Part twenty-three of the Fairy Tail disc releases begins the final season of the show, the first to be simuldubbed as well as the start of some major reveals about not only the guild itself, but also the entire world the story takes place in. It also comes on the heels of the Fairy Tail Zero prequel season, which is definitely more important than you might otherwise think, because the roots of the danger Fairy Tail is up against now were planted over one hundred years ago, when the guild was founded, although we could make the argument that even that isn't far enough back when it comes to one of the major players. It's very much a story about how the past informs the present and how it is up to the current wizards of Fairy Tail to not so much fix the mistakes of the past as to soothe them and find a way to make the pains of yesteryear feel better.

Thinking about the overall season that way makes Lucy, Natsu, and Happy's reunion and journey to find the rest of their guildmates a particularly good starting point. The entire series started with the meeting of these three characters, so it's a nice bit of symmetry to have them as the starting point for the reformation of our cast. It's also good for Lucy herself – while other guildmates may have been hurt by Fairy Tail's dissolution, losing her guild family more or less on the heels of the loss of her father and Aquarius made things that much harder and sadder for Lucy, who, it must be remembered, gained a family after growing up with an emotionally absent father and no mother at a much later age than others who were adopted by Makarov, such as Natsu, Gray, and Erza. Their aloneness is still a shock, but has less of a horrible familiarity than Lucy's does, so her need to remake the guild is almost greater than anyone else's – the fact that she didn't join another guild or take up government work suggests that she felt that would be “replacing” her family and that hurt too much.

Although getting the gang back together is important, it's also the shortest of the final season's arcs, despite the fact that it has its own dedicated villains and the job of reassembling the cast. The focus, appropriately, is primarily on Team Natsu (so Lucy, Wendy, Natsu, Erza, Happy, Carla, and Gray) with some Gajeel and Levy thrown in for good measure. Wendy clearly has some of the same issues Lucy did, along with a new sense of conflict at leaving her new guild, but Gray's reactions to the idea of returning to Fairy Tail are also worth paying attention to. His role is a bit truncated (and the entire arc is much less brutal than its manga counterpart when it comes to Lucy in particular), but it shows that he's aware of what and who he's been missing, reminding us that he's the more emotionally intelligent of the two guys on in the group, which is perhaps why he continues to just let Juvia build her castles with no foundations about him.

We start to get into the real meat of the season when Erza, Natsu, Lucy, Gray, Wendy, Mest, and the cats set off to find out what Makarov has been doing in the Alvarez Empire. Alvarez's emperor, Spriggan, is a very familiar face, and this sets the stage for the major conflicts to come. It also lets us know that the story was set in motion hundreds of years in the past, when Zeref first acquired the Curse of Contradiction, and reached its next level when Mavis cast the spell that ended the battle but started her own personal war against what it did to her body. That the two are intertwined in heartbreaking and unexpected ways isn't necessarily a surprise, but the degree in which everything is wrapped around all of the other story threads is impressive and speaks to the degree of world building that we can expect. Even more than that, the implications for the characters that are being laid out are particularly interesting, not only strengthening their roles in the greater storyline, but also in terms of what kind of plot developments lie ahead – it's worth noting that this set of episodes gives us the first-ever onscreen kiss in Fairy Tail as a whole.

As always, the dub for the series is strong, with mostly aesthetic differences determining which you prefer. The most striking difference is that Akira Ishida's Zeref has an overall more wistful, melancholy tone even at this point in the show, while Joel McDonald's take on the character at this juncture is more indifferent, as if he's seen too much and can't feel any more. Both are valid interpretations of the character, but it will be interesting to see how McDonald's changes as more plot points are revealed. In the three included episode commentaries (one of which is a video commentary), you can hear more about the boundless enthusiasm most of the people working on the show have for it; it doesn't sound like they're forced to say something nice, but rather that they're really, truly invested in what happens, which is lovely. Other extras are the usual clean songs and two art cards, which are the size of a large postcard and feature character art; my set came with Erza and Gray.

Fairy Tail's final season is still in its introductory phase in these episodes, and for people who have already watched the stream, it's neat to see all of the foreshadowing that's going on. With the insane amount of power that all of the new enemies have, Fairy Tail is in for a major struggle this time, and with the addition of the tragedies of the past coming back to haunt the living, it's fair to say that things are only going to get more intense from here.