Sousou no Frieren (Frieren: Beyond Journey's End)

The Demon King has been defeated, and the victorious hero party returns home before disbanding. The four—mage Frieren, hero Himmel, priest Heiter, and warrior Eisen—reminisce about their decade-long journey as the moment to bid each other farewell arrives. But the passing of time is different for elves, thus Frieren witnesses her companions slowly pass away one by one.

Before his death, Heiter manages to foist a young human apprentice called Fern onto Frieren. Driven by the elf's passion for collecting a myriad of magic spells, the pair embarks on a seemingly aimless journey, revisiting the places that the heroes of yore had visited. Along their travels, Frieren slowly confronts her regrets of missed opportunities to form deeper bonds with her now-deceased comrades.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

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Sousou no Frieren ranked second and sixth in the 2021 and 2022 Kono Manga ga Sugoi! for the Male Readers division, respectively. In 2021, the series won the New Work Prize at the 25th Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize awards. The manga was nominated twice for the 45th and 46th Kodansha Manga Awards in the Shounen category before winning the 48th Kodansha Manga Award in the same category in 2024. The series won the 69th Shougakukan Manga Award.

The series has been published in English as Frieren: Beyond Journey's End by VIZ Media under the Shonen Sunday imprint since November 9, 2021. The series has also been simulpub digitally through VIZ Manga. It has also been released in Polish by Studio JG since May 12, 2023.

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Characters

Frieren

Main

Fern

Main

Stark

Main

Himmel

Supporting

Übel

Supporting

Flamme

Supporting

Eisen

Supporting

Heiter

Supporting

Sein

Supporting

Denken

Supporting

Reviews

May 15, 2020

PowerPras

Recommended

Preliminary (3/? eps)

Well this is an early review but from what i can see, it is truly worth to read.

A common thing every hero vs demon lord manga has is the presence of an elf in the party.

This manga can be dubbed as "After happily ever after" by showing us the life of the elf years and years after defeating the demon lord.

This will truly be a change of pace for all the isekai type anime/manga fans.

People should be ready to be hit in the feels with every chapter so i suggest everyone to keep some tissues with them while reading this one.

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Apr 12, 2023

Thicc_Ink

Mixed Feelings

Preliminary (82/? eps)

I really don't know how to talk about this series to be completely honest. It might have one of the strongest first 30-ish chapters in any manga I've read, but it starts to lose what makes it so special the longer it goes on.

If you've ever played DnD (or watched any sort of fantasy media) I'm sure you've run into a 500-year-old elf character, but have you ever stopped and asked yourself "damn how would living that long actually affect you?" I had one of my friends once ask this in the middle of playing DnD once. He said "If I can achieve so ... much in 20 years, and can change the world in 80 what are elves doing for 500 years? Does every elf just have a learning disability or something?" And honestly, that question has stuck with me for a while. If you lived for 1000 years, ten times longer than a human lifespan, what would still keep you on the level of regular people?

It's this question that has been stuck in my mind for about two years now that has primed me so hard to enjoy this series because I've never actually seen the question tackled in media before. And it turns out, a story that tackles that question is super interesting. What would you do if the greatest accomplishment a human could achieve was done and gone in less than one-one-hundredth of your lifespan? What would you do if the people you achieved it with were all born and all died in less than a 10th of your lifespan? Could even form truly human connections anymore? Would you be numb to it? Or would you carry the memory of those relationships for another 500 years? What would a decade even mean to you? Much less a year, or a day.

Interesting questions right? And they're all tackled in the story... for the first 30 chapters.

I hope you can see where some disappointment would come from when they just stop talking about those things because they have to do a cliche anime test arc. I don't know about you, but I don't particularly care about seeing the Naruto chunin exams in a character drama about the emotional impacts of immortality.

At the time of writing this, I'm not completely caught up, but I am roughly another twenty chapters past the end of that arc and the story really hasn't seemed to regain its footing since this bizarre break of pace. And honestly, it's extremely disappointing. I still have faith that by the end of this series we might still see a good payoff and discussion of the things established in the first quarter of the story, but when the middle is this bland and unfocused, I'm not sure if that ending will land nearly as hard as it will deserve to.

TL;DR, this story tackles some interesting and unique themes and ideas but loses steam when it decides to shift focus to being more action-oriented and doesn't regain its footing afterward to create a fairly bland story that deserves more clarity and focus.

7/10 because the early chapters are incredible and I could easily see the story reaching those heights again

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Jul 18, 2021

BakiBrain

Not Recommended

Preliminary (10/? eps)

This is the most appalling piece of work I have ever witnessed. Overhype at its finest. Although I must preface this review with the information that I have only read about 10 chapters.

The story is an admittedly unique one, touching base on a rarely discussed topic i.e what happens after the story ends? Though that is about it.

The part which angers me the most in the story is it's "peaceful" nature which is true. But how are you meant to have a story devoid conflict? It is like being isekai'd but choosing not to be an adventurer or not having any relation to an adventurer. ... The scenes showing our protagonist's facing any sort of challenge are immediately overcome due to the fact that the elf has already done this before and the side character is usually the cause of concern, needing to be protected and serving no other purpose other than being a cookie cutter female from the early 80's.
The power rangers-esque nature of changing of the villains every arc with almost no relation to each other remind me of fairy tale but at least the villains in fairy tale served the purpose of building up their characters to reach the end point in the story.

The story is aimless with no vision of the ending nor any clues as to how it will end. I understand that this series is meant to embody the saying, "It's about the journey, not the destination." But if the journey does not have a destination to look forward to then why bother going on the journey in the first place?

The one saving grace of this manga is the magic system that is in place. It is initially simple at a first glance but the theory behind it is very well established. I, however see this as a waste of a good power system because most fights can be resolved by the protagonist and the "vast amounts of magic power within them". There is no real thought placed behind the action other than how could we show that the elf is the wizard that was part of the party that defeated the demon king and has an insane amount of "magic power" that was cultivated with her many years of experience.

Themes of building a deeper connection with the elf and her companions are overshadowed by the fact that the elf will inevitably outlive everyone and does not bother to build these relationships in the first place and this is ultimately true. The elf has no reason to feel any empathy for any other characters for they are simply a small paragraph in her long life and I find this to be utterly devastating to my immersion. This world had many small details that were able to bring this story to life only to be stopped short by the character having an irrational attachment to others and even seeing them on the same level as herself when she has no real reason to be compelled to do so. You might say that I missed the point of the hero slowly opening up the elf's shell but without seeing it for myself I believe this is a cheap way to skip ahead in the story and rush it along to the cute secondary protagonist.

Ultimately, this is a story without real stakes or consequences. The characters are simply secondary and unimportant, being used only as tools to create situations where it looks like complications have occurred. There is a reason why fantasy stories about what the hero party does after defeating the demon lord are not popular and that is because it is not very interesting.

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