Fairy Gone Review Episode 10

Posted on by Karandi
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It’s All About Marlya

Marlya and Free - Fairy Gone - Anime - Episode 10

Fairy Gone Episode 10

The aftermath of the death of a collegue and Marlya decides to make it all about her and her being cursed. The problem Fairy Gone faces with this is that it really does make her look ridiculous when everyone else has known Ozz significantly longer and is also feeling regret and responsibility and yet they try and make this a turning point for her character.

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Free also gets into the self-loathing a little this episode, but in his case it feels a little more earned. As the leader of the mission that utterly and completely failed and resulted in the death of a comrade, as well as an experienced war veteran, Free has a lot more of the weight of this riding on him than Marlya should. More importantly, Free himself shakes off his depression and glumness and reaches out to help Marlya. All things considered, his character is coming off as the MVP compared.

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Meanwhile, in the background of all of this the mercenaries are still doing stuff, the dukes are still doing stuff, the various government groups are still doing stuff. There’s lots of stuff happening and I’m guess it will become important fairly soon but each scene is give so little emotional weight and everything has the same kind of dull look about it that it is very hard to know which parts we’re supposed to be focused on or caring about, if anything.

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Once again we get an excess of flashbacks thrown amongst the limited story we get in the episode. Given Fairy Gone is all about Marlya in this episode, we see once again her childhood though foucsing more on her being adopted and then her new father dying of some illness. We’ve seen bits of this before but there was some new material, even if it added little.

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After the excitement of last episode a more contemplative episode made sense, however all things considered this was kind of just marking time until we get to the next exciting thing.

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Karandi James

Fairy Gone Review Episode 9

Posted on by Karandi
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A Train Derailment To Set The Story Straight

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Fairy Gone Episode 9

After making an assassination attempt against the prime minister dull, I wasn’t expecting much from Fairy Gone despite a certain other blogger’s assurances that things were about to get somewhat more interesting. After 8 episodes of poor pacing, badly timed or irrelevant flash backs, action sequences that look like they should be cool but really don’t pull it off, and having characters that I’ve struggled to care about, Fairy Gone found its groove in episode 9 and managed twenty minutes of actually pretty compelling viewing.

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Okay, I like looking at fancy swords.

This is the issue with episodic reviewing. This episode doesn’t make the previous 8 suddenly better. They were pretty tiresome to watch outside of a potentially intriguing premise. However, this episode couldn’t have worked without those previous 8 episodes. Whether or not this is a turning point that means this series is going to go from one that is fairly missable to one that is worth checking out remains to be seen, but there’s suddenly some light at the end of the tunnel.

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The political situation in Fairy Gone is pretty complicated with almost everyone out for themselves and running their own agenda. There are so many factions, organisations, and government branches that it really is difficult to keep them all straight. That said, when we get a simple complication such as the transportation of an important weapon and the guys who are clearly trying to steal it, though whether that is because they want the weapon or because they want to undermine Dorothea’s authority remains to be seen, things get a great deal more interesting.

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I mentioned in a previous review that I was wondering whether or not Dorothea was actually competent given they don’t seem to have succeeded at much since the start of the anime. This episode, while wonderfully dramatic and tense as the enemy derails the train carriage and rains bullets down upon them before liberally cutting down any sign of resistance from Dorothea, really demonstrated how under powered they are for the job they apparently have.

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The dramatic injury and subsequent death of one of their members kind of pins the severity of the situation but once again, Fairy Gone just hasn’t quite done enough to make me overly concerned about that particular character. More worrying is the impact this will have on Marlya and it is interesting that the flashback we got before the fight broke out (after the train derailed) was of Marlya learning to hunt. For the first time it felt like a meaningful placement of a flashback and one that might have consequences. As such, it felt like the death was less about making us feel sad for the now deceased character, and more about motivating Marlya into some kind of action.

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Also, the villain is one of those smug over-confident types who lectures his opponents as he cuts them down and leaves them alive to get stronger to fight again. I hate this kind of villain at the best of times and in this situation it just seemed ridiculous.

However, despite the few complaints, the episode worked. It drew me back into the story and made me wonder what the next steps would be. I also had to wonder what the consequence of this failure would be for the organisation. Fairy Gone isn’t suddenly getting amazing but  this was certainly a much appreciated step in the right direction.

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Fairy Gone Review Episode 6

Posted on by Karandi
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Fewer Things Worse Than Being Dull

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Episode 1

I’m struggling thinking of things to say about this week’s episode of Fairy Gone. Where previous episodes have left me a little curious about the premise and a little disappointed in the execution, episode 6 managed to hit that really terrible point in watching where I had to honestly say I was bored while watching. It wasn’t the absence of fight sequences, or the serious lack of fairies outside of the artificial ones, it was just that the episode felt like nothing was happening.

