It all started when Lucy, a budding young wizard, decided to run away from home and throw in her lot with Fairy Tail, the most notorious magic guild in all of Fiore. She got her wish, all right -- but she also got swept up in one crazy adventure after another, no thanks to the recklessness and unhinged bravado of her new guild-mates. But at least her life wasn't boring anymore.
Fairy Tail sports an odd name but an easy-to-grasp premise, and has gone from being a relative obscurity to a fan favorite in a short span of time. After streaming for some time on Crunchyroll and FUNimation's website with only Japanese audio, it's now out in the U.S. in a combination Blu-ray Disc / DVD edition, with an English dub provided by the folks from FUNimation's regular roster of English voice actors.
Fary Tail is one of a number of long-running anime -- shows whose episodes stretch into the hundreds with no end in sight. Bleach (348 episodes) and Naruto (220 in the original series, 240 in Naruto Shippuden) are two other major contenders; One Piece weighs in at a stupefying 523 as of this writing. And that's only among shows released domestically; some shows that have aired only in Japan over the decades run into the thousands of episodes.
The big disadvantage of any such show is the investment of time required to watch it. Try to imagine getting caught up on your own time with all five-hundred-plus episodes of Naruto. If you watched two episodes a day, it would still take over a year just to achieve parity with where the show is as of this writing -- and that's not including new episodes continually being broadcast.
The end result is that some shows almost completely limit themselves to the hardest of hardcore fans. Then again, this isn't a completely unheard-of phenomenon in Western TV either: try to get caught up with all of Doctor Who, both old-school and new, and see how long that takes you. Or even all the various iterations of Star Trek, or Dark Shadows. That said, a fair number of people who probably couldn't be described as "fans" per se pick up on such shows and watch them, albeit in a more casual, piecemeal way. Most long-running anime are constructed tightly enough that it's difficult to dip in and out at will.
That said, the best place to start with any series of length is when it first premieres domestically. So check out our review of the first installments of Fairy Tail and see if you're interested in climbing on board for the long haul.
Image: Fairy Tail Part I. Image courtesy Pricegrabber.
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