To get personal bias out the way - I went into this after hearing everyone badger on about how it's the 'greatest anime of all time', I'd only seen people singing it's praise and a MASS amount of people at that. I have a tendency to always be let down in these kind of cases. And I was let down with Frieren.
Considering it's a classic fantasy, Frieren did very well to subvert the basic tropes by focusing on an Elf who'd already completed their main adventure - this is an incredibly interesting premise that isn't widely explored in the genre. But I think the way this story is told completely fumbles the bag. Being a long lived creature, you live to see your friends and family die - this should be incredibly emotional, but Frieren does little to set up or execute any emotionally impacting scenes. Especially regarding her old party members, why are we supposed to care about these people we do not know? The first episode is presented like an extremely emotional one, but there's been 0 time to build a connection to the characters. The old party members are shown through present day meetings and past memories, for about the first 15 episodes? Which in themselves go from 10 or so episodes of 'character building' to a mini training arc. The latter 10 or so episodes follow the Violet Evergarden formula (best example I can think of) where you're supposed to see the characters grow from their interactions with others. But unlike Violet Evergarden, the growth was so minimal and insignificant when the characters are as bland as the ones in Frieren. The show lost me here and it just completely devolved when it turned into a random competition/training arc? It felt so out of place going from a slow supposed character building tone to some basic ass shonen fighting? Wild U-Turn.
Frieren makes sense to be so 1-Dimensional, she's an old ass elf. But why would they show emotional range with her bursting out crying at the start then only have her hint at caring about others in a very lowkey dont notice me, fashion for the entire rest of the show. There doesn't seem to be any development there as it's clear she always cares about the two kids. Her characterisation as also being childish and naive didn't work for me either.
Purple hair girl and Red hair guy were whatever. The same in the sense that they have sad backstories that are mentioned and promptly have 0 affect on their characters after two episodes. They don't grow or develop, they act like kids who sometimes get along and sometimes don't. Nothing more to it. I will note that their hinted romance is very cute and very well done.
The rest of the cast aren't worth saying anything about other than, if the main characters are so bland - these guys are worse.
Animation was fine, standard for a typical shonen.
The OP felt wildly out of place - I'm definitely swayed here as I absolutely loved the mediaval style of Dungeon Meshi's opening that went perfectly with the fantasy theme. I don't know why they chose a generic pop song for this anime, it doesn't connect at all, it feels like they knew Yaosobi was popular so chose her purely based off of that.
Overall I'm definitely jaded by my high expectations. I think the bar is really on the floor when people praise the hell out of this show for literally just not sexualising women - like that should be the baseline, not something that is deserving of praise. Overall I found it boring after the first 10 episodes, struggled to get through it (shoutout to Hades and Euro Truck Simulator2 for keeping me entertained whilst watching it). I can't say other people won't like it, it's highly rated, it just didn't click for me personally - and when you can't connect with the characters in a character driven show, it's obviously not going to work.
