It’s what Frieren the Mage would’ve done.
What They Say:
“A Beautiful Sight”
Hidden within the massive bridge spanning the Great Canyon Tor is a secret story of Himmel and Gehen.
Review: (Please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
In no time at all, we’ve come to the end of another season of Frieren. Last time this happened, there was a vague implication that there would be more, but it wasn’t for another half-year, on the one-year anniversary of the series premiere (and a few hours before I posted my review of the first season), that more anime was finally announced, and it was later still that the format and eventual release month and year would be revealed. This time, the season ends with the confirmation of more, that it will be a third season, that it will premiere in October 2027, and even that it will explicitly cover the Golden Land arc, complete with a key visual featuring the antagonist Macht. That iconic finale, appropriately titled “It Would Be Embarrassing When We Met Again,” served as an appropriate enough ending as any while reminding us not to place too much meaning in a finale. That ending, and the subsequent, noncommittal message that the journey would continue, was as much the ethos of Frieren as any commentary on its continuation. Of course the journey would continue, whether we saw it or not, especially considering the entire series happens after “the journey” apparently ended. This time, it’s very much the opposite kind of finale, one that sets up for the next season and arc rather than offering its own self-contained closure.
Before we get to that point, the gang has a couple more monster-slaying jobs to complete. In fact, the Golden Land starts to be mentioned by the beginning of the episode, but there have been several other references building up to that arc recently anyway. For now, as Stark is savvy enough to point out, they find themselves much in the same position as they did in this vignette’s immediate predecessor: unable to cross an area with flying magic. This time, instead of distance, it’s the wind that would provide too much resistance over the relatively short gap that consists of the largest drop on the continent. Once again, our highly powerful party may have to rely on the specialties of the common man to proceed on their journey.
Frieren seems to have a habit of collecting dwarves who have been obsessively trying to complete a single task for 200 years. At least building a very useful bridge over an otherwise impossible crossing to atone for not being able to save a massacred village is a bit more respectable than spending those centuries hunting for booze that ended up being disgusting. Gehen is an honorable dwarf who only wanted to spend his long lifespan working hard to help others. Sometimes a hero just needs to put some money where it will go to greater use, and we all know that Himmel would always do the heroic thing in any situation. Tying back into the earlier episode about retrieving the sword from the demon for the noble family, the party of heroes happened to acquire a windfall of cash from that job and saw this as the perfect opportunity to invest that money in something meaningful. Last episode, we learned that Himmel would always accept payment to avoid making the other party feel indebted. This time, the only payment he could accept was the completed bridge, despite the fact that he wouldn’t live to use it. But for Himmel, it was reward enough to know that future people could use the bridge in his stead, particularly his own immortal elf who might just need to cross it in another 80 years or so.
Just as Gehen needed the party to take care of some monsters harassing people trying to cross his bridge (and, having known Frieren, had a pancake-flipping spell all ready for her payment), their next stop presents them with a similar monster-hunting job around a mine of holy snow crystals. Contrasting Himmel’s relative wealth in his earlier meeting with Gehen, Frieren’s current party is fairly destitute at the moment. Generally speaking, Frieren is not good with money, and even when the party felt flush with cash, she was in so much debt she still got hauled off to the mines to work for a few centuries. Ironically, they now look at this mining operation as a potential source of money, but Frieren is playing the longer game by realizing that their monster-slaying skills will be in demand more than simply acquiring more crystals. So no silly grimoires this time; the party needs to actually make some money.
Both halves of the episode, with all their similarities and differences, feature all the hallmarks we associate with the Frieren anime. They have battle scenes that are lovingly animated and set to Evan Call classics, a wealth of endearing montage sequences, and of course they find their heart in connecting to the wistful memories of Himmel’s purehearted idealism. Every scene of Himmel in this episode positions him as entirely selfless and fulfilled in the idea of creating a better future for strangers he’ll never meet. He wants Frieren to be able to use that bridge after he’s gone, but he wants everyone else to do so as well, just as he wants everyone to be able to see the same beautiful sight his party got to see. He wasn’t on a journey to defeat the Demon King for glory; he simply wanted to create a more peaceful world in which people could appreciate the quiet beauty around them without fear. Of course, violence still exists, and his party had no trouble finding periods of peace in their time either, but every incremental effort he made has contributed to a better life for future generations. And if that’s ever in risk of being invalidated, Frieren will always be there to uphold Himmel’s hard work.
Frieren laments the reality of this mining gradually destroying the beauty that Himmel wanted to preserve, but fortunately, their employer is of the same mind and actually included part of their assignment for the purpose of preserving it. I’m not sure how the politics of that decision work, but it’s a happy result for everyone we care about (and in general, ethically speaking), so we’ll ignore those implications. Frieren just can’t help making irresponsible purchases, to which Fern proudly reveals that in fact she had hidden money from Frieren for just such an expectation, making Frieren not offended but proud, praising and petting her student to both of their joy despite the circumstances of the situation. It’s an adorable affirmation of their relationship before Fern and Stark reflect on the lesser-known members of the party of heroes preserving their respective childhoods as much as possible despite both being orphaned by tragic destruction of their villages. As we bid farewell to our party for this round, Fern views Frieren in the light of Himmel the Hero, seeing her as a role model to emulate much as the world has embraced the legacy of Himmel’s unmatched altruism. For her part, Frieren wraps up her role in the season with the same line she began and ended its first episode of the same name: “Shall We Go, Then?” A special credit roll features a lovely new milet song, as all ending themes must be in this series, gives us one more montage, and shows these final scenes.
