Frieren: Beyond Journey's End Season 2

As somebody who absolutely loved the first season, it pains me to say that season two falls short of that incredibly high standard. The best way I can put it is this- I feel that season two exemplifies and exaggerates the absolute worst qualities of Frieren as a story to such an extent that the truly excellent moments are completely buried. Yes, I'm largely going to complain about the 'slow' episodes that make up more than half of this (unusually short) 10 episode season- but before the Frieren diehards jump down my throat for not 'understanding' or 'appreciating' the 'point', I'd like to say that the slower,more episodic portions of s1 were some of my absolute favorite parts and integral to the identity of the show. I would have no problem whatsoever with these slow 'sidequest' esque episodes if they actually had something of interest to say anymore- but that's just it. They don't. From both a character and thematic perspective, Frieren has become so flanderized that it's almost comical. The first five episodes of season 2 play out almost identically: 1. The gang arrives at a village/location and gets roped into some mundane sidequest. 2. Fern and Stark complain that it's lame/boring/a waste of time and Frieren insists they do it anyway 3. We flash back to Frieren and her party doing that same thing in the past, and Himmel says some shit about 'enjoying the little things' or 'appreciating the journey' 4. We cut back to the present after completing said activity and Fern and Stark both go "damn this payoff was really worth it, glad we stopped to appreciate the little things" 5. Everyone smiles and we roll credits Every. Single. Time. (Maybe we also kill a demon/monster in there every once and a while) I'm not saying that wasn't the shtick of the slower early s1 episodes, but the fundamental difference is s1 was actually building towards something. Early on, the hero's party flashbacks were the thing of interest in this show– it helped contextualize where Frieren came from as a character and the motivations that shaped her burgeoning new journey with Fern. I didn't mind that we saw bits and pieces of the past journey in each episode as a way to relate it to the present, because the beauty of the storytelling was that slowly the present narrative expanded and became more and more interesting– demanding more attention and focus. As we eventually transitioned out of the slower episodes entirely into the incredible action arcs towards the end, the foundation of those quiet moments early on added a ton of dramatic weight. By the end of S1, it really felt like Frieren had momentum. Like the story had finally found its footing and was ready to move into the next phase. So where does s2 take that momentum? Well... nowhere. It grinds to a complete halt and reverts back to the style of the very beginning of season 1 all over again– the same, slow sidequest episodes with the same exact flashbacks to the hero's party, teaching us the same lessons over and over again. What happened here? Like... we get it. Life is about appreciating the journey and the little things, etc. etc. That was the thesis of the first season. I already watched that. Why do we need to hear this again? It's just... boring. The structure and use of the flashbacks to Frieren's original journey are so formulaic now that they're just funny. You know exactly when they're going to pop up and what Himmel is going to say for any given emotional beat. This is my primary disappointment with this season– it just feels stagnant. I'd also like to touch on the characters themselves, because the only thing that's become more stale than this show's primary themes is its character growth. Or, should I say... the complete lack thereof. Fern and Stark are still utterly emotionally stunted and despite the ample time spent on their awkward relationship, literally no development has occurred since these characters were introduced. We are still hitting the same "waaah Fern is scary and angry with me" bit from Stark 30 episodes later and the same "Frieren likes to sleep haha" bit every 4 seconds... like... come on. Really? The 'comedy' especially this season has been really grating. There was some excellent humor in s1 but since we're just recycling the same jokes over and over they're getting so lame, that is when they're not flat out weird and tonally inconsistent with the show (the Frieren meltdown/tantrum scene comes to mind. Wtf was that? Super out of character for her and bizarre) This is what I mean when I say s2 exemplifies the worst parts of s1 and makes them the main focus. Yes, all of these issues were present in small doses before, but the overall direction and novelty of the story made up for them and much more. Now that our expectations for what this show can be are so high, it's tricky to pick it back up when it feels like it's completely regressed back to the first few episodes of s1 again with no meaningful growth to speak of. Now, I'm not going to shit on what is obviously a visually and directorially gorgeous production with incredible, visceral action scenes and dismiss the entire experience as 'bad'. It's really not- once you get past the first 5 episodes or so and we get some actual narrative again the quality improves dramatically. There are some incredible action scenes and fights here... but it's hard to get excited about them when I don't really even know where we're going in the story as of now. The short length really did this season no favors in that regard. I sincerely hope s2 is just a blip in an otherwise amazing story from here on out... but this season was a pretty disappointing watch compared to what my very high expectations were coming off of season one. Oh well.

