For the first time ever the hype didn't disappoint. Honestly a breath of fresh air for anime, my only complaint is I wish it was longer.
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My complaint is I wish they spent less time fighting monsters and more chilling in random villages to learn a spell that bakes bread.
Yeah the demons are the least fun part of the story, aren't they? Typical dark anime psychopath creatures.
I don't think the combat can be saved by better antagonists. The real issue is the author is atrocious at writing characters with a plan of action. The use of flashbacks and over explanatory dialogue here is painful. This might not be so bad if they weren't so insistent on trying to show their protagonist effortlessly outsmarting her opponents.
It's not just a show thing unfortunately, it's faithfully replicating the manga here.
To be clear, I still really like Frieren. It has cozy vibes and a really unique perspective.
Does it need "saving" ? The combat isn't bad by any stretch of the imagination, in fact the incredible power displayed sort of raises the stakes because it can clearly all be over in just one mistake.
Yeah, I had read the manga about two and a half years ago and while I initially really enjoyed it for the cozy travel and the bittersweet start, I gradually lost interest when it became clear that the story was starting to focus more on its mediocre conflicts rather than the travel.
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I specifically dropped it a bit after the maze arc, when they were introducing the new demon villain who had been mind-enslaved to serve a kingdom but still found a way to kill that kingdom.I'm very glad that the anime has been doing so well though, while I dropped it I still vastly prefer it to the isekai fantasy that was so common for the past decade.
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I liked the first demon fight, because it gave a big chunk of backstory and world building. This thing being a reminant of a prior era that was horrible back then but trivially defeated now was a clever way of iterating on the idea of "progress" within a fantasy setting.I was less thrilled with the second demon, simply because "my pot of mana is bigger than yours" is a lame way to resolve conflict.
But the fight with the diplomats gave us another big chunk of plot, in so far as it established why the idea of a demon was so horrible. A monster in a man's form that preys on compassion is a good set piece for future drama.
At some point, the focus of the story is around the mystery of what occurred in the prior age. And demons are necessarily a big part of that. So introducing them as minor antagonists in order to unspool the story works well.
The pace of the conflicts does drag though. The only thing worse than a Naruto-esque low stakes fight scene is one that feels like filler.
I think for me the interesting part isn't just "progress". The interesting thing that this show has going for it is specifically training.
What I mean by that is that battling monsters is not how the characters in this show get stronger. Yes some battle experience plays a part in confidence building and making less practical mistakes... But the main message being driven home here is that it is generational education that makes each generation progressively stronger than the last.
Fern is unbelievably powerful, having trained under Frieren. She has not been in that many battles but she has been trained relentlessly from childhood by Frieren and she has the skill to demonstrate this. She also has the battle-personality of the person that trained her, she has a poker-face unlike any other and she is exceptional at hiding just how strong she really is.
The same goes for other characters in the show. The whole thing is about how people are trained. Who their educators were. What knowledge was passed to them by those educators.
When something new appears that nobody knows how to beat there is a collective effort to paradigm-shift all methods and find a solution. This paradigm-shift then becomes just totally normal and is educated into the next generation.
I highlight this because the traditional fantasy anime is all about defeating enemies to become stronger. But this is not. These people are all strong because they have been trained well. Their strengths are not from collecting EXP points over time by defeating mobs but by their educational backgrounds.
I can definitely see that. Although, there is a certain implication that some things have been lost over time.
Frieren's hobby of collecting niche spells and leveraging "village magic" to great effect, plus the commentary on declining numbers of wizards, and the brief call back to the Elven genocide of prior eras all allude to it.
The flowers episode describes something that is (almost) lost, while the episode at the port town looks at the quality of life being predicted on this steady maintenance without which the past is lost.
The "lost knowledge" thing is another commentary on education. Passing things from one generation to the next, or the failure to do so.
This is pretty explicitly stated in Fern's backstory where she was convinced not to commit suicide by the priest because it would be erasing the memories (and knowledge) of her family.