That would be an ending befitting another open-ended season like the first one, but as I mentioned, we already know what’s coming next, and this finale is ready to tease that. So we end not with Frieren but with Denken, set up as the hero himself, as he charges toward the Golden Land. I alluded to this earlier, but we’ve actually had several breadcrumbs leading to this moment throughout the season, especially in these last few episodes. We heard about the Golden Land in this episode, we saw a flash of Macht in Frieren’s memories last time, and we saw a bit of Denken beginning this journey. So this brief pair of episodes following the Revolte arc to conclude the season made sure to start building that bridge, so to speak. But back in the second episode of the season, they discussed the Demon King’s top generals, the Seven Sages of Destruction, and the fact that the Hero of the South had killed three, the party of heroes had killed two, and Aura from the first season was one of the remaining two. This struck me as foreshadowing that the final member of this group would be a future enemy, and that flash of Macht in the penultimate episode certainly made me wonder if there was a connection. Now, in building toward this eventual confrontation, Macht’s identity as the final remaining sage – and the most powerful, apparently – sets him up as easily the strongest demon we may actually see fight in the present day. As always, this is never truly the point of a story in Frieren, evidenced by the series opening just after the unseen defeat of the unseen actual greatest demon of all time. But just as the unassuming Genau became the unlikely emotional core of the relatively short Revolte arc, Denken is being established as the heart of this next arc. In his old age, he knowingly heads toward this impossible foe with every intent to die, dreaming of seeing his wife’s grave one last time and striking a unique impression of heroism worthy of closing out the season with him in center focus, alongside an epic theme that has me counting down the days until the release of this season’s soundtrack.
Was this season as good as the first? Perhaps not, but it had several factors working against it. Most critical is the fact that we went into the first season hopeful but with no expectation that it would be the greatest anime of all time. Conversely, that result gave its followup the highest possible expectations, so even if it was actually better, the impact wouldn’t be as significant, because it would just be meeting expectations instead of blowing way past them. Another factor is certainly the length of the season; with hardly a third of the episode count, this season inevitably couldn’t offer as much variety as the first one, on top of its various paradigms being more familiar this time around. The fact that we have our next season all lined up is certainly appreciated, and the gap until then gives me confidence that they know exactly how much time they need to maintain this level of quality. But it’s something of a double-edged sword in that this “finale” feels much less satisfying than the original finale, and more of a “Look forward to next fall!” Finally, I do feel that the less prominent position of original series director and current supervisor Keiichirou Saitou does have a nonzero effect on the overall atmosphere of the season.
But even if it doesn’t have quite the same level of magic as that first season all the time, the important thing is that it very much feels like the proper continuation of the near-perfection established across those 28 episodes. There are so many ways this could’ve gone wrong, but everyone involved clearly knew their responsibility to uphold that quality, tone, and aesthetic that became so iconic in the first season. Season 1 was the party of heroes. They achieved something that can never be fully replicated. But Frieren is still around for the next generation, she knows the care Himmel took to do everything perfectly, and she’ll dedicate her life to ensuring his legacy not be tarnished. A year or two between seasons is a lot less than the 80 years between Frieren’s journeys, and thankfully that means we still have most of the original team here to maintain parity between seasons. Based on this second season and the hints we’ve gotten for the third, I remain confident that the team will continue to produce a Frieren that can amaze us in many different ways each episode. It’s what Saitou the Hero would’ve done.
In Summary:
Another season of Frieren wraps up just as it seemed to begin. This time, it’s less of an ambiguous sense of closure and more of an explicit leadup to the already-announced third season and the seemingly much more substantial arc that it will cover. Other than the post-credit scene specifically setting up for that story, the episode itself was largely another collection of relatively trivial side quests to secure passage or earn some money. As always, though, each one includes a strong thematic core to tie the party’s actions into Himmel’s legendary selflessness of days past. It’s not much of a finale, per se, but it’s a fine showcase of why Frieren is such a uniquely resonant series in all of its eclectic aspects, especially in its episodic structure that we might not be seeing for a while, given the promise of a fully arc-focused season. Overall the season may not have hit quite as hard as the first, but there are various factors behind that, from the impossibility of trying to live up to the surprising greatest of all time to only having about a third as many episodes this time. It’s remarkable enough that it felt like a proper second season of the series that blew us away so profoundly in the first place, and as long as it can keep that up, I couldn’t ask for more. When the harshest criticism I can offer is “Possibly not the greatest season of the greatest anime ever,” I think it’s doing just fine.
Grade: B+
Streamed By: Crunchyroll
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