It's challenging to write a review for Frieren: Beyond Spectrum's End S2 because the series is so lacking in content, as S2 is often equivalent to filler or optional fanservice OVAs with no real arcs, other than doubling down on shonenslop like the Divine Revolte mini-arc. It was the same back during the preliminary days of S1 when my review was deleted for "too much humor" because I framed it as if the author were using ChatGPT prompts to write Frieren as a generic, bland, and sentimental fantasy show. But I actually think it's much worse than that now. The author must be using ChatGPTto deliberately make his series as dull as possible. If anything, ChatGPT should easily be able to write something more interesting than Frieren, so if the series isn't AI slop, then it would easily benefit from the author handing his story over to the AI overlords. "ChatGPT make a comedy scene where Frieren cries for three days straight as her party watches in embarrassment, but make sure it isn't funny." I mean, humor is subjective and all, but the timing and forced obnoxiousness makes it difficult to imagine this producing laughter. Same with the chibi bits where Fern is booping Stark. Or a sitcom moment, like Fern and Stark scheduling a "date"; meanwhile, Stark moves around like a sloth because he thinks he's going to get curb stomped by an ill-tempered kuudere. The second half of the show, once they reach the poorly supplied northern lands, has one main joke: "Gee, this bread sure is hard!" Madhouse finds every opportunity to remind us as they drop the bread bricks into bowls or chomp on it. Methode from the Chuuni exam arc returns, and her one character trait is that she likes doling out headpats, set to whimsical music and wonderful lines like, "I love giving headpats to small girls" (imagine if her sidekick, Genau, said this instead, lol); this culminates in an embarrassing scene where she headpats Frieren (the exotic demon waifus that the author keeps killing off are more deserving of headpats than our trash protagonist waifus), Fern pouts in jealousy, and then the two fight over Frieren in a tug of war, with elfblob's butt sticking out like she's about to lay a big ol' elvish fart on Fern. Also, wow, ten whole episodes and a mimic chest hasn't snacked on elfblubber yet? I see the author is really branching out with his humor. S2 follows the same aimless and episodic slime of life formula that the early parts of S1 were known for before it turned into a well-animated but otherwise mediocre battle shonen. Insipid dialogue around hiking and campfires. A random monster encounter to keep anyone from getting too antsy. Frieren zones out for a flashback to when she was adventuring as one of the four heroes; these flashbacks tend to be somehow related to the present moment, such as when our chump heroes, despite being low on cash, refuse to rake in millions by forming sweatshops to extract all of the magic-nullifying crystals found in episode 2 (have Stark use a long rope to carry the crystal back at least, lol). A bit of cozy nostalgia from some landmark that Frieren remembers, such as the small hot spring that "wasn't worth venturing out for." Oh, and plenty of shots of grandma elfblob and nanny Fern's feet, often served up in lacy nightgowns (the patrician NEET and otaku's fetish). The hot spring was only a foot deep so we'd get treated to another feet shot (even one from Stark for the girls)! Madhouse is spoiling us, UwU. Somehow this show has been touted as deep and mature, but the SoL is as shallow as ever, driven along with the curious combination of overwrought music, superficial characters and script, and the glacial pacing of an arthouse film, but without any of the merits. The source material is lacking in the first place and is carried greatly by Madhouse's production values, as always. The direction doesn't elevate these moments, there isn't anything insightful being said, any real world building mixed in (most of the "spell building" was all done ages ago in S1), nor atmosphere, and the characters are as derivative as any trio you'd find in a random '90s adventure series, with the exception of elfblob's unusually elftistic perspective because of her advanced haggery. A severe problem when comparing the two seasons is that, yes, S1 was poorly done SoL slop as well, but there were shonen arcs with solid animation and some more plot progression by the end that at least acted as something like "payoff." I'm sure we all expected things would slow down once again, but coming from the latter half of S1 for S2 to again be milking this sloooooow, no-content, haggard SoL of the week formula of hiking sim - huehue funny joke - monster fight - syrupy Stark/Fern moment - elfblob flashback is like having learnt to ride a bike and then regressing to training wheels or a tricycle. Maybe the most frequent criticism I see about anime is "show, don't tell." That's apt advice sometimes, but Frieren has a tendency to engage in "show and tell," like this is kindergarten or elementary school, and the kid has to present something to the class. This is something you might expect from Dora the Explorer, not the most famous fantasy anime of the decade. Most notable would be the bad food is fun/food is better when you're eating with friends bullshit that every derivative anime pulls to pretend that the characters are growing closer. The whole first half of episode 5 is devoted to this, when a dwarf starts nipping at Frieren's ankles to help him find special beer that he's been trolled into looking for for 200 years that tastes like piss (netting us another corrupt priest drink so much haha joke). "It tastes bad, right? Then it's best