The Original Slayers Anime Is Pretty Good!

Lina and company hanging out together.

It's been over a decade since the last time I've sat down and watched some episodes from the Slayers anime. The show is one of my favorite series to run in the mid 90s, and it still holds up really well now. Slayers followed the adventures of Lina Inverse, a gifted sorceress, and her friends as they traveled around getting into all sorts of adventures. It's a good mix of action and comedy that stays consistently entertaining throughout the show. There have been plenty of follow-up seasons and stories in the Slayers universe, but it was fun to return to the very first season of the series.

I think my first exposure to the series was from an issue of Gamers Republic in the anime section that they'd have towards the back of the magazine. There was a small write up there discussing the show, and my interest was peaked. After that I started to see mentions of the show every now and then on message boards, so I finally got around to watching the series, on VHS no less!

One definitely needs to do a good job with their suspension of disbelief while watching the show, though, because there are some pretty convenient plot twists like Gourry just so happening to have the Sword of Light, or Lina having access to the Giga Slave spell all of a sudden. There's also stuff like the more or less meaningless deaths of Zolf and Rodimus, which seemed like a really contrived means of trying to make the audience a little bit sad. If you can look past stuff like that, then Slayers can be pretty entertaining.

What makes the show for me are the characters, as I really like Lina and Gourry. They have good chemistry together, and both of them can make me laugh. There are plenty of other interesting people to make appearances in the series as well, but these two are at its core, and make or break the show for me.

At some point, I really should make some time to check out all of the seasons that followed these original stories in the series, but for now I've been happy just to revisit Slayers.