The Slayers Try Volume 1   Starring (voice): Hikaru Midorikawa, Masami Suzuki, Megumi Hayashibara and Yasunori Matsumoto MVM RRP: £15.99 MVD2266 Certificate: 12 Available 07 September 2009

Lina Inverse is your average sorceress and bane of bandits, putting them down wherever she finds them. Okay, so she keeps a little of the loot rather than returning it - a girl’s got to make a living. Through her adventures, Lina has collected together a motley crew of friends to fight against the rising evil in the world. With their greatest battle behind them, a new era of exploration has opened when the magic barrier disappears from the kingdom opening up the outer lands for an enterprising sorceress and her motley crew...

The Slayers Try (1997), directed by Takashi Watanabe, is the third season of this popular show and given the high note which ended the second season, there was some anticipation about the direction of the third. Sad to say that the show appears to have dropped back a whole year in its story telling, with shows which are padded with the consumption of food and terrible jokes.

Oddly enough Slayers insists on continuing its episode numbering system through each of its series, therefore volume one kicks off with episode 53: Hoist Sails for the Journey! And includes Episode 54: A letter from Home, Episode 55: Where’d That Arrogant Guy go! Episode 56: He’s out for Revenge, Episode 57: A Wild Rumour and Episode 58: Wandering Around? If you’re wondering why the episodes are grouped together it’s because once you remove the jokes and fights the narrative is pretty thin.

The show opens a short time after the events depicted in the previous season, with Gaav defeated and the magic barrier erected by the Hellmaster destroyed. Lina meets a mysterious woman - Filia - who obviously has more than one secret to hide, especially the tail which she hides under her clothes. Although she says she has a tempting offer for the crew, she must test them first and promptly turns into a dragon. Lina wins and sets sail across the ocean. The problems with the story really start when they land on a new continent. With the option of creating anything their imaginations could conger, I’m not really sure why the creators chose to start another endless quest. It’s a case of different land, different continent, and same storyline.

The extras on the disc are pretty good with a Behind the Scenes (11 min, 49 sec) feature which looks at the creation of the show with contributions from the English dub crew, great if you want to see the dub being created. Given the usual paucity of extras in anime this is a generous addition. It doesn’t stop there and the disc also has some bonus footage (47 sec), in Japanese with an English subtitle. The extras are rounded off with an image gallery and some production art.

The animation still looks like Saturday morning fare with audio options for either an English or Japanese 2.0 track with optional English subs.

If you liked the previous two series then what you’re looking at here is more of the same.

6

Charles Packer