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.
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?
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.
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.
