Slayers Excellent

There has never been a menace, monster or force of Evil Lina Inverse hasn’t been able to handle…until now.  When a busty and scantily dressed Sorceress called Naga the Serpent appears and declares herself Lina’s greatest rival, Lina’s world is turned upside down forever.  Now she cant seem to escape this walking time bomb whose laugh hails her appearance.  And Lina’s got all manner of jobs and missions driving her crazy as well.  How the heck did Lina and Naga survive their first encounter?  This is where the Legend begins.

Slayers Excellent marks our final feature with Lina and Naga as the main stars and it does set itself up with quite the hook: the very first meeting of our two sexy Sorceress frenemies.  However, while their first encounter goes exactly as you might imagine for these two danger magnets, the rest of Slayers Excellent falls far short of the bar set by their previous feature films and the Slayers Special OVA.  I dare even say this might be the most dull and bored I’ve been watching anything Slayers.  Honestly, it’s so much of a letdown that even Lina and Naga cant salvage a lot of it, mostly because the OVA wont even let them try.
 
Like Slayers Special before it, Slayers Excellent consist of three episodes.  While Slayers Special kept connectivity out of the formula, a common thread for Excellent is that all three do play out like the earliest meetings between Lina and Naga.  Things kick off naturally with the time they first met and had to handle Vampires and Zombies in a Labyrinth.  Then Lina’s bodyguarding of an obnoxious brat socialite only gets more hectic when Naga and a creepy pervert veer their heads.  And lastly, Lina and Naga find themselves on opposite ends of a fashion dispute that threatens to destroy an entire town.  On paper, these simple premises sound fun and right up Slayers alley.  In practice, these definitely needed more time in the writers room.
 
The stand out of these three tales is the very first encounter with Lina and Naga.  It makes sense it wouldn’t even start logically.  Naga really does just show up and declare herself Lina’s greatest adversary and the ball just rolls along.  That it isnt something spectacular or life changing fits the Slayers laid back motif.  We do get to see Lina and Naga both as ticked off rivals and efficient partners during their time in the labyrinth.  I kind of wonder if this could have been expanded into another movie cause you’d think such a momentous occasion as the origin of their frenemy-ship would be deserving of one.  Still, lots of fun is had watching the pair bicker like we’ve seen them do all month long and the final outcome of their battle with the Vampiric Final Boss is classic Slayers, I did laugh a lot there.
 
There aren’t a lot of laughs or joys really to be found in the other two episodes.  Episode 2 leaves you feeling just as frustrated as Lina when it comes to her babysitting the ever annoying Sirine.  Lina is mostly just around to suffer while Naga is hardly in the episode itself, though seeing her put Sirine in her place was a highlight of this little trilogy as a whole.  The final episode fares a lot worse.  Not only are Lina and Naga hardly a critical factor in their own series here, but the episode cant even recapture the magic of Golem fighting that was perfected in Slayers Great.  It’s not only is it insulting to our lead duo, it also makes Slayers the one thing it should never be: boring.
 
I should also note that Slayers Excellent isnt the prettiest of the Slayers Movies/OVAs.  Slayers Special looked like a proper OVA with crisp visuals, some of which even made lesser episodes look amazing.  None of that is here in Slayers Excellent, which looks about on par with the animation of the TV Series.  And hey, the TV Series looks just fine.  This is an OVA though, it should look much, much better than it does.  It just feels like JC Staff, the studio behind every other Slayers feature we’ve looked at, wasn’t even trying with this one.  And I get it, Slayers Try concluded the original series a year prior to this OVAs release so they might’ve been ready to move on from the franchise.  That said, Slayers Gorgeous looks freaking phenomenal so did they really leave it all on that and have nothing to make this one look worth the effort?
 
If you want my honest opinion: Slayers Excellent probably should have been released or produced differently.  Take out or leave in the Meh second episode of Slayers Special and add in the Origin Episode and that could have made for a nice little side story collection to the Main Series and Companion piece to the Movies.  As it is in its present state, Slayers Excellent is the lowest point of the Slayers franchise for me.  The beginning of Lina and Naga’s rivalry/friendship is solid and fun but the other two stories are boring, not funny and very, very annoying: Three things anything Slayers should never be.  Like I said, you wanna know how Lina and Naga met, Episode 1 is fine.  But after that, turn off the DVD and switch on one of the movies or Slayers Special and just forget that the rest of Slayers Excellent exists.
 
3/10
 
That just leaves one more Slayers movie to tackle for this 30^th Anniversary Celebration Month.  Tomorrow, Christmas Eve, Lina is back and this time she’s reunited with her old crew.  That’s right, Gourry, Zelgadis, Amelia and Xellos take Naga’s place at Lina’s side once again as we look at Slayers Premium, right here over at the Gundam Anime Corner.