©真島ヒロ・上田敦夫・講談社／FT100YQ製作委員会・テレビ東京
After last week's deep dive into the romantic subplots, this one is mostly action-packed as Naruto and the others face off against the rest of their guildmates. While we don't get much story progression, that's mostly made up for by the sparring matches and the chance to do a few rematches. On the other hand, the heavy focus on action means there's not much left to talk about.
Natsu, Lucy, and Erza are ambushed by the rest of the guild. They are rescued by Wendy and Gray before Juvia explains the whole situation. The biggest piece of information they get is how the White Mage can control and manipulate other people's magic. She originally planned to use those powers to inflict Merchphobia on the other dragon gods, but since Natsu and the others defeated him, she changed her plans to take control of the rest of the Fairy Tail guild and have them defeat the dragon gods instead. Now that the White Mage is using the other guild members to start stripping the Wood Dragon God of his magic, Natsu and the gang have no choice but to try and eliminate the guild members one by one to free them from her control.
In terms of the current matches, we see Gray pitted against Laxus' team, Naruto facing off against Gajeel (after taking out Makao, Wakaba, and Romeo offscreen, which I'll admit was pretty hilarious), and Lucy coming up short when she has to fight all three Strauss siblings. While Gray's fight with Bixlow is a fun little callback to the Fairy Tail Battles of old, it's probably the least interesting on paper, so I'm curious to see how the other two matches play out. It's also been a while since Naruto and Gajeel have gone down. While they don't have the same level of fierce rivalry as Goku and Vegeta or Naruto and Sasuke, it's still fun to see them go all out and throw all their power at each other (even if it does highlight how inconsistently they've been used at this stage).
I was pretty nervous about how Lucy's fight would go, mostly because she, and even her spirit, spent a lot of time pointing out that they had little chance against Mirajane. To be fair, the power-ups were pretty much pointless, given the fact that any character can win against any other character in their series as long as the author felt like it, and it was especially pointless in this series since nearly every main character had at least one win against someone they clearly outclassed. Everyone…except Lucy, whose fights were played entirely for comedy, pitting her against much stronger opponents that she needed others to bail her out of or had some form of outside interference blindside her just when she was about to win. In most other fighting series, this would be disappointing, but not too unusual for a member of the female cast. Since Fairy Tail is so good at equal opportunities, Lucy's underperformance is especially egregious. I find it especially lame that she needs to unleash her latest upgrade against Lisanna (who can barely fight much on her own) of all the characters instead of Mirajane herself. However, with everyone else being caught up in their own fights or possessed, it's hard to see how she'll get out of this other than actually winning, so I'm hoping that this is where Mashima finally decides to throw us a bone. The girl. She deserves it.
Evaluate:
Fairy Tail: 100 Years Quest is now streaming on Crunchyroll.