I like it a lot. It has made me wonder recently what an mmo might look like if you removed the "gain exp from killing monsters in order to gain more power" mechanic. What would game design for this genre look like if you explicitly prevented this?
A bit like a very population dense version of Journey, I imagine.
I think Ultima Online tried to do a system in which you gained ability through practice and it decayed over time. But because of the mechanics of gameplay, all this really amounted to was lots of bot-activity to boost abilities into the stratosphere.
Another approach I've seen is mini-games with variable difficulty based on the task you're attempting. So, opening a lock is a kind-of increasingly complex rubix cube exercise while casting a spell might require solving a Captcha or chemistry problem of varying difficulty. I like this better in theory, but I can see why it never got the traction of more traditional stat-based games in practice.
I think you do run into the fundamental problem of answering "What kind of game do you really want to play?" I've heard the Halo FPS combat system described as six-seconds-of-fun on a loop, for instance. Very engaging, lots of permutations on a theme as you change maps and available equipment. But not conducive to a particularly deep or story driven game.
On the flip side, you've got a very story-driven game like BG3 which still ultimately involves a lot of rat-smashing, but lets you advance at pace entirely by advancing the story. Bleed off even more of the combat and add more opportunities for social interaction, you might approach what's being described here. But there's also a certain "main character syndrome" in all of these animes that make them antithetical to an MMO. You can't have every player be Frieren, after all. They can't all be thousand-year-old mages on a 10 year pilgrimage with a big mystery origin story.
Frieren as an NPC set piece and guide stone could be very cool. But I think you can kinda get that already from Genshin Impact, if you just avoid the dungeons and stick to the plot.
I've been thinking about it and I sort of think you could have "training" as part of gameplay if you can make it fun and enjoyable. Perhaps a sort of arcade minigames thing? Like Maple Story 2 was doing. They're essentially Fall Guys style minigames, races, contests, memory games etc. If you came up with some fun ones you could have these as representations of the "training" your character does. Might need to be fairly varied with mmr to create added challenge and competition in this element of the game. The downside though is balancing this against what players probably want to be doing which is running dungeons... But even then I sort of think running dungeon dailies is a hyper repetitive task that people only "enjoy" because they're gaining progress points towards greater character strength. Perhaps you would offset this with harder and more challenging dungeons or other tasks set to players out adventuring outside of the cities. The issue here is that I think a lot of mmo players are playing mmos because they don't want a challenge they just want to over-level almost everything and be unstoppable gods.
Pokemon is interesting in a sense because you're not the one levelling up, the pokemon are. The levelling up in pokemon for trainers is collecting gym badges.
This isn't really relevant but I've also often wondered about more features from The Sims making their way over to mmos. Like characters engaging in conversation with nearby players of their own independence. For example let's say you go to the marketplace and you're there looking at the market boards, your character will indepently engage in conversation/actions while idle. Or just in passing out and about characters might greet one another, as you do in real life when you say good morning to a stranger in passing. These could affect social stats between characters, and could be influenced by the players in a roleplay kind of way. At the very least it could highly increase social interaction.
I think part of the problem with modern gaming is that you've got two very different cohorts of people. One group wants to escape reality entirely and play the game as much as possible. They're going to be the ones doing all your high level content and maxing out all your builds as fast as possible. Also the ones who will be doing a bunch of online discourse and YouTube reviews, etc, which is essential for promotion. But then you've got the other group that wants to log on for an hour or two a week and do something exciting in the limited time they have.
MMOs are wildly biased towards the first group. But the second group is where folks with jobs and incomes and shit actually live.
Some of the most fun I had in WoW was in doing a dungeon for the first or second time. Because its new and the challenges are fresh and unexpected, it feels like I'm getting a new slice of content, even if the dungeon is five years old for everyone else. Grinding my level until I could do the next dungeon was a pain in the ass. But the allure of the next new adventure kept me going along... until my friends outpaced me and I had nobody except randoms to play with.