enjoyed with friends... I'll make the whole city suffer with me." After the self-help lesson, he holds a piss drinking festival set to LotR tavern music. To add to the repetition, Genau says the bread his dead childhood friend made was bad but laments how he won't get to eat it anymore. Implying the same thing. Then there is an eating scene with the girls, which makes me think: "This bread is hard." "So you mean it's bad?" *Moeblob wipes breadcrumbs off face* "Yeah, but hard bread/bad food is better when eaten with friends. Now, give me headpats." They attempt to mine so much humor out of the sound effects of the bread bricks, but it'd actually be closer to charming if they wouldn't comment on it all the time. It almost looks like a parody, but I know the hack author is recycling stock anime moments like Frieren constantly does. This author shows this same tendency to not trust the audience in the way the Stark x Fern date is presented. When nothing is happening, Fern will say, "Anyway, this was a nice, quiet place" or "This is such a peaceful, quiet moment." You know, because... the characters are enjoying a peaceful, quiet moment. There's even a part where they say, "Wow, the cloud looks exactly like the dumplings we ate," which is recycled from the much better boob cloud scene In S1. They went from the well-choreographed and animated dance scene that any romance series could be proud of (albeit with better characters, hopefully) and then resorted to this awful date scene between the two. I'm sure a defense will be that the date is meant to be awkward, yet it comes across as lazy and lays bare the emptiness of these two characters. They lack personality, likes, dislikes, perspectives/worldview regarding anything, or opinions. They have nothing to talk about on the date despite traveling closely with each other for many months or years. Not only do they hardly know anything about each other, but we don't know anything about them either. Fern and Stark are basically non-entities outside of their role in this adventure. It's supposed to be a cute, awkward date between a couple who are inexperienced with romance, but there isn't much to work with when the script and characters are this dull. Nevertheless, as much as I rag on the droning SoL moments or the mundane adventures where our heroes volunteer to help villagers in return for grimoires containing useless spells, the shonenslop parts aren't much better and are arguably worse. One would be better off going UOOOH while watching these sick cuts on Sakugabooru, as many of them look wonderful in isolation. But when considered holistically, the fight scenes are plenty flashy yet lack exciting choreography, tension, or any real drama. I thought the shonen asspulls in Stark and Linie's fight in S1 were appalling, but the big showdown with Revolte was truly revolting, dense with the thickest of plot armor, rife with shameless auramaxxing, and far more illogical than a less serious series like DBZ, a show with escalating craziness every arc and characters who can blow up planets. It's not a good look when your deep and mature battle SoL series has a spine-displacement jutsu to save characters that's worse than when Inosuke shifted his organs to avoid a death blow in Kimetsu no Yaiba. Characters sit there and monologue or ask inane question when they should be fighting, and Fern and Frieren chat while Methode is fighting for her life. The OP Frieren casually sits back with popcorn and risks the lives of everyone. Hey, why not? There are no stakes anyway! The mage battles are cheap, and the authors become bored and auto-vaporize the villains as they sit there like a deer in the headlights. It must be some kind of manga-to-anime timelag that Madhouse left uncorrected. Whatever the case, many of the fights are left unsatisfying as a result. There aren't many new or returning characters this time. I've said enough about Methode already, but her partner is Genau, who is far more of an emotionless and humorless husk than Frieren ever was in the early parts of S1. That pokerface is unbeatable. Despite his calm mask, he's secretly seething in rage and has a hobby of asking people if they're a "good person," but whatever merits his PTSD traumadump might have, it's undermined at every turn by the silly antics of the waifu trio or the shonen rambling delivered during the big fight. The demons are all one-note, but Revolte has a clownish presence and only lacks clown shoes because he doesn't have feet. Looks like they awoke this prissy thing from his beauty sleep, and he didn't have a chance to take off his nappy-time/BDSM eyepad yet. The piece holding his shoulder plates together looks like a pearl necklace too. This is chuunibyou-tier character design or would better fit in a comedy like Konosuba. As for grandma elf, there was this CGDCT geology infotainment show called Ruri Rocks, in which a girl with big boobs explains the cycle of rocks moving about from land to sea to volcano and so on: "Their movement is less limited than humans. To us, they look like they're standing still because they operate on a timescale so different from ours. Rocks move on a scale of thousands and millions of years." This instantly reminded me of Frieren because of her being a moron who is oblivious to time (hilariously emphasized in S1 by the cheesy symbolism of Frieren and Himmel divided by a clock tower, with a kneeling Himmel slipping a gold ring onto elfblob's finger, in what is an unspoken marriage proposal--never forget that this series is a forever alone incel x femcel romance at heart), and freaking rocks have more personality, characterization, and character development than she ever did.

