The Slayers Next

The Slayers Next takes the humor, the fun, and the great parodies of the first season and generally improves upon them in every way. Generally regarded to be the best of the three seasons of Slayers TV and I have to agree. Next is more consistently humorous and makes more of an effort to draw out fully dimensioned characters, particularly Lina Inverse.

Slayers Next picks up where the last season left off, with our now familiar cast of characters led by the indominable Lina Inverse. Throughout the slow developing story, the Slayers will match wits with many enemies of the Monster race, who apparently have some plot involving Lina. Their ultimate hope in defeating the schemes of powerful monsters involves finding a copy of the legendary Claire Bible, a source of infinite knowledge that just might have a spell to combat high-level monsters (And maybe turn Zel back to normal even though we all like him better as a Chimera man).

As with the last season, the story is often put on the back burner to showcase humorous situations that the characters get themselves into, such as Gourry and Zel dressing up as girls, or everyone wearing silly stuffed animal costumes, or god-forbid, Lina singing like a lovestruck girl! These generally succeed enough that you don't mind the fact that nothing else is really happening.

The whole gang is back in this one, Lina Inverse, Gourry, Zelgadis, and Amelia are pretty much unchanged in their behavior from the first season. Those of you hoping to see something more between Lina and Gourry just might be rewarded for your patience.

New characters include Xellos, a mysterious priest with great powers who often accompanies or shadows the party on their quest, never really getting directly involved but there to contribute in a pinch. There's also Martina, an "adversary" (in her eyes only) for Lina who provides much of the comic relief in an already comic series.

There's no standout villains in this one, though viewers will be treated to a fuller explanation of the generic otherwordly "monster" hierarchy and some of the big boys might show up to play with Lina and her friends.

Good animation! The main players in the show get the full treatment when casting spells or dressing up in different outfits silly or cool. The backdrops including towns and other stuff is unfortunately pretty generic fantasy fare. There wasn't any really cool environments that the characters interacted with, so that keeps the focus on them rather than their uninspired world.

Oh, and just as in the last season, the ending is wholly satisfying and very well done. The season definitely ends with a bang.

Good voice acting. Lina is done much better in this episode I think. She still keeps her trademark colorful personality while managing not to be so grating on many occasions like I felt she was in the first season of Slayers.

I like Zelgadis attitude which is a mixture of "why me" suffering as he tags along with this group of highstrung companions and a little bit of trying to be badass cool like Squall or somebody of FF8. The best thing is that he acknowledges this in-character!