Review of Frieren: Beyond Journey's End

This anime has a strange tone shift in the middle. I really enjoyed the more contemplative first half. The main character living on a time scale much larger than that of the other characters makes her care about some things they wouldn't care about, and conversely she fails to care about what others, especially humans, care about. That makes for a very interesting tension. There even is a small arc centered on the environment! Then the second half is basically Naruto's Chūnin exam. There are things to like in it, without a doubt: characters, plot points, strategies, decent animation. But i find it to be much lessclever and subtle than the first half. What happened?! I eventually found myself skipping parts of the last few episodes, because the structure being predictable, i got bored. From that second part I really liked Übel as a character, she's interesting (and some fans are even love-struck).

Cool anime but it doesn't deserve the hype in my opinion.