tRIEREN: Beyond Journey’s End – Part 1 Blu-Ray Review
葬送のフリーレン
Sōsō no Frieren

Seeing as how I love the Frieren franchise so much, it was only natural that I was going to purchase the Blu-ray once it released. The only downside was finding time to actually sit in my living room and watch. Now I have, here is my review of the BD plus a couple of additional thoughts about the first half of the series I didn’t note in my series review.

–> Buy FRIEREN: Beyond Journey’s End – Part 1 from Amazon.com!

What’s in the Case?

The FRIEREN: Beyond Journey’s End – Part 1 set comes with everything you see below.

There are two Blu-ray discs, three DVD discs, four pieces of artwork cards, and the disc comes in a slipcover.

Extras and More

Sadly, there’s not much in the way of extras beyond your typical anime release. There are next episode previews, textless opening and ending Songs, including the special broadcast ending song. In addition, there are also promo videos.

There are TWO, unskippable anti-piracy warnings, ’cause who doesn’t like looking at those WHEN I DIDN’T PIRATE THE BLOODY THING! For some whacked reason, Crunchyroll then throws us disclaimer about the views and opinions expressed as well as the other extras not getting a rating. That made me think we might have cool extras, but no, it is just CR throwing in rubbish ’cause “reasons”.

I’d seen some folks claim that this release did not have the Japanese audio with subtitles. I can assure you that the official release does include this. Its just that English is the default, so you have to go to settings to change it to Japanese and use subtitles. Then again, that’s what I’ve always had to do for anime titles to watch them in Japanese (unless they didn’t have an English dub track), so I don’t know what those people were on about.

Visually, this looked good on my 4K TV and sounded great too. While I have no problem watching streaming stuff on my PC, there is something about watching stuff on a giant TV.

Additional Series Thoughts

As I rewatched the first 16 episodes, I realized that while I’d watched the individual episodes TONS of times, I’d never rewatched the whole series from end to end. As such, I was struck by some little things that came up early on that have payoffs later.

For a start, in the first episode, Frieren casually looks at a ring before putting it away and saying goodbye to Heiter and Eisen. It was then that I realize that this was the ring Himmel gave her and which was the focus half of episode 14. Sadly, this moment wasn’t in the first chapter of the manga. However, this is an example of a positive addition to the anime adaptation.

Another moment that sprung to mind was Fern recalling all of the worthless things that Frieren has, including a potion to dissolve clothing. That potion comes into play for Stark’s birthday. The moment is in the manga, but still, these are nice moments that mean nothing on the first watch, but on the rewatch, makes one sit up and go, “Oh! I know that item comes into play later!”

Final Thoughts and Conclusion

While there’s not much in terms of extras in FRIEREN: Beyond Journey’s End – Part 1, nevertheless, it is well worth the purchase just to have this series on physical media if you like the series. I can’t wait for Crunchyroll to release the second part.