フェアリーテイル
Fairy Tail Volume 29 Review

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Highlights of this volume continue the Tenryo arc, starting with Gray battling Ultear, where Ultear gets a revelation about her mother Ur. Natsu, Gray, Wendy, Erza, and Lucy battle Master Hades. Laxus returns to enter the fray, but ends up transferring his remaining power to Natsu to try to finish Master Hades off. Master Hades gets serious. Master Hades incapacitates the other Fairy Tail magically, though they still fight physically. The cats destroy the source of Hades’s magic, restoring power to Fairy Tail as Tenrou Tree is restored, allowing them to take out Hades.

Since I had four volumes of Fairy Tail stacked up on my desk, I figured I’d have to put aside my extreme distaste for the “awesomely awesome” hybrid adaptation and just read. Yeah, every time Capricorn calls Lucy “Lady Lucy” (’cause she’s nobility…oh wait, she’s not nobility, just a rich merchant’s daughter), I do want to claw my eyeballs out since I know Capricorn addresses everyone with the “-sama” honorific. But I digress…

Story-wise, there’s not that much special to write about. We have the usual Fairy Tail members at the end to face the boss villain and take him down, so that’s pretty much by the numbers, including Master Hades “getting serious” to make things as bleak as possible for Fairy Tail before they rise again. It wasn’t boring or anything, but just nothing special.

In the fashion that Mashima-sensei has come to follow, it appears Ultear gets her redemption moment after being defeated by Gray, landing in the water, and making a connection with her deceased mother, who had turned herself into ice to seal one of Zeref’s monsters, only to have her ice melted and apparently sent to the sea. It was a way of giving Ultear some backstory and to potentially have her fighting alongside Fairy Tail in the future.

Speaking of redemption, Laxus actually did make a return. I had thought he’d show up, but then Gildarts, Freed, and Bickslow showed up, so I forgot about Laxus. No doubt, this was Mashima-sensei’s plan all along. Unfortunately, Laxus makes an impressive appearance (with a weak excuse to do so, but that’s part of his redemption path), doesn’t do much, then hands the ball to Natsu, under the excuse of not being in the guild (that wasn’t expressly stated, but that’s the implication I took).

Speaking of Zeref earlier, assuming this dude is Zeref, Mashima-sensei is playing him oddly. He insta-killed Zancrow, so that’s supposed to give this latest iteration of Zeref more street credit. Knowing Mashima, this will be yet another smeghead who was caught up in another nutty scheme to make him believe he’s Zeref, only so that the real Zeref can be revived. We’ll see though.

On the Kodansha Comics side, while I appreciate translator notes, even if limited ones, the page number citations for two of the three notes were incorrect. The last one was for page 194. I decided I didn’t want to bother looking up the middle one.

As for other extras, they are very limited. We got the two notes from Mashima-sensei (always appreciated), and some fan art was scattered within the manga. A preview for the next volume was also there. Not sure if anything was cut out (I don’t have the tankoubon volume) because normally, there’s more to the extras.

OK, I’m going to make a push to catch up on these volumes, so I’ll try to do the next volume tomorrow.