Slayers (Original Series)

Slayers:  C

It's really hard to give a rating to a series like Slayers, which was another anime that I watched very early in my life watching anime, and even harder to admit that, by my modern standards, it isn't the stunning and beautiful jewel I treat it like it is.

The truth is that Slayers was very good when it first came out in 1995.  It was an original, slapstick high fantasy story that didn't take itself seriously but was still capable of some genuinely moving drama when things got serious, with an interesting and delightful cast of characters.

However, seventeen(!) years later, the animation, while not horrible, looks poor next to modern works, and, most damningly for the rating I gave it, the pacing of the original series is shakey: an epic confrontation deciding the fate of the world takes place before the halfway mark, and then the series falls back to hijinks for another ten or so episodes before getting into the meat of the final arc, which runs a little slowly at times despite the sense of urgency and threat that the story maintains.

The other reason I give the original series a poor grade is because of how much it pales next to its successor, Slayers Next, which is funnier, more dramatic, better paced and more coherent, plotwise, even though both seasons have about the same number of episodes dedicated to fillery hijinks.

Ultimately, the first season of Slayers is fun and entertaining, but takes a while to watch, and the story that it manages to tell with its time isn't particularly amazing.  If you want to get familiar with the Slayers as a team before watching them in their later adventures, you probably won't regret time invested in Slayers.  If you saw the series when you were younger and want to nostalgia, it certainly isn't bad.  If you're just curious and want to know what all the fuss about Slayers is, you're probably better off starting on the superior seasons (in my opinion, Next and Revolution/Evolution-R).