I think a game that takes advantage of transferable skills, rather than a discrete in-game numeric level, might be a good way to get around some of this. Something where you interact and play through adventures and learn about the Lore, then have to solve a Captcha tied to information in the game or solve a puzzle based on things you've already seen and done up till this point, could let people adventure at their own difficulty so to speak.
You see a bit of this in Counterstrike, where the hand-eye coordination you developed in other shooters transfers fairly neatly to this shooter. And playing this game refines your skills until you pick up the next shooter. Same with DOTA-style games, where the knowledge of the character class is the underpinning of the quality of the player more than the number of mobs you smashed over your career in the game.
I like the idea of characters becoming active NPCs while players are logged out. Having a home in game and establishing some passively interactive activity creates a certain digital community without having people be online constantly. But I think it runs the risk of implementing features that keep drawing people back into the game, which some folks will find too obsessive and others too annoying.
Idk. I think there's a fundamental appeal to MMOs that's just not... great. Anything that's such a huge time sink, but whose benefits just kinda evaporate as soon as you log out, just feels fundamentally wrong to me now. Maybe its a silly feeling. All games are ultimately like that. But it just feels like a giant tease.
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I actually found the second demon fight to be extremely amusing purely because of the lore tidbit that retaining your magic makes you more powerfulFrieren is the ace representation I needed
It was just a very long build up to reveal "ancient Elven mage trained by legendary wizard kinda powerful actually"
It was fairly important to establish just how much mana she's got now as a result of consistent training her entire lifetime to raise it. Also I think it was very important to establish that her primary tactic (which she learned from her teacher) is to prey on opponents completely underestimating her strength.
She even mentions that Aura could have beaten her if it had been a head on fight with all of her knights. But ultimately the thing that wins this fight was a very simple deception that she's carried with her from her teacher her whole life.
And she's passing that same deception to Fern too.
This whole arc establishes one of the more important skills passed between teacher and pupil.
my problem with demons is their lore. It's the only thing that makes me uncomfortable in Frieren. They are intelligent beings but unlike other races like humans, dwarfes and elves, they are born evil. And in this anime, if you doubt that all demons are monsters that should be purged, you will be punished by rules of this world. I don't like it. This is imaginary world, you can set it up how you want but for some reason the creators of manga/anime decided to create a world where some beings are just simply evil by nature and must be eliminated. I would like if in Frieren world, demons would be something that people become, like by solding their soul to dark forces or something. In that case i wouldn't be having a problem with them. Also, to be fair, this problem isn't unique to Frieren, a lot of fantasy stories has the same problem. But i was hoping that there wouldn't be such thing in Frieren :(
Yeah, I have the same problem with the demons. I'd rather they just make them straight up ontologically evil by being evil spirit's literally summoned from hell or something, rather than a race that "evolved" to prey on humans. At least the Demon King being Literally Satan would neatly sidestep all this skin-crawling Evo-Psych stuff
I'm not entirely against the concept of a race born evil (it's certainly not a new concept, and born evil races are what most people are accustomed to), but for myself I'm concerned with their depiction as being beyond the ability to reason with and that they use their speech just to trick and kill you, which sounds familiar to racist views of minorities.
It makes no sense to consider anyone as born with any morality (let alone set with one), since morality isn't really part of the world as such. But the demons inexplicably have basically an ideology to kill humans stuck in their brain that can't be changed and that's reactionary as fuck to write, nothing good comes of it. They had a softball among softballs with the infant demon to demonstrate that it's like a cultural divide that devolved into racism, but nope, demon orphan killed the humans who raised her. The only way that it could possibly be redeemed is if later on this was shown to be some kind of elaborate trick by a party invested in keeping the conflict going.
I can guarantee you weren't paying attention during this. The demon didn't do this out of some malice stemming from her demonhood, she literally did this in an attempt to make amends to the other villager. She killed the child of one of the villagers before she was adopted so she got another child as an offering.
Demons aren't malicious or evil in this setting, their thinking patterns are just fundamentally alien and that leads to conflict. Demons and humans cannot understand each other, that is the conflict in this setting. Demons aren't born with some sort of natural hatred of mankind.