Given how the first season of Sousou no Frieren ended on a shitty note, it’s not surprising that the second season starts badly too. At least we already got past the battle shonen arc that covered 1/3 of the first season, so we get back to the adventure of our favorite bland character band. I would like to say that I’m pleased to be past that arc, but I’m not, as this season is just worse than the previous one, basically everything about it is a downgrade, whether the slice of life adventures or the fights, the characters are as stagnant as ever, and thisseason decided to recontextualize some scenes making them worse. You see, the very first couple of episodes of this season render the entire Chunin Hunter Exam arc pointless, the Northern Plateau has checkpoints where you have to present your first class mage certificate to pass, once you get to these villages, you see there are completely normal people leaving there, there are also some knights whom I doubt are good enough to protect the people from these extremely dangerous monsters given that, as established before, not any mage can enter the place, you specifically need to have special permission to enter here. The mere fact that people who aren’t first class mages, or people that have absolutely no way of defending themselves, or that not a single other first class mage is around any of these villages tells you that the entire previous arc was just a massive time sink, that was there to provide an artificial obstacle that didn’t matter. This season is just a blander version of the first one, the slice of life elements are very clearly duller than what they were before, last season you would actually learn things from the characters in flashbacks, Himmel’s quirks, maybe something different about Heiter aside from him being a drunk priest, Frieren looking at something that happened in the past in a different way thanks to a new experience, but no, this season is just doing something and then having a flashback where they said and did the exact same thing, and it’s not as if the previous season didn’t have this problem, but it wasn’t something so omnipresent as it is here. Not only that, the “romance” subplot between Fern and Stark also became the dullest shit, this happens because Fern and Stark posses absolutely no chemistry at all and because their characters are pieces of cardboard, these two cannot even hold a conversation, and watching them on a date is eye rolling, as all they can say is just repeating what’s happening around them, there’s a cloud and they tell exactly what the cloud looks like, they are quiet and then someone says that it is a quiet moment, and this isn’t exactly surprising, as I think the romance between Fern and Stark always felt forced, but you just need to take a good look at what has happened before, as in the previous season, there was the episode where they danced together, that single moment is much more significant than anything that happened this season between them. In one of the earlier episodes of this season, the author gives us an attempt at world building, as he introduces an anti-magic crystal, crystals with the ability to stop mages from casting their magic, so as you should expect, these could easily be used as some kind of weapon against some of the strongest characters in the setting, but obviously nobody thinks much about them, they just talk a little bit about them and then ask “well, what’s for dinner?” before throwing them. This series doesn’t even understand the implications of what anti-magic crystals can do, the argument used against them is that they are too resistant, so trying to dig them and work on them is a waste of effort, however, if you know anything about rocks you should be able to understand that, if a rock is too sturdy, then you dig the earth around it and grab it, if they are too sturdy to work with them, then you just need to stick them on the weapon or armor you want to use it on, but their use is completely ignored. They apparently are also worth a lot of money, which is exactly what Frieren’s party was looking for given they need it, but again, they just threw them away because they aren’t worth keeping for them, which I guess it’s not a completely bad idea given that they are mages and that would cripple them if they had the crystals too close to them, but honestly this could be circumvented by just having Stark carry it with a rope, but as they would still need to find someone who would buy them (which shouldn’t be hard, mind you), so they don’t even entertain the idea. I know, most people who thought about these crystals did more thinking about them than the author, and I doubt they will ever be brought up again because they are treated as an irrelevant element, but it’s surprising that no one ever thought of using them as weapons against mages or maybe try them out against demons given how prevalent magic is in the setting. Of course, some moments of this season have done nothing but actively damage the previous one, and I’ll start with a very simple one, this season introduces a character called “Hero of the South” (he doesn’t even have a name) and he is a character actively damaging the previous story despite the fact that he barely appears at all. You see, in season 1, there was this powerful moment when Himmel fails to pull the sword, at that moment Himmel basically got told that he wasn’t the one destined to end