Back to Bigaku's Profile Bigaku's Profile

The entire gimmick of this manga is that the heroine, and her sister as well for some reason (Does it run in the family??) are bilingual, and seem to switch to speaking in Russian whenever they are embarrassed, shy, bashful, recalling something, or thinking to themselves out loud.
My main issue with this manga is that... not a single bilingual person ever does this... As someone that has learned 5 different languages, is fluent in two of them, with varying levels in the other three, I have never caught myself switching to one language out of embarrassment or being bashful, or even accidentally.
The only instances it ... happens are with filler words, such as "like" or "basically"...

Hell, I could catch myself occasionally saying "fuck" or swearing, but definitely not going to my crush, calling them cute, expressing how madly in love I am with them, how we are actually childhood friends, and the fact that their Uncle Bobby died in a car crash (He was the one driving) in the 1990s in a different language and vanish like nothing ever happened just because I assumed that they don't understand that language.

My point -which should obviously go without saying, because it's a manga after all- is that it is not realistic. Which is not a sin in and of itself, it isn't like I was expecting anything realistic.
But it is a sin when it is doubly unrealistic because characters speak their "embarrassing" thoughts OUT LOUD for no reason.

At this point you are taking a detour to convey something that could be conveyed in two panels in a normal romcom, just for:
1. The novelty of having the heroine blush after murmuring something (THAT SHOULDN'T BE SAID OUT LOUD) in another language (A SANE PERSON DOESN'T CYCLE THROUGH THEIR LANGUAGES LIKE THAT) and,
2. The MC, that can speak Russian to go "E-EH? DOES SHE MEAN IT???" and having a cringe mini monologue about how he must pretend that he doesn't know Russian followed by him usually playing along with what she said in Russian anyway.
By the way, there is no reason for the MC to hide the fact that he can speak Russian to begin with...

Do you realize that there is a portion of this loop that could be completely cut out and the events would be the same? DO YOU REALIZE THAT THAT PORTION IS THE MANGA'S MAIN GIMMICK?
This manga would have been the same if instead of speaking in Russian, the heroine had a habit of saying what she thought out loud, or the MC overhearing the heroine talking about him, or the MC being able to read minds. I JUST DON'T GET WHY IT HAD TO BE RUSSIAN LMAO. Just give me the same things said in Russian but in thought bubbles instead and respect my intelligence and media literacy...

I am not criticizing this manga's lack of realism, I am criticizing the fact that despite it being unrealistic in the most boring ways possible, it still utilizes its gimmick in the worst conceivable way.

If you still have to resort to tropes such as constant misunderstandings, the heroine being "the school's idol", and the MC being secretly epic and cool and awesome and smart and handsome (No seriously when will this trope cease to exist?), then the main gimmick won't amount to anything other than being a sorry excuse of a way to progress the "story" if you could call it that.

Art is cool though, and the character designs are alright, some interactions are fun and there seems to be some mystery about the MC's past (I can not promise that it will end up being satisfying, in fact, I, personally, will most likely be disappointed), so if you can tolerate, or outright not mind the issues I have with the manga, it might be worth a try.
Otherwise, there is so much better manga out there it's hard to justify spending time on this one.

Usually, I only feel the urge to write a review if something is obscure and deserves more attention, or something touched me deeply. This one doesn't fit in either of those.

Instead, this review is fueled by hatred and written out of spite.
I'm only writing this review to shit on the seemingly recent-yet-common trope of being self aware, with this manga being the worst offender I've come across so far.

Frankly, this manga is annoying, and the author comes off as constantly insecure, because they feel the need to remind the readers that "usually in manga or novels this would happen, but this is real life", constantly ... having to remind them that the way they have written the story is realistic and that's justification for it being uninteresting.

Yes, this guy has the audacity to acknowledge clichés and tropes, to feign awareness, all while trying to avoid them like the plague. But what does that leave us with? Well, definitely not a well written story devoid of clichés and tropes. It leaves us with extremely uninteresting dialogues that feel like the outcome of putting two introverts in a room and forcing them to talk.