This is like saying the fucking Cthuhlhu is problematic it's a sentient lifeform too.
The demon had some weird justification, but ultimately there is at least as much evidence to say it was just fucking with people (or simply hadn't figured out humans enough yet to devise a better excuse), and even if it was genuine ignorance, that still would not answer why the demon kid had to be killed rather than merely driven out.
Remember that the demons themselves say that they only learned to speak in order to lie, they delight in human suffering, exhibit stereotypical arrogance, feel fear of dying and joy at their tricks working. Most importantly: Humans and demons very obviously can understand each other because demons are excellent at manipulating humans! At the very least, they can understand humans, which undermines your thesis about the kid (though it is plausible that the kid is too young for this to apply) and further cements the demons being just that evil. Everything about all of the interactions we see with the more adult demons suggests that they know exactly what they are doing, morally speaking, from the perspective of humans.
btw, I do not recommend citing HP Lovecraft for "obviously unproblematic" counterexamples, his whole thing was comparing inhuman abominations to minorities. The Deep Ones are literally an allegory for his discovering having Welsh heritage.
A creature who murders entire families because it doesn't understand human society is still dangerous even if driven out. Letting it go live in the woods to hunt humans isn't the solution you think it is. If a bear was known to seek out and hunt humans, it should be put down.
You take what they say at face value when it benefits your point but when it comes to the child explaining their reasoning you dismiss it. You're cherry picking here.
There is literally an entire arc that revolves around demons and humans not being able to understand each other. The anime hasn't reached it yet but the entire impetus is a demon not understanding human emotions and trying to do so. Their understanding of human behavior is "If I claim to have a son who I love, they are more likely to spare me." It is a cold-calculated decision, they do not understand why humans are this way. You are objectively wrong on this.
Ah shit I forgot that since Lovecraft influenced cosmic horror I'm not allowed to use any example from Cosmic horror to prove a point. If Cthulhu is problematic because Lovecraft was, then the Sousou No Frieren is not problematic because the author hasn't been. But using the author as the only metric for determining a media's message is reductive to high hell.
I'm beginning to think you just buy into the logic of punitive bullshit. The kid seemed to not have any magic or anything like that, why not put it in prison? It wouldn't have the ability to hurt people and again is a fucking child, and perhaps then you could educate it. There are real humans with psychopathy who could conceivably make such a mistake, and we shouldn't euthanize them either.
I'm weighing something a child demon said versus what an adult demon with some authority as well as what Frieren, with her wealth of experience dealing with demons, said. It's said often enough that it's like a fucking slogan. I'm not cherrypicking, I'm considering what interpretation produces the most consistent answer, and that demons are extremely deceitful is basically the most established fact other than that they prey on humans. Maybe that shit is 4D chess by the author and there's a revelation that this is all just bigotry and cultural differences or something, but the material as-presented in the anime so far is highly fash.
I wonder how this is reconciled with the elaborate deceptions already pulled off, where demons managed to nearly control a town despite the people therein bearing enough suspicion of the demons that they planned to ambush and kill them initially. I can't really comment on what I haven't seen, though.
Blatant sophistry ignoring what I already said. Lovecraft had an ideological ax to grind (see the Deep Ones being Welsh) and your example wasn't "any example from Cosmic Horror" it was Lovecraft's boi. Of course, in Lovecraft's own writing, there is a similar effect as with Unseelie where he wasn't really looking for an answer to "Is this thing evil to the depths of its soul", his interests were "existential shock" at how it disrupts our understanding of nature and later on imperial conflict (see Mountains of Madness). Oh, and also how insidious it is that is has a multiracial cult of followers that are unconcerned with Lovecraft's white supremacist ideology and therefore d*generate, but I guess we're pretending Cthulhu is apolitical.
This trend in writing that I have mentioned, to answer critical thought about how we could all get along one day with "Nope, actually this race simply cannot be persuaded by any means to interact in a way that is compatible with human flourishing" is the most reactionary trend in fantasy writing and should be regarded as such instead of being excused on a completely bullshit basis.