the calamity happening, that he wasn’t the hero the sword was made for, he receives an ego blow, but he doesn’t decide to leave, he decides that he will continue his journey and be courageous independently of the meaning of that sword, because he wants to help people, and he manages to beat the Demon King because he persisted and not because he was a chosen one. Now, this 5 minutes long scene about the Hero of the South destroys all that, you know why? Because this guy who can see the future and appeared out of nowhere in front of Frieren, before Himmel came to her, told her that there was a young hero that will appear and defeat the Demon King, and that this hero is Himmel. As you should be able to tell, this means that Himmel defeating the Demon King was an event that was predestined, so Himmel was, in fact, the one chosen to defeat the Demon King, which means this short scene completely breaks the previous scene I mentioned, as the reason why that scene was powerful is because Himmel went against fate and triumphed anyway, but apparently the future that was predestined was that Himmel was going to be the one who would defeat the Demon King anyway, rendering all meaning of that scene moot. As much as I complain about how dull the slice of life scenes tend to be, they are much more better than the other parts, since this series also wishes to be a battle shonen, it has meaningless fights every episode for almost any quest they take, and then there are the small arcs that tend to focus on battles, and when these battles aren’t just bad, they are completely dreadful, as they usually take over from the worst parts of battle shonen battles. The battles featuring Stark are the ones that mainly suffer from this, as he is the warrior of the group, so he fights with weapons instead of beams of light. Last season, he had his fight with Linie which consisted of him getting pummeled, then having a flashback about his master, standing up, saying Linie’s attacks don’t hurt (please, ignore the blood he has as he says that) and then one-shotting her. This season decided to do something even worse, he and another first class mage whose name is not even worth remembering were fighting against a demon, and this demon blasts them both through their torso leaving a big hole, and they just stand up and keep fighting, the severe injury they had taken not mattering until after the battle is over. As you should know, Frieren is a mature series, or at least, that’s what people say it is, so this scene is something mind breaking, this series got outrealism’d by One Piece and Dragon Ball Z, it’s very hard to understand why the author would try to write these fights when he is so bad at it, and the problem of this scene isn’t that they got healed afterwards because they survived with 1HP, the problem of this scene is that it should have never reached this territory into stupidity and immaturity, if you get a hole across the middle of your torso, if you aren’t dead, then you shouldn’t even be able to walk because your spine would get destroyed, this series should know better than to copy battle shonen where the protagonists just stand up again no matter how much damage they received. The animation is the only part about this show that I can still praise, Madhouse is clearly giving all of its love towards it, even if at the cost of all other series they have been making since 2023. Despite the cities all looking the same, at least they look pretty and the animation in battles, as much as their actual content annoys me, is outstanding. The thing that still is horrible is the comedy, I have to thank the author for stopping doing mimic jokes that were run through the ground, but the things replacing them aren’t better, one of the scenes plays out like this: Frieren and Stark enter a bar *laugh track* and then they are talking about how Fern feels about a date invitation, they have a little conversation where Stark treats Frieren like an old lady and Frieren says that he shouldn’t make her mad because she would start throwing a tantrum *cuts to the most obnoxious flashback you’ve ever seen of Frieren crying while her party watches* and then we return to the present *laugh track*, the laugh track is an exaggeration from my part, but it looks like you are watching Family Guy with the cutaway gags. It's exhausting to watch this season, the premise was already run thin back in the first season, specially because the theme of “passage of time” is irrelevant when time doesn’t pass in the story beyond the first couple of episodes, I know it would be a pain to replace Stark and Fern with another type of cardboard cutouts, but I can’t take seriously this series when the themes it wants to explore aren’t explored as it doesn’t allow itself to do it. Thank you for reading.

A huge step down from Season 1. It spends 10 short episodes rehashing the same character development points as Season 1, except with less impact this time around. There's some excellent action scenes, and some heart touching scenes. Animation is excellent as usual. But it's too slow and too short to make any kind of impact. Very little story progression. Very little character growth. It's kind of boring, honestly. This feels like an afterthought or an epilogue for Season 1. It's filler to bridge Season 1 and Season 3. Very disappointing. If you're not a huge fan I recommend just waiting until Season 3 towatch Season 2.