Fairy Tail: 100 Years Quest

Episode 7

Fairy Tail has been on a pretty solid streak with the last couple of episodes, and I've been happily surprised by how much it's boosted my level of excitement for this sequel. Still, I've followed the series long enough to know a good streak from the series gets undercut by one or two weird swerves from Mashima, so when I saw an episode title like “All's Well That Ends Well”, I was half expecting to see some abrupt return to status quo. Fortunately, this episode manages to avoid that particular pitfall as it wraps up this arc. Though there aren't quite as many consequences to everything as I'd like, it manages to do just enough right that I'm still invested in seeing what the next leg of the story holds.

Even after stopping Mercphobia's rampage, Natsu doesn't feel satisfied with how everything went down since he doesn't recall anything after eating Ignia's flames. He quickly learns that Lucy got hurt trying to stop him, so while he is grateful for her help, he also feels a bit guilty about what happened. Of course, while you'd hope a heart-to-moment like this would get these two closer to finally smooching, Natsu ends up trying to ease the tension in the most Natsu way imaginable and does so via a gag that I'm pretty sure would get me seriously side-eyed if I bothered trying to type out what happened (I'll just leave the screencap for this review, and the rest to your imagination). Suffice it to say, those two probably aren't hooking up anytime soon but it does show that Natsu is at least a little bothered by everything that happened so I suppose it balances out.

I also more or less feel the same way in regards to learning that Mercphobia ultimately ends up surviving—but at the expense of losing all his magic power and turning into a human. While I do think it would have been more interesting if he had actually died as a consequence of all this, I know that death is extremely rare in this series and the outcome was telegraphed enough not to feel like a total copout—so I'm not too bothered by how things played out. It also helps that while the Mercphobia stuff is mostly wrapped up with a nice little bow. The same can't be said for everything with Touka. We know that she's decided to go after Natsu and the others but it's still ambiguous as to what exactly she did to the rest of the guild. That mystery leaves enough looming tension to keep this from feeling too clean of an ending and make some exciting setup for what might happen when she finally comes face-to-face with Natsu so I'm more than happy to see that left hanging for a little longer.

With all that settled for the moment, the rest of the episode is fairly light as the gang heads off to deal with the next Dragon God, the Wood Dragon, Aldoron. It's a bit of an odd tonal shift after the first half of the episode—but I did at least get a pretty good kick out of the gag with Natsu erasing the train tracks from their map because he and Wendy are terrified at the prospect of enduring eight hours of motion sickness between now and their next destination. I was a little less amused with the gag of Natsu breaking into the girls' tent to prank Erza since I was at least hoping it might follow up on the earlier moment between him and Lucy—but it does double as establishing that he's trying to move on from his encounter with Ignia, so it at least doesn't feel like a total waste.

Thanks to Natsu's antics with the map, the gang ends up having to make a detour, but when they make it to the nearest town, they get swarmed by fangirls mistaking Erza for another woman named Elkis who looks just like her and belongs to a guild called Fairy Nail. Given this isn't the first time dealing with doppelgangers in Fairy Tail's universe, I do wonder if this is actually the Edolas version of Erza in disguise. But between her never being shown to have crossed into their world—and being on opposing sides with our Erza the last time they met—that would raise its own set of questions if it is her. Despite a couple of minor letdowns, this episode made for a pretty good transition into the next arc as a whole. And while time will tell whether or not all this setup actually pays off, I'm pretty happy with where things seem to be headed.

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