Frieren: Beyond Journey's End Season 2 Review

The first season did something no adaptation of a quiet manga is supposed to get away with. Keiichiro Saito opened on the funeral of a hero nobody in the audience had met, ran four episodes as a feature length premiere, and then spent twenty four more letting an immortal elf work out slowly what she failed to notice about a man she travelled with for ten years. It worked because the direction trusts silence.

Evan Call's score sits out whole scenes, Reiko Nagasawa's designs keep Frieren's face almost still so that a small change carries, and Madhouse put their money into the flashback cuts rather than the spectacle. The second season inherits a harder job. The first class mage examination was the closest the story has come to a conventional shonen structure, with a large cast of competitors, explicit rules and real fights, and it is the arc that convinced sceptics the show could stage action when it chose to.

What follows is a return to the road, with the examination's survivors now part of the furniture, which means the series has to make the deliberate pace feel like a choice again rather than a retreat. Madhouse are the right studio for that, Saito has already proved he can hold a shot, and Fern and Stark remain the reason the format works: the joke and the grief run through the same two people.