Fairy Tail 3

Hiro Mashima – Del Rey – 2008 – 14+ volumes

I was actually very surprised that the story arc from the end of the last volume lasted through this entire volume.  I’m not sure why, especially since I associate this series with One Piece, and One Piece has story arcs that last ten volumes sometimes.

The battle with the dark guild really is the coolest thing ever, though.  As you would expect, most of the volume is battles between Natsu and an opponent, Gray and an opponent, and Erza and an opponent.  I’m fine with that at this point, because all of them still have really fresh and unique fighting styles.

It starts off with the four splitting off into girl/boy pairs to find the guy with the lullaby spell.  Obviously, Lucy isn’t a good match for Erza since the latter is fantastically strong.  You know she’s strong because very strong characters are afraid of her, but to see her in action in a fight is AMAZING.  Lucy is starting to become more and more useless as the story goes on, which is unfortunate because she’s too annoying to keep around if she’s not actually serving a purpose in a fight.  I like her summon magic, but she literally serves almost no purpose here except to help out at a very key moment.  Even Happy gets to help more.

After dispatching the entire dark guild, the members still have not successfully stopped Lullaby.  The guild’s true intention was hidden from them, so they wind up on another wild chase to catch one lone member.  The lone member winds up squaring off with Natsu, which turns out to be a pretty good fight since the rogue member is a wind user and Natsu uses fire, which is inherently ineffective against wind here.  We get to see more of Natsu’s strengths, and I’m really hoping Natsu winds up with a great role in the story somewhere down the line.

What actually happens to Lullaby is very good.  I should mention, as corny as the constant jokes inevitably are, I like this series’ sense of humor a lot.  It’s got a bit of “throw out 500 jokes to see which ones stick” syndrome, but it’s also got a really bizarre and unique sense of humor that you don’t see that often.  It’s kind of like Law of Ueki in that way, except Fairy Tail’s sense of humor is slightly more refined.  The art is also good, mostly because it looks just like something Eiichiro Oda would draw, and One Piece will always be my favorite.

No plot has emerged as of yet, but at this point the ride is still fun enough that I can see myself following along with the flow of events for at least a while longer, even if there is no immediate destination.  It’s funny, it looks good, the battles are awesome, the characters are good… and that’s just about everything you can get right in a series, so I have no complaints.