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.
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.
spoiler
I liked the first demon fight, because it gave a big chunk of backstory and world building. This thing being a reminant of a prior era that was horrible back then but trivially defeated now was a clever way of iterating on the idea of "progress" within a fantasy setting.
I was less thrilled with the second demon, simply because "my pot of mana is bigger than yours" is a lame way to resolve conflict.
But the fight with the diplomats gave us another big chunk of plot, in so far as it established why the idea of a demon was so horrible. A monster in a man's form that preys on compassion is a good set piece for future drama.
At some point, the focus of the story is around the mystery of what occurred in the prior age. And demons are necessarily a big part of that. So introducing them as minor antagonists in order to unspool the story works well.
The pace of the conflicts does drag though. The only thing worse than a Naruto-esque low stakes fight scene is one that feels like filler.
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?
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.
I've been thinking about it and I sort of think you could have "training" as part of gameplay if you can make it fun and enjoyable. Perhaps a sort of arcade minigames thing? Like Maple Story 2 was doing. They're essentially Fall Guys style minigames, races, contests, memory games etc. If you came up with some fun ones you could have these as representations of the "training" your character does. Might need to be fairly varied with mmr to create added challenge and competition in this element of the game. The downside though is balancing this against what players probably want to be doing which is running dungeons... But even then I sort of think running dungeon dailies is a hyper repetitive task that people only "enjoy" because they're gaining progress points towards greater character strength. Perhaps you would offset this with harder and more challenging dungeons or other tasks set to players out adventuring outside of the cities. The issue here is that I think a lot of mmo players are playing mmos because they don't want a challenge they just want to over-level almost everything and be unstoppable gods.
Pokemon is interesting in a sense because you're not the one levelling up, the pokemon are. The levelling up in pokemon for trainers is collecting gym badges.
This isn't really relevant but I've also often wondered about more features from The Sims making their way over to mmos. Like characters engaging in conversation with nearby players of their own independence. For example let's say you go to the marketplace and you're there looking at the market boards, your character will indepently engage in conversation/actions while idle. Or just in passing out and about characters might greet one another, as you do in real life when you say good morning to a stranger in passing. These could affect social stats between characters, and could be influenced by the players in a roleplay kind of way. At the very least it could highly increase social interaction.
I think part of the problem with modern gaming is that you've got two very different cohorts of people. One group wants to escape reality entirely and play the game as much as possible. They're going to be the ones doing all your high level content and maxing out all your builds as fast as possible. Also the ones who will be doing a bunch of online discourse and YouTube reviews, etc, which is essential for promotion. But then you've got the other group that wants to log on for an hour or two a week and do something exciting in the limited time they have.
MMOs are wildly biased towards the first group. But the second group is where folks with jobs and incomes and shit actually live.
Some of the most fun I had in WoW was in doing a dungeon for the first or second time. Because its new and the challenges are fresh and unexpected, it feels like I'm getting a new slice of content, even if the dungeon is five years old for everyone else. Grinding my level until I could do the next dungeon was a pain in the ass. But the allure of the next new adventure kept me going along... until my friends outpaced me and I had nobody except randoms to play with.
I think a game that takes advantage of transferable skills, rather than a discrete in-game numeric level, might be a good way to get around some of this. Something where you interact and play through adventures and learn about the Lore, then have to solve a Captcha tied to information in the game or solve a puzzle based on things you've already seen and done up till this point, could let people adventure at their own difficulty so to speak.
You see a bit of this in Counterstrike, where the hand-eye coordination you developed in other shooters transfers fairly neatly to this shooter. And playing this game refines your skills until you pick up the next shooter. Same with DOTA-style games, where the knowledge of the character class is the underpinning of the quality of the player more than the number of mobs you smashed over your career in the game.
I like the idea of characters becoming active NPCs while players are logged out. Having a home in game and establishing some passively interactive activity creates a certain digital community without having people be online constantly. But I think it runs the risk of implementing features that keep drawing people back into the game, which some folks will find too obsessive and others too annoying.
Idk. I think there's a fundamental appeal to MMOs that's just not... great. Anything that's such a huge time sink, but whose benefits just kinda evaporate as soon as you log out, just feels fundamentally wrong to me now. Maybe its a silly feeling. All games are ultimately like that. But it just feels like a giant tease.
spoiler
I actually found the second demon fight to be extremely amusing purely because of the lore tidbit that retaining your magic makes you more powerful
Frieren is the ace representation I needed
It was just a very long build up to reveal "ancient Elven mage trained by legendary wizard kinda powerful actually"
It was fairly important to establish just how much mana she's got now as a result of consistent training her entire lifetime to raise it. Also I think it was very important to establish that her primary tactic (which she learned from her teacher) is to prey on opponents completely underestimating her strength.
She even mentions that Aura could have beaten her if it had been a head on fight with all of her knights. But ultimately the thing that wins this fight was a very simple deception that she's carried with her from her teacher her whole life.
And she's passing that same deception to Fern too.
This whole arc establishes one of the more important skills passed between teacher and pupil.