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On reflection, quite a bit happened, but that doesn’t take away the fact that while watching Fairy Gone I had this overwhelming feeling that I was in the endless elevator listening to that irritating music over and over and I wasn’t getting anywhere.

The bright side is that they’ve come up with a new gimmick to start episodes outside of flashbacks. Now they just directly narrate the history to us and join it into the episode through some awkward dialogue. No kidding. This week we got a history lesson of the first prime minister and the five dukes and then we cut to the old guys and the pub arguing about the dukes and so the episode begins.

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The jury is still out on whether this approach is better or worse than decontextualised flashbacks in terms of starting an episode.

Free and Marlya then patrol the city because the anniversary of the end of the war is coming up and during their patrol one of the automated soldier things goes a little crazy for reasons Dorothea never seems to figure out but the audience was shown exactly what happened. It just adds to the overall impression that Dorothea is a little bit useless.

Anyway, forget that, because now Marlya is getting sent after a rumoured black tome once again and what follows is perhaps the slowest and dullest train pursuit sequence ever.

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Things kind of come together at the end of the episode but to be perfectly honest the characters have spent most the episode just kind of meandering about, they haven’t figured out a single thing, and it isn’t as though this was a pause to develop some of these characters because other than a Marlya-woe-is-me-I-have-no-parents moment there was nothing going on that could be counted as characterisation.

Fairy Gone not being very good I could handle. Fairy Gone being boring is a different story and if it doesn’t find its way to slightly interesting again soon I think I’ll let this one go from my watch list.

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Fairy Gone Review Episodes 3 + 4

Posted on by Karandi
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Why have one coincidence when you can have 5?

Fairy Gone Episode 3

Episode 3

In episode 3, Fairy Gone seems to focus on the black fairy tome. After giving us a few scenes tying up loose ends from their last mission, Free and Marlya meet a Vice-Minister who explains what the fairy tomes are and why people are searching for the black one. Or kind of. Despite the amount of screen time the explanation takes up we still don’t really know why people want it other than it was torn out of the original tome.

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From there it should be a simple matter of meet the scholar and collect a piece of the tome but you know why make things easy?

Free encounters yet another face from his past (again, is it really that hard for them to meet new people, does every encounter have to come with back-story and complications) in the form of Bitter Sweet – what a name? There’s some wine drinking and some really unsubtle dialogue and then a chirpy yellow fairy starts creating a raucous.

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Because, you know, two groups after the tome wasn’t enough, let’s also throw in the mafia. We then have a three way chase sequence that ends in a bit of a fight and stand-off.

I actually enjoyed most of this, though again it will only work if ultimately these threads they are spinning come together in a satisfying manner. However, it felt like everything took longer than it should and more than once in a scene I found my eyes flicking to the clock to see just how long it had gone.

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The other issue with the story being that despite the whole fairy soldiers being more or less wiped out in the war and the creation of them being illegal, it seems like every other person we meet is possessed. Much like continually running into people our protagonists have back-stories inter-connected with, they really are pushing coincidences a little too far. While it might be well and good to say that working in the job they do, Marlya and Free and more likely to encounter fairy possessed people, occasionally you think they would run into someone a little more ordinary.

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Episode 4

Something novel happened; we didn’t begin with a flashback. That said, immediately after completing the fight from last episode we had a flashback but it seems like there’s some progress here.

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These fights are still ridiculously dark – need some more contrast here.

I don’t mind the fights between humans and fairies. They took a bit to get used to in this series but watching Free fighting Sweet and Marlya jumping into the fray was pretty cool and the fight in the tomb later was also kind of interesting to watch. Knowing a bit more about the parameters and limitations of the fairies would probably help add weight to some of the fighting, but mostly it works.

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I am starting to get the impression that the ministry is pretty useless. I mean, they recovered the tome only to have it stolen almost the next day and it seems they are always a step behind or on the back foot.

Meanwhile, we meet some other characters who clearly work for Dorothea who are searching some other guy’s house though the why is not really clear or who he is, other than a name. It is a little disjointed when you jump from character to character but you don’t know who some of the characters are and others just haven’t been given any time to develop.

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Still, the partnership between Free and Marlya has finally worked itself out and we have a bit of flow between the two of them. That’s what I making the majority of this episode pleasant enough to watch. Hopefully these two continue to build some chemistry as the series continues.

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Karandi James