After rather long break from anime, I came back to this series and was pleasantly surprised.
Initial premise, mood, design, feel of the series was good, despite mediocre opening and very bad ending songs, which became premonition of what this series would become.
While story was still fresh, and little details were present about titular character - Freien, a thousand or so, years old elf who is lazy but talented as a magician - story was good. It kept bouncing between collage of memories and current events.
Despite indifferent, almost unpleasant or passive-aggressive nature of Freiern, the more of her backstory was unveiled, the more this character became somewhat close.
And then it started going downhill.
Cliche, tired tropes, and eventually, more and more younger-lo0oking girls started to pop-up.
Frieren turned out to be god-like magician with One-punch man level of unrecognition, by most, of hers true powers.
Events began dragging worse than most uninspired side-quests in ancient RPG game.
Basically, series got boring.
Side characters are the same - purple mage girl is cold, antisocial idiot who can't read relationship or human face-to-face ques, besides polite, passive aggressive formalities. And redhead boy, who has no spine whatsoever, is also un-killable, godlike warrior trained by Freieren's former party member (just like purple girl btw).
So instead of slow paced, slice of life series, this cartoon drifted into action-comedy with scenic, long, dragging scenery and landscape shots, some action, some memories, some boring background characters, some more old memories of events which would become deus-ex machina to push forward very formulaic format of the episodes.
Maybe my fault was expecting it to be something closer to Aria or YKK, while focusing on the overall concept of how "eternal" character like Tolkien-like, long living elves are lonely because of their lack of concept of time and mortality of other races.
Or might it be that this adaptation just lied about being something else in the hook, first 3-4 episodes and then drifting into mediocre fantasy adventure animation lacking adventure?
Well, that said, I feel lied to.
Last time I've seen this level of "accidental" trolling was when I believed one weird guy and watched Haruhi Suzumiya season 2.
Anyways - I have my guesses about elf loli and "hero" after-death relationships, I'm tired of people shipping purple and red teens together, or even worse - Freieren and monk elf... Uh.
My opinion is a hot take because you people can't handle the truth. If a series is just a bit, initially, better than average product, you fall into trap of judging it highly.
Funeral March of Freiren is not bad, but the longer it goes, the weaker it gets. It lies, and have horrible openings and endings, and those, obviously, are the most important aspect of every cartoon (that's a joke).
First 4 episodes are 9/10
Later you can remove 0.25 point per 10 minutes of the show - I gave it 4/10 because it's not bad and had just a little amount of cheaper and quality moments. But story, despite initial quirk, is house of cards build without said cards. It's an illusion.
Final score: overhyped/10
