Review of Frieren: Beyond Journey's End

It took me almost an entire year to watch through this 28 episode, short anime. Why have I voted this as a masterpiece you may ask? Because it is. Let's review everything about this show! (No Spoilers) First of all, this show is not for everyone. It's definitely got a different take as to how an anime is played out and presented to the viewer. It explores different subjects in life and has very positive lessons to learn from. As you probably already have heard, the animation and the art is great. The songs are usually very fitting (I say usually because it's subjective to theviewer in some scenes) to the scenes and the characters are memorable. This show is filled with emotions yet it's not done in a generic way in most cases. There has been multiple scenes where I got goosebumps or suddenly started tearing up even when the show is trying to give me a message and tell me to smile.

Now one thing I really like about this show, is that the characters don't act like they're trying to cast a show, they act more natural and very emotionless at times, of course sometimes it's not realistic but it doesn't have that fake, childish overreactions that you would usually get from other anime characters.

Another thing to note is that this show never keeps things hidden from you. Now I'm sure there is millions of plot points yet to be revealed but most of the time if something is mentioned, it's usually followed by a whole episode dedicated to that topic. Now as a person who likes paying attention to little details and working things out myself, this is not a very good trait, but the upside is when I'm having a conversation with another viewer, they are almost never confused as to what's going on and they completely understand the situation unlike other shows where nobody has a good read on what the show is actually trying to tell you.

I personally dropped this show in the first couple episodes and had trouble connecting with the characters or the story (well, technically they didn't even have characters or a story), but ended up picking it right back up, watching amazing 3-4 episodes back to back, and ended up dropping again because the show changed paces way too many times so my brain couldn't take how slow it got after that much action. I enjoy slow shows, but when you keep switching up the pace, it does lose my interest.

Although this was the case, I knew the show is praised for a reason and I have seen it with my own eyes from the episodes that I have enjoyed to I decided to pick it back up and keep watching. I forced myself to watch around 2 episodes and I suddenly started to get attached to the fantasy world they have built and started to enjoy the show a lot more. Even on episodes where they were basically doing nothing, it was so fun and interesting to watch. Towards the end it started following a little bit more generic anime arc style and introduced new characters, which did make the show a lot more accessible and easier to enjoy.

Is this the best ever anime? No, nothing is. Every anime is subjective, but what I know for a fact is that this show has very small amount of things to hate on (or almost nothing to hate on). Which leaves me with no reason to take off any points off of it. 10/10 show, I recommend everyone to pick it up and stick with it. Take your time if you need, but you will not regret watching the whole thing.

Thank you for reading.