Sousou no Frieren is a series with a great premise, it starts after the demon king is defeated and it is focused in what comes after that, the passage of time is very important as we follow an immortal elf that sees the friends she fought alongside with getting older and dying and she feels that she should have known them better, so she decided to go on another journey retracing her steps. This could have worked wonderfully, if only the protagonist Frieren wasn’t a Mary Sue, Fern wasn’t Frieren 2 but with some more human concerns and Stark wasn’t Zenitsu but somewhat less annoying. Honestly, I had such high hopes for this series, when I saw it was animated by Madhouse and it was directed by Keichiirou Saitou (who people surely know for his directing work in Bocchi the Rock), the fact I’m disappointed despite all the big names on it is easily because of the writing. This series tries to be an introspective series about the passage of time and relationships, but it gets very inconsistent and half-assed with that, when half of your episodes are focused on action arcs then you have a problem here because, as fans of the series will tell you, this series isn’t about the battles and so having as many battles as this does just ruin the mood and sour the experience, despite not being a fan of multiple parts where a scene happens and basically the exact same thing happens again in a flashback, it at least feels like it tries to tell you something, that maybe Frieren knew her friends better than she thinks and it is only understanding that now, some episodes manage to be meaningful in this aspect, but others definitely don’t contribute this at all.

The worst offense of the series is that sometimes it doesn’t know what it wants to be, it starts as a slice of life but sometimes it will turn into a battle shonen, and I think there’s nothing wrong with having some battles here and there nor that I have problems with battle shonen themselves, the problem is that the series isn’t supposed to be this, you don’t have to look further from the PVs, the synopsis and what everyone will tell you about the series to know this, it is supposed to be an introspective series, not an action show. Just take a look at the arc where they face Aura and her minions, this is clearly formatted this way, I was baffled when watching episode 9, not because of the incredible animation, but because I was confused why this series was turning this way. You get many problems here going from Stark’s battle against Linie, which is stupid when you think about it, really, Stark is getting completely defeated by Linie until he has a flashback about his master and realizes that apparently Linie’s attacks have no weigh to them, never mind he has a lot of blood in his body from said attacks, and then proceeds to one-shot her, this kind of asspull is literally out of a battle shonen, it made me feel like I was watching Kimetsu no Yaiba. Then you have Fern’s battle, somehow it managed to be both impressive and unimpressive at the same time, it is impressive because of the quality of the animation put in there, if you check the manga you will see that the anime improved the battle scene so much it’s unreal, but at the same time it’s unimpressive because watching it makes me feel nothing, I’m not excited to see this battle nor interested in it, the fact Fern’s face looks like she is having the most boring battle of her life doesn’t help either. And you will see that things that were talked about earlier don’t make sense either, when Stark and Fern are hiding, Fern is the one that says that if they face the demons alone they will die, this clearly isn’t true because her battle with Lugner was pathetic performance on his part, why would she lie to Stark about this? It’s not like the demons are hearing them or something, honestly that episode annoyed me and I thought it was the worst episode of the series until that moment.

