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Do you sometimes have the feeling that somebody's work is celebrated for the wrong reasons? Do you feel that people tend to misunderstand their work?
That's how I feel about Akasaka Aka as a writer.

Looking at the rating and considering the hype around this manga died down nearly immediately after release, it's easy to understand what happened. Renai Daikou suffered greatly from the comparison with this author's other romcom manga, Kaguya-sama. And it's easy to understand why. Kaguya-sama had it all right from the beginning: an interesting premise, a loveable cast, some of the best comedy out there, and most importantly, a profound engagement of the ... community.
Which brings me to the second reason Renai Daikou suffered from the comparison: the anime. Most people discovered Akasaka through the Kaguya-sama anime with all the implications this had. The first one is that the anime took considerable liberties. While the manga is more standard, the anime used all the means it had at its disposal to elevate the comedy with things like the narrator or the use of creative animation and directing. We can see traces of this with a lot of people being disappointed by the later arcs of the manga: while it certainly is different for each reader, it's easy to make the link between people discovering what the manga wad really like without all the additions of the anime and the weakening of the hype.

But what about Oshi no Ko, then? Even though it's a very different series we could see the same thing happen as with Renai Daikou. With the release of the first episode, the hype was considerable but it quickly dropped afterwards. In general, hype dies down with time or because people don't receive what they were expecting anymore. And how was it branded back then? A new series by the author of Kaguya-sama with a surprise at the end of the first episode. So when said surprise occurred and it happened that it was quite different from Kaguya-sama, a lot of people quit.

But Oshi no Ko is still very popular so why did Renai Daikou fall off so hard? As I said before, when you think about a romcom by Akasaka Aka, you immediately think of Kaguya-sama. Even more when you consider that the premise of two people who are in love with each other, but too insecure to admit it is the same with the two mangas. So basically the readers were served the same stuff twice without all the things they liked for the first one.

And the thing is that Renai Daikou is actually closer to what you can expect from Akasaka. Akasaka, as he admitted himself and can be seen if you look deeper than the surface of his works, isn't an author of comedy. He is great at it, okay, but he always reverts back to drama at some point. We see this with Oshi no Ko being quite the heavy dramatic manga, a big portion of Kaguya-sama (mainly later chapters which also corroborates why people didn't like it as much as the beginning), and most importantly, his most important work to date, Instant Bullet.
But Renai Daikou isn't a drama, right? Well it most likely should have been if it had more time to develop its story. The main reason I say this is because of the main character, Mari Maria Winter-Nanase (I love this name it's so dumb). Everything in her character screams deep rooted mental disorders as do the best characters Akasaka has written before and it's what makes me love his work so much.

The Akasaka style of writing and the reason I like his manga so much is all about talking about very serious matters in-between lighthearted moments. This, the fact that a lot of elements are not what they seem to be (like Seki's personality being the opposite of what he looks like) and his sort of educational approach of featuring some trivia and explaining the notions he uses are what I would call the Akasaka formula. This is for me what you can really expect from an Akasaka manga without needing to compare them looking for which one is more like Kaguya-sama and Oshi no Ko.

So if that formula sounds like something you'd like, I'd greatly encourage you to read any of his manga, Renai Daikou and Instant Bullet in particular due to their relative unpopularity.

And to wrap this review up, I'd like to talk a little about what not to expect. Obviously, having been axed, you can't really go into it expecting the most distinguished story-telling. So if you really need for a story to have a satisfying conclusion to all its elements without it being rushed, you can go on your way, it's not for you.

In conclusion, I'd like to say that expectations are a double-edged sword that can kill an interesting work in the egg. So instead of just following the hype, find your own reasons to follow a creator and learn through their work what they really want to create. This way I'm sure you'll be able to find media that will really resonate with you personally.

First, I will go with the obvious. The production is really polished and gives a lot of weight to many scenes throughout the series. The characters are good and varied and the action scenes are great.

But for this review, I'd like to use the public's reaction to explain why I disagree with a lot of the hype around it.

The first thing that I heard about this series was how emotional it was. Some people even compare it with shows like Violet Evergarden and Maquia. I will be clear about it: if this anime is supposed to be emotional then to me it has completely failed. ... To be honest, I even felt that it was actually the opposite at some point. The characters we see on screen are almost never emotionally implicated in any sort of thing that happens. Actually, most of them look more like emotionless sociopaths than anything. Let's take the main cast for example: Frieren's entire point is that her longevity makes her oblivious to the human existence, Fern shows like two different faces in all the anime and Stark is also completely oblivious to almost everything around him, showing lack of understanding of himself and other people. This is not an issue obviously, but I couldn't ever call anything in the show emotional with characters like these.

The second point I'd like to talk about is the dichotomy between the two main experiences this show gives. On the one hand, we have slice-of-life episodes with our main cast traveling around the world and interacting with the people there. I'll be honest, I'm not a big fan of slice-of-life and even though I think Frieren is clearly not the worst of this genre, I think there is something very shallow in its way of portraying the genre. To compare it with an anime I'm currently watching, I'll say that Aria portrays its world in a much more interesting way. With Frieren, I feel like I'm doing some kind of fetch quest in some random RPG, while with Aria I constantly feel amazed by how its world works and all the mysteries around it. Now if we take other episodic travel stories, I can say the same. Shows like Majo no Tabitabi for example shows much more variety and creativity in how it handles the topic of travel and the different things you can encounter. In the examples I've given, every episode feels like watching something else entirely while Frieren is too coherent and basic in its construction to really use the potential of this genre.

On the other hand, the action episodes feel like the most interesting part of the anime. There's something very raw and almost cruel with the way these are made and I feel like they're what the author does best. If the manga had given more importance to these moments and really went deeper with them, I feel like it would have been way better. But now I feel like these episodes are competing with the lackluster slice-of-life episodes, making the rhythm of the series feel like a roller-coaster between very high and very low stakes moments which feels weird to me.

To summarise, to me Frieren feels like a good fantasy story with some wasted potential here and there. It handles many story elements but treats most of them in the same way making some of them feel really underwhelming. To me it tries to do two completely different things at the same time. On one hand, it tries to be exhaustive and very open to new story elements, but on the other hand, it has a very extreme way of portraying its characters and their way of acting. It feels like it's being written by two authors, trying to tell two different stories, trying to make sense of what the other does while using the same characters in the same way and I can't really call that good storytelling.

Is this anime good? Most certainly. - Is it the best anime ever? Quite far from it.