Midpoint Impression: Slayers (First Season)

Okay, it may be a little early on to be saying that I'm doing a midpoint impression of the first season of Slayers, given that I've only seen ten of the twenty six episodes, but episode ten more or less wraps up the series' first story arc, so I figured it would be a good point to do my impression at.

The plot of Slayers is pretty simplistic. It's basically a fantasy parody. The main characters seem to be Lina Inverse, an adventuring sorceress with a childish figure and an incredible amount of power, and Gourry, a dumb as a rock swordsman who 'rescues' her from some bandits -and then starts making comments about how he wished she'd been a real babe and not some kid. Several other characters are shown in the opening credits for the show, but so far we haven't met very many of them. Of the ones we have, the stone skinned Zelgadis is amongst the most prominent, and fulfils the 'dark brooding character' role that neither Lina nor Gourry is very well suited for.

Gourry: more brawn then brains.

Lina can be so cute when she's about to torch someone...

As you can imagine, a show like this has quite a bit of comedic potential, and there are certainly some very humorous moments (like the aforementioned first meeting between Lina and Gourry). Unfortunately, the show also has quite a bit of semi-serious stuff that can kind of drag it down a bit (it's not really good enough with the action for its fight scenes to be all that exciting), so while it's not really all that bad, it's not really all that great either. I'm going to wait and see how the rest of the series goes (after all, I just finished the first story arc), but at this point it's not much of a challenge to my current favourites. It's amusing enough to keep watching, but so far it hasn't had me raving very much.

Just one further note on Slayers: if it seems like it's not all that well animated, that's probably due in part to the fact that it was released back around 1995. I'm not sure its artwork was considered all that good even back then, but the fact that so many of the newer animes out there look so slick can't really help things.