Back to the Vaults: The Slayers Review
スレイヤーズ
Slayers

“I just helped myself to a little of their treasure and now they’re just never gonna leave me alone.” — Lina Inverse

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The Story, in Brief

Lina Inverse is a 15 year old master sorceress. She raids a fortified bandit encampment, taking all of their plundered gold, gems, and some unique items. The survivors catch up to her, but before she can deal with them, swordsman Gourry Gabriev sends them packing. After a misunderstanding on his part, he agrees to escort her to her destination.

Along the way, they continue to be hounded by beastmen, trolls, and more, sent by the spellsword Zelgadis. He wants an item Lina got from the bandits. When Lina refuses, the Red Priest Rezo helps Lina, saying Zelgadis (Zelgadiss) wants to resurrect the Mazoku Dark Lord, Ruby Eye Shabranigdu. However, after Lina is captured by Zelgadis’s people, he secretly frees her. It is then that Lina realizes it is Rezo who wants Shabranigdu brought back to life in a desperate attempt to cure his blindness.

After dealing with Rezo and the resurrected piece of Shabranigdu, Lina and Gourry find themselves pursued by mercenaries. As it turns out, they and Zelgadis have large bounties on their heads. After joining forces with the white magic sorceress Amelia they are herded to the town of Sairaag by the swordsman Zangulus and the seeming immortal mage, Vrumugun.

There, they encounter the powerful miko (priestess) Sylphiel, who knew Gourry from a previous act of heroism in Sairaag. However, “Rezo” shows up and obliterates the city, killing Sylphiel’s uncle, whom she lived with. Aided by the power of the demonic creature Zanaffar, Copy-Rezo intends to prove himself superior to the original by killing Lina Inverse in combat.

Mazoku Dark Lord, Ruby Eye Shabranigdu

There are three story arcs within The Slayers. Episodes 1 through 10 adapt the first novel of the series. While there is a fair amount of padding and some changes to the source material, on the whole, it is a fairly accurate adaptation. As such, the story itself is the strongest of the lot. The anime adaptation shows us exactly who Lina and Gourry are and what they can do in a fight. Further, the production team do a great job setting up the foundation of the partnership between Lina and Gourry.

While the anime certainly adds several things, including comedy gag material, all of the episodes continue to advance the plot. Thus nothing feels like it is just marking time to pad out episodes. Some of the gags are taken from the novel, including the joke/plot device of Lina losing her powers because of “that time of the month.” I saw some people wringing their hands over this, completely missing the point of why it is there. Kanzaka-sensei needed a way to have the OP Lina helpless, captured, and in a bad way.

There is one thing I wish I could change about the first arc, beyond revealing the Mazoku barrier. I wish that we’d been shown Lina finding the pages of the Claire Bible that caused her to create the Giga Slave spell, and to show how dangerous it is. Instead, the anime adaptation kinda drops it in on us. Further, the way things are written, it makes it seem that Giga Slave must be used to enchant a weapon, when in fact that’s not the case.

Journey to Sairaag

Episodes 11 through 17 of The Slayers center on Lina and Gourry getting herded to the city of Sairaag after initially coming to Saillune (Seyruun). While the novel series has Gourry and Lina arrive in Atlas City, Lina’s original destination, the anime decides to avoid that. Instead, the anime writers wanted to bring in the characters Amelia and Prince Phil right away. Had the novels been faithfully adapted, the two wouldn’t have debuted until the second series.

Unfortunately, this “arc” is very weak and pretty much all anime original stuff. It is a shame too because there are some gems in the rough in terms of stories. Although the writers try to provide an explanation for while the ruler of Saillune would be out on his own with his younger brother Randy, it doesn’t make sense. Randy wants to seize the throne, but needs some complicated scheme to do this while they are on the road. That’s so comedy gags can be inserted.

When Zangulus (anime original character) and Vrumugun show up, they initially are a credible threat. However, because the plot demands the two survive, they become a joke. I had long believed that only Slayers Try turned Dragon Slave into a joke. I was wrong as episode 14 has Lina kill Vrumugun with Dragon Slave, but Zangulus gets thrown for miles by the spell. Ugh. 😑

If time wasting and gag writing were the priorities, stories like episode 15 could have been more interesting. The concept of an evil sorceress forcing rich young men to marry her various daughters to take control of the men’s fortune was interesting to me. But alas, the interesting story gets wrecked by gags as well as Zangulus and Vrumugun showing up to keep herding Lina and Gourry to Sairaag.

