While Solo Leveling ultimately became Crunchyroll’s Anime of the Year in 2025, Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End was on the short list of people’s uncrowned kings of anime that year, and for good reason; it took everyone by surprise with how disarmingly good the show was. Studio Madhouse‘s anime adaptation of Frieren also doubled as a return to form for old-school fantasy anime without all the gimmicks that’ve made the genre derivative over the past decade.
The fantasy genre, in large part, up to that point was oversaturated with isekai shows that basically played Mad Libs with their sentence-long permutated premises of so-and-so with a mundane modern/RPG-class day job actually being goated at that job and getting all the ladies and what have you, that it all but became synonymous with the genre. Rather than shake the puzzle pieces that make up the hallmarks of the fantasy genre and haphazardly pick up what plays up the min-maxing stats of a hero’s progression the most, Frieren was a return to form to old-school fantasy tales where character and world-building lead to growth, not arbitrary number crunching.
Its second season on Crunchyroll looks to be more of a good thing. For those who still haven’t been put on to the show, allow us to count the ways why Frieren is a household name in the anime community as a must-watch show in this jam-packed season.
On the whole, what makes Frieren such a magical breath of fresh air is that it has a pretty meditative vibe to watch—kind of like an animated lo-fi beats video with a fantasy twang to it. The show begins with Frieren, the mage of the heroes’ party, at the end of her great adventure, having already defeated the big evil and saved the world. When her party go their separate ways, years pass like seconds for her, what with her being an elf, leading to a bit of survivor’s guilt as she sees the party members she spent a non-insignificant portion of their lives adventuring with die, among them the hero Himmel, who definitely had feelings for Frieren. Feelings Frieren didn’t recognize until it was too late.
Do you get deja vu? #frieren pic.twitter.com/7Q4CoWcXDr
— 𝐶ae (@caezelnut) January 17, 2026
But life marches on. This time around, however, Frieren aims to rectify her past mistakes by taking in the small, mundane moments with a new party as she retraces her steps from her great adventure as the mentor and, let’s be honest, surrogate parent of a warrior named Stark and a fledgling mage named Fern. These are two heroes who also just so happened to be the previous apprentices of Frieren’s party members. Along the way she takes the time to really soak in the little moments that make life so wonderful; this is made abundantly more poetic and a touch melancholic since Frieren is a mage of a thousand or so years, making her functionally immortal compared to her human allies.
She didn’t appreciate this enough with her past party, and she regrets having had to lay two of her friends to rest. She doesn’t want to repeat that with her younger upstart party.
While the show is still primarily all vibes, it is far from aimless. Ultimately, Frieren’s goal is to reach Aureole, the rumored final resting place of souls, so she can speak to Himmel the hero again and bid him a proper farewell. But that doesn’t mean she and her friends can’t accept a few side quests along the way. Be that killing demons, entering a mage tournament that had no business being as good as it was, or taking on garden-variety quests for the chance that a chest is actually filled with treasures and isn’t another mimic—a vice uniquely Frieren’s.
When the show isn’t wowing fans with its pensive writing and likeable ensemble, it’s blowing their minds when the otherwise chill anime’s action pops off incredibly hard. Be it from its flourishing of intricately animating the ruffles of moving fabric as characters take off jackets or the kinetic force of riding alongside a dragon, the show’s fight scenes go above and beyond what one would assume it would, given both its contemplative premise and the manga’s tendency to forgo showcasing its fights so prominently. Translation: The show hits.
Much of what makes Frieren feel so special behind the scenes comes down to how outstanding Madhouse has been at adapting the manga and at keeping the show in the anime zeitgeist. Outside of the content of its episodes, that tender love and care also translates into season two’s outro, “The Story of Us” by Milet, where artist Mimei Aoume used hand-drawn colored pencil sketches to create its ending sequence, as well as its social media crew making damn-near daily posts of Frieren plushies in all kinds of odd real-life settings.
https://t.co/oY44O5Nr3O pic.twitter.com/HVrtitc0TH
— 青梅美芽AoumeMimei (@aoumemimei) January 18, 2026
It also probably doesn’t hurt that the show triggered a whole artist boom on Twitter when a fan asked folks on Reddit for tips on how to draw Frieren with an uptilted head pose from a lower perspective. Oh, also, a real-life Frieren fan stopped a knife attack in 2024, becoming a local hero, because “if Himmel was there, he would’ve done the same thing.”
Seeing as how One Piece also became a symbol of rebellion, Frieren being right up there as a symbol of heroism is as good an example as any of its influence on the anime community in their day-to-day lives in the short span we’ve had it in the mainstream.
While season two comes with a bit of a dour note that it will only be 10 episodes, compared to the first season’s double-cour (part) 28-episode run, much of that is due to the ongoing manga also suffering from multiple hiatuses. This, in part, is due to the authors’ health, according to AV Club. (The series is written by Kanehito Yamada and illustrated by Tsukasa Abe.) That said, there’s still plenty of material to be covered this season, which the impatient anime-onlys among us can read ahead of time on the Viz Manga app. For what it’s worth, we’re guessing the season will likely end somewhere around chapter 71~77 for those who care for that sort of thing (season two starts on chapter 61, btw).
New episodes of Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End Season 2 stream every Friday on Crunchyroll.
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