Fairy Tail: 100 Years Quest

Episode 25

After taking a week off, 100 Years Quest is back with one last episode to close things out, and…it's a letdown. I was hoping the setup from the previous episode would at least give us an action-packed conclusion to wrap up the Elenetear arc on a decent note, but what we get instead feels like set up for a second season that we may or may not be getting. While focusing on future teases certainly isn't the worst way to wrap things up, the result leaves this finale without much substance.

Team Natsu was getting ready to square off against Alta-Face, and out of everything we got in this episode, this was by far the most disappointing. I bemoaned last time that it kinda sucked that we were robbed of a fight with Selene, and hoped that we could at least get a bit of spectacle as compensation, so I was surprised when this fight was over and done in a couple of minutes. About the most tension we get out of it is Natsu and the others briefly thinking they've been drained of their magic before Irene's spirit tells Wendy that being so close to Alta-Face has actually caused their magic to spike beyond their perceived limits, and once they tap into that, the fight is over almost instantly. It might have been easier to give that a pass if the fight at least looked good, but beyond a couple of cool-looking shots, the whole thing looks bland. Even the insert music does little to raise the hype here as the fight is so short, the show barely has time to play it, and while I can imagine the swiftness of this fight is easier to shrug off in manga form, as the big closer of the season, it's not exactly a showstopper.

If there's one thing I can genuinely praise about this episode, though, it's finally doing something interesting with Selene once we learn what happened with her and Suzaku. At first, it appears as though Suzaku had managed to defeat her off-screen and offers her up to his guild master which would have been a pretty lame way to get rid of her even considering how I felt like her presence dragged down this arc. Fortunately, it turns out to be a red herring, as she immediately kills the guild master and performs a hostile takeover of the Dragon Eaters by bullying them into submission. Sure, taking out their guild master so unceremoniously feels cheap, but this is a much cooler reversal and it's far from the first time the series has pulled this sort of stunt. More importantly, this takeover finally gives Selene a clear agenda, as she states that she wants to defeat the other God Dragons and usher in an age of humans she'll be in charge of once she abandons her dragon form to live as a human. While all this makes her intentionally misleading Faris into resurrecting Aldoron feel like a bigger writing error, it's certainly an improvement over her previously vague motives.

Aside from all that though there isn't too much else to this finale. It's nice to get a little moment between Jellal and Erza where Jellal considers joining Fairy Tail to be with her, and less nice to see that Gray and Juvia's relationship has only “improved” in that he's simply learned to tolerate her obsessive behavior. There's also a brief tease of Selene sending the Dragon Eaters after the dragon who gave Natsu and the others their quest, but since things end before we can see that happen, it doesn't mean much here beyond a sequel hook.

I walked away from this sequel series feeling pretty mixed. It was nice to see how some of my favorite characters were doing after the end of the main series and it tossed around some fun new story ideas. Still, there were just as many moments where I felt a little frustrated at a lame plot twist or its refusal to deviate from much from the established status quo. However, these are all complaints I've had about the main series at some point, so very little has changed there, and while I'm not exactly happy about that, I'm not too irritated either. I might feel differently if this had aimed to be a more ambitious sequel like Boruto: Naruto Next Generations but with this being such a direct continuation, it never felt like it was trying to go out of the way to outdo the main series. For better or worse this sequel just felt like more Fairy Tail, and if that was the goal, I'd say it succeeded.

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Fairy Tail: 100 Years Quest is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.