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Comedy Anime Reviews: The Slayers: Try
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Posted by:
Zenthus on Dec 09, 2005
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The Slayers: TryWhile at first glance the animation is beautifully done compared to the other seasons, watching episodes consecutively will tell you otherwise. Hair, eye, or clothes color will mutate. Line thickness will shift. Sometimes, this will occur within a few minutes on the same episode, depending how many animation directors were on the same project. In one episode, static lines surround a falling spike visibly, like snow, while the characters look like cardboard cutouts. In the final battle, if you pause at a certain angle, they draw two of the final weapons and forget one. In a camera-angle change, blood will be on Filia or Lina's face one moment, and gone the next. The episodes were being cranked out at a rate of one to two per week actively, and no one was paying attention to the fine details.
Speaking of details, Try decries a lot of the previous seasons' facts. I tend to just ignore Try, since Try is the only season that did not base itself from any of Hajime Kanzaka's graphic novels. Instead, it took his anime, Lost Universe - released at the same time as the first season of Slayers' first season - and crossed over the two universes, as he found they fit into each other like jigsaw pieces. When time came to know which of the two series to promote [Slayers S1 or Lost Universe], he had to choose Slayers, and Lost Universe was lost in the dust. Lost Universe has similar animation problems to Slayers Try, so I'm wondering if they have the same animation directors. They go from beautiful to horrible imagery in the blink of an eye.
To Try's credit, the music is beautiful. They try to build a strong plot, and they make a very climactic story up until about halfway in. Then it all falls apart. They try to have the good'ol fashioned humor of Slayers but fail horribly, injecting it into the middle of the most dramatic storyline you'll see. Characters seem to forget that the end of the world is coming and instead run around in power rangers/sailor moon ripoff teams, or trying to make a fishman and woman fall in love, or a whole other bunch of malarky until they randomly run into each other again and happen to remember there's trouble. While drinking tea and having a picnic in a field. It just doesn't jive like the old seasons, where there was at least an explanation. They try too hard, and the episodes aren't even funny anymore.
Valgaav, at least, is a very developed villain, and we get to revisit, however briefly, Gaav. A villain you can relate to and feel for is one of the best, in my opinion, but maybe that's just me.
Back on topic of details: The directors didn't know what they were doing, end of story. A website was put up on the internet stating that Filia was 300 years old, by a director [the site now gone as Try is no longer an active project]. Comparing the ages of Milgasia and Seichuro [the supreme elder], and time periods where we knew they were alive and what kind of rank they had to have then [Milgasia too young to fight 1012 years ago, Seichuro in a position to declare war then], and looking at their human appearances, Filia would look 10, as opposed to 20. Try states that there was no magic in the outter world, while the novels say that the outter world lets humans even use divine magic. The dragons couldn't fly to the pillar of light, but Filia flies from it back to the temple in one instance. The directors were all over the map factually. It hurts my brain as someone who likes consistancy.
The final battle makes me chuckle. It's one of those "we'll talk for ten minutes while black stuff flies around" battles. I think Dark Star ended up saying "stop ignoring me". Or he should have. Anyway, they tried, but they failed. It was like a bunch of amateurs got together to make a series.
In the end, Try fails as a story that supplements the previous ones. The most it's good for is hearing some pretty music, seeing some pretty boys [Valgaav and Xelloss], and being introduced to a lesser-known anime [Lost Universe].
I wouldn't really advise wasting your money on it unless you're a big Slayers fan. It's better than a lot of anime I've seen, but it definitely falls short of Slayers: Next.
(Click on images to view fullsize)  ![Click to view fullsize image for The Slayers: Try]()
 
 
For more information on The Slayers: Try go to Inverse.org , your #1 stop for Slayers Info The views expressed on WatchAnimeOnline.com are in no way associated with the creator of The Slayers: Try, its publisher or any of its subsidiaries.
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