Copy-Rezo

Episodes 18 through 26 of The Slayers are the Copy-Rezo arc. Here, the anime writers skip the 2nd novel to take elements from the 3rd and 5th novels for a hybrid story. Since the 3rd novel deals with Copy-Rezo, that novel has the strongest influence on the anime story. While this story arc is is certainly stronger than the previous one, it does suffer from gags taking priority over the story. The writers even acknowledge this toward the end of the arc.

One thing this story would have benefited from is showing MORE of Eris working with Rezo. We get a montage showing bits of this. Unfortunately, we do not get shown the creation of Copy-Rezo, nor the horrible experiments the two did on the clone. The anime doesn’t explain why Copy-Rezo suddenly has mouths in each hand. The novel states that Copy-Rezo was merged with a summoned Mazoku to become a chimera. Linking these experiments to what Rezo did with Zelgadiss would have been awesome.

Another item lost is the Shabranigdu element. The anime story has Lina consult with a mage who experiments with copy creations and such. We learn that the copy would have everything the source had in terms of power and such. The anime implies that Copy-Rezo has Shabranigdu sealed in his eyes (and he really should, though in the novels, he doesn’t). However, nothing comes of this and the clone just has weird eyes.

Regarding Eris, the anime should have have had Zelgadiss name drop Erisiel to better explain how Lina came to realize who Eris was. That would have made for a tighter story. Also, instead of changing the nature of Zanaffar, the anime writers should have written this to be the power of Zanaffar.

Translation Issues

My chief complaint with the translation/adaptation is that they don’t use the term Mazoku. Instead, they opt for “Monster race” or “Monster”. However, this gets confusing when dealing with actual monsters that aren’t Mazoku.

Second is the removal of Japanese honorifics. Much of the time, the translator/adapter ignores them. This issue will become more severe in Slayers Next. That said, the forced translation of honorifics stands out in how Sylphiel addresses Gourry. Because of Gourry’s heroics prior to the events of The Slayers, Gourry is a hero in Sylphiel’s eyes. Since the religious folks in the franchise are formal Japanese honorific users, she addresses Gourry as “Gourry-sama” to show her respect.

Unfortunately, because Sylphiel is also romantically interested in Gourry, the translator/adapter decided to change this to the cringe “Gourry, darling.” However, in scenes when “Gourry, darling” doesn’t work as a “localization”, ignoring the -sama honorific is apparently a perfectly acceptable adaptation decision. 🙄

The other cringe adaptation element (which some people think is orgasmically brilliant) is how the made up Japanese word “doramata” is handled. It is a pun on “nekomata” — “Neko mo mataide tooru.” That means a cat finds something so terrible, it would purposefully step over it to avoid it. Doramata replaces “neko” (cat) with Dragon. The adapter decided that an invented Japanese abbreviation needed to become an acronym. Thus we get “Dragon Spooker”, which makes ZERO sense. Why? Because “Dragons Step Past Out Of Clear Revulsion” isn’t “SPOOKER”.

Since “doramata” is an invented word, I would have invented “dragit”. That way it would mean a DRAGon finds something so loathsome, they’d step over IT. But that’s just me.

Final Thoughts and Conclusion

Let me wrap up my review of The Slayers with some final thoughts.

• For me, the Japanese audio version is miles better than the English dub. Indeed, when I watched the English dub YEARS ago, it was just okay. When I rewatched with the Japanese, I immediately became a fan of HAYASHIBARA Megumi. She IS Lina Inverse and her work here is amazing, in addition to singing the theme songs.
• Sadly, The Slayers is out of print in all forms of physical media. (I don’t see Crunchyroll bothering to resume it ’cause they don’t actually care about anime.) As such, if you can get a copy on physical media, the subtitles (and English dub) will be from the old Central Park Media release from Software Sculptor’s. (That includes the FUNimation releases.)

In the end, The Slayers has more of a kiddie element than I remembered. Further, while it has a lot of humorous gags, sometimes the story is sacrificed for the gag, which is unfortunate. However, after all these years, I still find the series to be a fun and enjoyable one to watch. Were there an option to do so, I would upgrade to blu-ray.