User blog comment:Miskos3/Fairy Tail 536: The Flame of the Dragon's Roar, Review/@comment-68.33.90.75-20170520191729/@comment-4449950-20170521110623

I don't think it's so much an issue with having too many characters. There are plenty of stories that have heaps of characters and they all work fine. Harry Potter, FMA and LotR are three that immediately come to mind for me. They have fairly massive casts with different kinds of people, different bad guys and so many helping side-characters. The difference between their success and FT is that they fulfilled their character roles. Not every character needs to be in every arc/book or do something awesome, but they need to be introduced for a reason, and then have a logical conclusion to this reason. FT fails here for all the reasons we've been discussing for weeks: Why have the Slayers do the 400 year plan and introduce them if that's not going to be important? Why set up CrimeS and then bring it up again if they serve no purpose? Why have Gray and Natsu set up to fight if it does nothing in the story or their stories? Why give characters cool powers that could be useful but then make them disappear when they could shine *hem Meredy*? I could go on but I don't want to relive all the annoyance. If these characters had point and saw that through, FTs large cast could work. But Mashima's thrown so much shit aside just to hype a few characters that they all seem pointless and a waste of space/potential. Rather than thinking through characters properly and trying to plan an end-game for them, Mashima seems to have just introduced them and then thrown them in willy-nilly whenever they are convenient to use, or left them out completely because he can't work out how to logically conclude their stories, which leaves them hanging open and unfinished. That to me is the real reason FT's cast just doesn't work.