The worst part about this is that the next episode was even worse, I was already worried when I saw the next episode title the week before episode 10 aired, because I knew nothing good would come out of it, this episode is something that made me roll my eyes, because not only the episode is horribly paced, it is also terribly done. The episode has 15 minutes of flashbacks about Frieren and Flamme, where they talk about how hiding your mana is a great technique to trick demons even if it takes hundreds of years to do it, and Frieren asks Flamme if demons can hide their mana, she very clearly says that they can’t but shortly later mentions that they actually can suppress their mana and sometimes do for some stealth, then she says that there’s no benefit to them if they hide their mana, and then says that they can’t control their mana when it was clearly stated that they can just a couple of statements ago, can you see how contradictory these four statements are? It’s like there’s no consistency in what they wanted to say about it. So, apparently this special technique that Frieren would use to beat Aura was hiding her power level, no, really, just think about it for a second, oh yes, she has been training this ability that was never mentioned before for a thousand years and coincidentally works perfectly when put against the gimmick of this gimmicky enemy. Saying that the writing in the “battle” against Aura was stupid is saying too little, actually, I remember that the very season this ep came out an isekai anime called Watashi no Oshi wa Akuyaku Reijou was airing and a couple of weeks later than this episode in Frieren they mentioned a battle with scales, and I remember doing a remark that it will surely go the same as Frieren’s episode, and as it just so happens it was exactly that, honestly it was my most disliked part of that series because of how stupid it is and I can’t believe I predicted it perfectly using another series as an example, because in both cases it was stupid. Surprisingly, by making the pacing of the episode completely suffer by making such a long explanation of a basic ability, it makes me feel like this series doesn’t trust the audience’s intelligence to get it the first time it was mentioned, if I wanted a series that did the hiding your power level bit better and without so much redundant exposition I would go and watch Dragon Ball again. This moment was clearly used to make Frieren look cool by making the villain kill themselves in a completely humiliating way, sadly, it fails to do that because it only makes her look like a cringe kid on the internet saying to others that they should kill themselves. It doesn’t even have a relevant purpose, because if I wanted to know that there are demons still roaming around even after the demon king’s dead, we already had Qual to make this point and that battle actually had a connection to the series’ theme of the passage of time as it talked about how humans improved in the last 80 years because his magic was terrifying so they reverse engineered it and created a counter to it. Mind you, I’m not saying that Aura shouldn’t have died, I’m saying that the way she dies was terrible writing, I don’t think I was supposed to feel pity for her after the fact. I remember that I was watching the series with my brother because he was also interested in the premise and he dropped the series right after that episode and never watched anything about it again because it wasn’t what he what the synopsis had promised, and I can’t blame him, honestly, that’s my entire point here.

Honestly the series would be so much better if it stayed like it promised it would be, a pretty comfy adventure that explores the world in the eyes of an immortal elf and how she sees her relationship with the people around her, and said theme actually returned in a way when Sein was introduced. In fact, I liked Sein, he was this jaded guy who was a drunkard and who had a friend that promised to meet him years ago but never returned to the town after he decided to go on an adventure, the catch here is that that friend asked Sein to go with him but Sein declined, so when Frieren and co try to make him go with them again and again, he eventually accepts because he started to feel that he needed to meet with his friend from many years ago, and actually I liked where this was going as he is a much more interesting character than Stark and Fern combined. Too bad that this series cannot keep itself interesting and decided that he should go after like 4 episodes, Sein was a good addition to the cast, but the worst part that came from this wasn’t letting Sein go, it was what came after it.

The next arc is actually the worst part of the entire show, remember that this show was an adventure to rekindle Frieren’s memories? Well, it no longer is about that as they stay in the same place taking an exam for 10 entire episodes, and it is stupid from its inception, the fact that they wouldn’t let the legendary mage who defeated the demon king traveling to the northern lands is stupid, especially because the situation doesn’t look bleak at all because there are cities ahead, and literally some episodes ago Frieren was simply allowed to pass another roadblock because of her reputation. And the more you think about this the more stupid it gets, as you can’t go to the northern lands in foot unless a 1st rate magic is there, when there are only 50 first rate mages, so searching for one just to go there is absolutely stupid, in fact, Frieren’s group could completely skip going that way and just go in a boat, but nooo, they have to do this because Fern has to eat, because that is the justification given despite how little sense it makes in this context, so we leave one of our main characters behind, because Stark doesn’t fucking matter in this show, so we can introduce a whole bunch of new characters that will also be examinees. The first part of the exam is putting people on a dangerous forest where there are creatures that could kill them while they try to capture a bird and there is also the possibility of stealing the captured bird from other participants, which is straight out of a battle shonen arc, you name it, Naruto’s Chuunin Exams or Hunter x Hunter’s Hunter Exams, it’s as cliché as it gets. The second exam is literally dungeon crawling, and Sense decided this test because she supposedly is a pacifist, despite the fact that there is a monster that create replicas of the participants and has their exact abilities and the willingness to kill them, honestly, this series just keeps contradicting itself the more it goes.