Not like they successfully avoids tropes anyway, because they will still create cliched scenarios and execute them in the most pretentious/boring or ironically enough, the most cliched way possible.
They will have the MC help the heroine study (cliched development) yet the interactions and dialogue will be drier than a piece of KFC left in sunlight for 76 days, because remember, this is real life hurr durr. At that point I'd take the MC slipping off some notebook on the floor and falling onto the heroine instead.

This is not simply just a bad manga. This manga's existence is offensive to me.

If I were to summarize Sousou no Frieren in a single word, I'd borrow a word right from its own chapters, which perfectly encapsulates what it is all about.
That word is "Ephermal."

The hero's party's epic adventure, in the grand scheme of thing, was ephermal. It might have took years to defeat the demon king, but from Frieren's eyes, an elf that can and have lived for centuries, it felt like a few days.

Learning magic, was ephermal.
Travelling around the world, was ephermal.
Staying in a certain place for weeks, even years, was ephermal.

When you have lived for centuries, everything blends together.
Defeating the demon king is just as ... memorable as the passing words of a friend.

Frieren's value of time is shown clearly whenever she casually proposes staying in a place for months or years to await bad weather or a certain event.
After all, what is one or two years when your lifespan is in the thousands?

It's only natural to consider most ephermal things insignificant.
And this is Frieren's story of realization that not all that is ephermal is necessarily insignificant.
It's only 80 years after the passing of her former party members -which also marks the beginning of the story- that she begins to realize that those days were worth more than she had initially valued.

This is a story of regret and melancholy, laced with coming to terms with the past and moving on.
It's the story of "what could have beens", but thanks to her new companions, it is also a new beginning filled with "what will bes."

Relating to an Elf's sense of time might seem impossible, if it wasn't for the extremely atmospheric dialogue, perfectly placed flashbacks, and gentle eye-pleasing, yet horrifyingly expressive art. Just a single look at Frieren's smile in a panel following a flashback is enough to convey her regret.

You will feel the same sense of regret Frieren feels, if not more.
You will come to learn to enjoy the little things, just as Frieren has.
You will realize that your time maybe limited, but your legacy could be eternal, just like how Himmel is still admired and respected, as observed by Frieren everywhere she goes.

And most importantly, you will learn to act before it is too late, unlike Frieren.

This is a modern classic in the making.
This isn't memorable because of flashy fights, or pretentious dialogues that you will end up forgetting in 5 years tops, only to be replaced by the new hot thing.

This is memorable because of how impactful and relatable it is, and is something that will stick with you to the very end.

TL;DR: it's a shorter Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei aka it's a comedy until it blows your fucking mind.

The comedy is unique and well executed. The author utilizes multiperspectivity pretty well considering the genre, and that the setting is, for the most part, the same place by a river.
Think Durarara or Baccano, or the recent Odd Taxi (Which is written by the same author as this manga) but as a slice of life comedy.
Could a situation that gets told twice, or even thrice sometimes, still hold up comically just because it's from the perspective of another character? That's obviously a rhetorical question, because the answer is ... yes, and this manga proves it.
At face value seeing the same thing from the perspective of another character that's sitting inches away from a character whose perspective we have already seen might seem like a cheap excuse to recycle previous panels or even entire pages, which it might actually be, but the execution is masterful and the payoff is worth it.

It's episodic in nature, so there is no overarching plot, although callbacks to stories told in previous chapters often occur. Which in the end culminate in the author pointing out every single piece of foreshadowing he had put in the earlier chapters to create a remarkable ending.

While mostly comedic, some chapters are more serious in tone than others, but it doesn't feel out of place, largely because it comes off as natural with how realistic the characters are. There aren't many characters, but the author does a good job of making the ones that do appear memorable. If anything, this is probably the only manga where you'd take the words of a Belarusian character dressed up as a clown seriously.