Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End vol. 1

You and your party members have just finished a ten-year journey to defeat the Dark Lord.  While you’ve saved the world and become famous for it, what do you do next?  If you’re the party’s elven mage, Frieren, then you bid your farewells and get back to doing what you’re really interested in:  Learning more about magic.  That is until she meets up with her old human and dwarven party members fifty years later and the march of time finally sinks in for the mage.  Frieren realizes that while the ten years she spent with them were a drop in the bucket for your lifespan, they were far more meaningful to those who don’t live for a thousand years or more.  Which is why Freiren is now determined to learn more about the people she adventured with, and the importance of getting to know other individuals in general.

“Beyond Journey’s End” isn’t the first series to tackle what happens when the good guys win and figure out what to do with the rest of their lives, and it won’t be the last.  If you think that I’m making this sound like vol. 1 places this title in the middle of that pack, you’d be correct.  While I doubt that the concept for this series won’t ever stop being novel to me, this first volume doesn’t have a whole lot to offer beyond that.  I kept waiting for it to throw out some kind of twist as Frieren goes about her new journeys and I never really got it.

This first volume is still a thoroughly pleasant read, if nothing else.  Writer Kanehito Yamada and artist Tsukasa Abe deliver a fantasy world that feels quite cosy, with its own quaint charm.  Frieren is a nice enough protagonist with her own faults and quirks to go along with her magical skill and seeing her grow is fun enough.  Highlights include her adoption of an apprentice and their encounter with a servant of the Dark Lord who is on the wrong end of the march of time.  The end of this volume implies that there’s going to be at least a short-term focus in the storytelling, but we’ll see how long that lasts.  As it is, “Beyond Journey’s End” makes itself out to be decent comfort food for those who like this kind of fantasy storytelling.