run from an unfairly placed bounty on their heads which eventually ties itself back to the first half of the series.

So how does it measure up.

Being that the series is almost 15 years old, the animation is hand drawn as opposed to CG, so while a lot of parts look really good, such as sword fights and comedy pieces, the magic parts look pretty cheezy. The music is pretty good, I really like the op and end songs and the serious moments have some really good instrumentation. The beginning gets a little annoying with Lina introducing herself at each episode with her little speech, so I could only listen to it about 4 or 5 times before just zooming through the credits. The dub is pretty awful, as were most dubs of its time and most of the voice actors migrated over to 4kids so all of them are very recognizable. Even so I am very sentimental over the dub and still liked it. A problem is that after the first 13 episodes the voice acting for Zelgadis and Amelia changed. While Crispin Freeman is a far superior actor to the original Zelgadis's voice, I think the original suited more to Zel's personality.

The characters are also awesome. Lina is no-nonsense, greedy and selfish, but she isn't a 'bad' character, and I respect her for it. Goury is dumb but sweet and Zel is probably one of my favorite characters of all time. And this series is truly funny. My mother hates anime, so much that she won't even watch a Miyazaki movie with me, if that tells you anything, and yet she will sit and watch and laugh at Slayers, which should tell you the power of this show. On a storytelling level though, this season is seriously flawed. I hate when shows break up a season into two arcs, and that is preciously what Slayers did, and in addition before getting to the second part of the series there is a LOT of filler, and for a 26 episode season that's not a good thing. They are good, one shot episodes, but hard to go through in continuing through to the end of the season. Also, the climax is very poorly done and basically goes to the premise of 'ha ha, you didn't actually kill me and now you have to fight me again.' The first 12 episodes are brilliant, the next 14 are 'meh'.

So how does it compare to modern anime? In terms of storytelling, animation and music, in the fifteen years since Slayers 1 came out, I can think of a half dozen series that outrank Slayers. So why should someone who has never seen Slayers before check it out? Because Slayers is a rarity in this: it is pure comedy and isn't heavily reliant on fan service for its jokes. It's an easy to follow, genuinely funny and harmlessly entertaining, something that is becoming increasing rare in modern series, which will start out funny and quickly devolve into an angsty bloodbath (Naruto, anyone?) or rely on panty shots for all its laughs. Slayers is a great Otaku hook. For a kid just finishing Bakugan or something similar and wants to know 'what else is out there' without getting too discouraged by gore or sex, Slayers still remains a classic.