Slayers Review

[eastofthemoon]

For those interested, Arkada (an anime reviewer on the Desubrigade website
) just did a video review on Slayers. It's part of his Anime Review of Awesome in which everyday he did a different review. (With that said, the anime he reviewed were chosen by fans votes and Slayers won the spot for the last review.)

Anyway, the review itself is fairly good and funny. You can tell he had fun with the D&D references.

Comments

[brendala.livejournal.com]

The D&D recreation of the Xoana battle was great!

The review was very well done. It was fair and did a good job of describing the show in a nutshell. I was afraid he would eviscerate the dub (as many reviewers have before) and I was pleasantly surprised when he praised it. That Crispin Freeman picture was awesome and it was cool that he found an amusing way to warn the audience about the jarring voice change that Zelgadis goes through. Though I don't understand why he didn't mention the drastic change in Amelia's voice, too. It's just as jarring and it's not like Veronica Taylor is a complete unknown to anime fans.

I agree with the reviewer that, if somebody is scared off by cel animation, they have no right to call themselves otaku and/or animation fans. The fact that some people are scared off by old animation honestly baffles me.

[earthstar-moon.livejournal.com]

I was baffled why he didn't mention the voice change in Amelia too (I ALWAYS warned people before they watch it), but it could be a case he didn't have room to fit it in or it didn't occur to him. (Maybe he wasn't as bothered by it. @_@) Arkada is one of the few anime fans I've seen that always tries to give a dub a chance and tries to point out the good and bad in both the English and Japanese version. He's probably my favorite reviewer on the website.

I love the D&D battle at the beginning. XD That had me laughing for a few minutes.

[sensitivinferno.livejournal.com]

Ugh, that dub.

I didn't like that review very much. I think he took too many liberties in describing things as "fact" when they are really more his opinion. Like saying over and over that the first season didn't know what direction it was going in. Well, yeah, it obviously did. Because it was based on pre-existing novels and because LOTS OF STUFF HAPPENED.

I don't know, I think he sounded like a know-it-all without actually knowing much of anything about the series.

[shansito.livejournal.com]

Yep, that's exactly what I thought. And when he finally stated that "first season loses track of plot", I thought... what plot are you talking about? The 1st series didn't have a main plot for all the season, it was just some stuff that happened to Lina while she wanted to go from some place to Atlas City. Maybe HE lost track of what was happening.

[earthstar-moon.livejournal.com]

To be fair, he was viewing the series as a casual viewer not a fan who knows the franchise inside and out and didn't realize it was based on a series of novels.

You can't expect every single person who watches Slayers for the first time to know it's based on a novel series. Remember, the novel series only got released officially about four years ago, and most are more familiar with only the anime. (Plus, I think most reviews are based on opinions. In the end, you always have to make up your own opinion.)

[dqbunny.livejournal.com]

In a way, I can kind of see where the reviewer is going. When I first saw the series, offing Rezo after 11 episodes didn't strike me as odd because I know that 26-episode anime tend to crest about midway through, then head for its climax. In a way, season 1 is like Revo/Evo-R. It's a semi, but really big battle on the way to the endgame. There wasn't a clear goal stated outright like there is in Next (Find the Claire Bible, which morphs into defeat Gaav/Phibrizzo) and Try (save the dragons, y'all!) Series 1 is two completely different stories that are loosely dependent upon each other.

But, I never felt that the series was lacking in a goal because I had faith that the animators knew what they were doing, and they did. I enjoyed the journey getting there.

[brendala.livejournal.com]

Ugh, that dub.

Hey, lighten up. A lot of us love that nostalgic ol' thing. ^_^;


Reviews are, by definition, opinion pieces. So it goes without saying that, when he said the first season didn't know where it was going, that was just his personal observation and nothing more.

And, well, he's kinda right. After Rezo is defeated, the show does meander a bit before Lina gets another clear-cut goal to shoot for. I noticed this when I first discovered the anime; but it never bothered me because the filler episodes were fun.

[earthstar-moon.livejournal.com]

I happen to like the old dub myself too, in fact it was the first anime I watched in dumb (You know besides Pokemon and Sailormoon)

dqbunny and I were discussing last night that the first season could have been better paced if after the Rezo battle we had abotu 2-3 episodes of Just Lina and Gourry, meet with Phil and Randy and then go to Seyrune as they did in the fourth novel and met Amelia then. After that, the rest of the show follows as it should.

If they meet Amelia as they did in the novel, she might not have been hated so much as first because they really did make her more naive in the beginning of the first season. (Next is more like how she was in the novel.)

[ichiban-victory.livejournal.com]

She has every right not to like the dub. As it is, I love the dub actors, but the first half of the season's dub was incredibly weak aside from Lisa Ortiz and Eric Stuart. (Note: my opinion.)

If the anime had been accurate to the novels, Amelia would not have been introduced until halfway through Next. Lina and Gourry never met up with Prince Phil and Randy, that was just Lina before Gourry was ever her partner. The entire second half of the anime was retconned to include the most popular novel characters, and Amelia is lucky to be that popular...in Japan.

Also, as I did a lot of asking and studying on it back in the ancient days of Amelia-bashing, most everyone I ever encountered that hated Amelia hated her because of the dub. So some of us can have even more reason to not like it. Veronica Taylor didn't take over for Amelia until later in the season, but by then the damage was done, and the dub's hyper Amelia paired off with the "dreamy" first dubbed Zelgadis sealed Amelia's fate as most hated character for a long time... And yes, there were a lot of dub fans that hated Crispin Freeman taking over as Zelgadis' voice.

My two cents as an ancient in the fandom...

[ichiban-victory.livejournal.com]

All lack of plot can be blamed on Lina and her habit of doing whateve she wants. ;) If he wanted consistent plot, he should never watch a series where the main character is Chaotic Good! Lina will chase down plot points when she's forced to, and not a minute before!

[brendala.livejournal.com]

She has every right not to like the dub. As it is, I love the dub actors, but the first half of the season's dub was incredibly weak aside from Lisa Ortiz and Eric Stuart. (Note: my opinion.)

Oh, I can understand how people who watched the earlier episodes could hate the dub (if I hadn't been watching the DVDs with the botched Japanese audio, I would have switched to the subs, too). It just bugs me when people inject comments like "AARG! The dub blows!" into random conversations without even explaining why it blows. I have issues with the Japanese version; but I don't lob insults at it every time it comes up in conversation. Just sayin'


I'll never understand why people prefer the first Zelgadis over Freeman. His entire shtick was whispering every line to make it sound more menacing/mysterious. It worked well enough when Zel was just a mysterious angst-bucket; but it would have fallen flat in the episodes where Zelgadis had to be funny.