Ubel is a whole hell of a can of worms, but most notably has an ability that clearly makes the magic system stupid. She can copy other people’s magic if she empathizes with them, really, that’s it, she doesn’t need actual understanding of how that magic works, she just learns it. She has a spell that can cut through things as long as she is able to visualize herself cutting that thing, an example is given in the series itself, in a previous exam many people were incapable of making the first class mage leading the exam move because he has a magic cape with a gazillion of defense magics to the point no one has been able to damage him ever since he turned into a first class mage, so then comes Ubel who not only bypasses his defenses but also kills him in the process, which is because she visualized herself cutting through it as “they were just clothes”, which almost makes the defense magic look like a bluff because if a simple spell can cut it if the user visualized it being cut then why other people can’t do it too? The only explanation is that they are imaginationlets, because it has been mentioned across the series multiple times that magic in itself works through visualization, so why more people don’t just visualize themselves doing crazy shit? You would expect that since they have knowledge about this, they would practice it. This even makes previous scenes look stupid, take as an example the scene where Fern defends herself against Qual’s spell, Qual is completely sure that he is going to evaporate Fern and Fern thinks she might not be able to stop his spell, so under the logic of visualization, Fern should have been evaporated right there because Qual was visualizing himself piercing Fern’s defensive magic. This makes the magic system look stupid and the characters look even more stupid, as they literally just need some imagination and that’s it, they can do whatever they want. Honestly, Ubel’s character doesn’t annoy me as much as her abilities do.

On the other hand, Serie is a nonsensical character, she is written to fit whatever moment she needs to fit in to be a foil to Frieren. Flamme implies that they wouldn’t fit in an era of peace because she is inclined to fight and she agrees, but she doesn’t actually fight anything, not even when demons are still fucking around in the current era, she didn’t even try fighting the demon king which I guess would have been the only good challenge to her. She is against magic spreading, but then also decided to create a magic organization that helps magic spread. She is just there to exist and antagonize others in stupid ways because she herself is stupid.

I'm actually happy that Sousou no Frieren premiered across Christmas season, since the themes that people keep repeating around those times are pretty similar to the themes of this series and there was a video around social media that I saw and it was along the lines of "Christmas eve is finally here, and you prepare for the reunion with your family and you see multiple empty seats and now you finally understand what your grandmother meant when she said that the best gift she could have in Christmas was being with all of you" and when I watched that video I thought "isn't that obvious?" because for me understanding why you care about people even if they aren't there is something extremely basic if you have actual mental maturity, the message is pretty nice, yes, but it isn't something that you shouldn't know if you aren't a teenager. Last year I watched the Yuru Camp Movie and halfway through it I came to the realization that "hey, I haven't met with my high school classmates in years" even though we had a pretty good relationship, that movie actually made me think about me and my relationship with other people, which is something that not many anime can do, sure, it wasn't some kind of K-On! level masterpiece when it comes to being able to relate to what's happening on screen, but the feeling is still there. And it just so happens that while I was writing this review, I actually met up with my high school friends again as one of them was leaving the country, we had fun, they had drinks and smoked, I personally don’t do that but I liked seeing them having their fun and we talked about a bunch of stuff that happened in all this time and some things we remembered for hours. The reason why I mention this is because there wasn't a single moment across this entire series in which I stopped and thought about anything related to me, this show doesn’t actually make me feel anything on a personal level, maybe because it feels very artificial, as the world is a JRPG fantasy world that you could easy pass as something you would see in an isekai series, hell Himmel feels like he’s about to say he came from Japan any time we see him.

I’ll give obvious credit where is due, the series is animated by Madhouse and with that comes the amazing quality of animation, anyone with eyes should be able to tell you about how Frieren’s animation looks great. Honestly, when I watched the first couple of episodes that premiered at the same time I wasn’t actually surprised, not because it doesn’t have great animation but because this is the quality I have come to expect from one of the biggest powerhouses of animation such as Madhouse, I would actually be more surprised if it didn’t look as good. The biggest improvement that came from this was obviously the battle scenes, because if you check the manga the battle scenes there are pretty bad, but the number of added details to these in the anime alongside the great animation makes them look fantastic.

Honestly, Sousou no Frieren looked like a series that had with so much potential, only for it to squander it, no wonder one of the editors at Shogakukan said that he wanted the series to be the next Kimetsu no Yaiba as that’s what it feels like, but with that comparison I think there are two options of what happened here, either the author really decided to go on different directions that have no relation to the premise and themes presented at the start of the series or his editors made him do things that would obviously sell, but whatever happened there made Frieren not as good as it may have been, and that’s pretty sad. Also, the mimic joke isn’t funny at all, there’s no need to keep repeating it, please stop it.

Thank you for reading.