Slayers

As a person who is actually quite a lot into old anime, in fact even stuff much older than Slayers, I'm honestly bewildered by the amount of praise this show gets, and I think its status of an old classic might be heavily influenced by nostalgia. The anime is severely lacking in multiple areas, most of all it's just boring and completely devoid of anything unique.


Slayers tells a story of Lina Inverse, a powerful yet inconspicuous magician who travels around, kills monsters, fights bandits and robs them of their treasure. Over the course of the show, new adventurers, starting with a travelling swordsman Gourry, join ... her party and together they explore the fantasy world. You know the drill, and have probably heard something similar many times, because this is nothing new. Nevertheless, this extremely popular idea can definitely turn out very nice and become its own thing, if the authors bring their new twists and details to it. Sadly, this is not the case with Slayers.

Everything, starting with the setting, is bare of nuances and unique ideas. The anime is set in a generic medieval-fantasy world, with magic, creatures like trolls and dragons, princes, knights and the like. Philosopher stone and sword of light. Old and boring. There is also the demon-king sealed long ago and sought to be revived by his followers. You have never heard of something like that, have you?
While this could still allow for a great and compelling story, with brilliant and interesting characters, Slayers definitely doesn't deliver, it actually doesn't even seem to try.

The plot progresses in a pretty messy pattern, and despite not being very long, brings to mind 300+ episode shounens. It randomly jumps back and forth between important events revealing old mysteries, and completely meaningless, inconsequential fillers that shouldn't even be there, because they are neither interesting nor funny.
The story just lacks direction. The characters don't pursue any real goal to drive the plot. Something is happening, our adventurers just get dragged into it, do their job to solve the problems, rinse and repeat. Some of it can be pretty cool , but it all feels kind of pointless.
The mood and atmosphere also swing in completely unnatural manner, and it does stand out sometimes. Two characters are killed shortly after finally uniting with the main party, and you know what? Not even a minute later, the main trio is back at an inn, stuffing themselves and laughing out loud joking. There is not even a moment of grief or sadness, just a few shocked faces for a second.

Speaking of jokes, the humour is one of the weakest points of Slayers. It's extremely repetitive, childish and ham-fisted, appearing regardless of danger or situation at hand, and is at fault in the show rarely having the proper atmosphere. Lina has small breasts. That is the joke, hahaha... I won't be discussing wether this alone is funny or not, as that's purely subjective, but repeating this time and time again, episode after episode, is definitely boring and actually gets quite annoying, even if it could be funny at first. Gourry is stupid and doesn't understand the simplest of explanations, Amelia is clumsy, trips over and falls on her face. Oh, there was another joke with Lina, you know, she's on her period and can't cast powerful spells then, isn't that funny? You know, it's THAT time of the month, wink wink, haha...

This humour is also detrimental to characters themselves, because it's all around, and in fact pretty much defines them.
While there is focus on Lina, and she does get enough screen time and characterization to be more than just her breast size, it's a real problem with other characters. It's hard to say anything meaningful about Gourry other than that he's stupid and has bad memory, and Amelia being also silly and clumsy, because most of their scenes are either fighting or reusing the old jokes. Most of the characters are just very poorly characterized and thus it's hard to truly care for them. They're not unlikeable, but they definitely are forgettable and undeveloped. This should never happen in a show that wants to be more than a silly comedy.

The arstyle is mediocre, and character designs, save for Lina and Zelgadis, seem effortless. The animation is poor even considering the time it was made, and just screams low budget. Overall the anime doesn't look terrible, even if it's aged, but the visuals definitely don't help to make up for other aspects of the show either.

The music is actually pretty good and fitting, and few of the tracks are especially good and memorable. It's nothing spectacular, but it does its job well, and in my opinion, is the strongest aspect of the show.

Overall, Slayers is a very disappointing experience. It's a huge cluster of overused ideas and tropes. The story has weird pace and goes nowhere, the characters are basically running jokes, and at times just annoying. It's full of bad, repetitive humour and lacks fresh air, making the whole show pretty boring.
It's not the worst watch ever, it's not offensively bad at anything, but it doesn't really have anything going for it either, and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone, because there are shows better at everything Slayers does. It's just completely mediocre.
I really can't see why it achieved the status it has now, and personally see it as just another, uninspired fantasy adventure, severely lacking in character. I would only watch it if you want to see what one of the most popular 90s anime is all about.