After the Demon King’s defeat, the victorious hero’s party returns home. After disbanding, the elven mage Frieren continues journeying to indulge her hobby of collecting spells. However, being a long-living elf, fifty years pass in the blink of an eye for her. Now, she finds her old companions and friends slowly passing away from age one by one.
Before his death, Heiter the cleric manages to foist his young ward, Fern, onto Frieren as her apprentice mage. Together, they travel to collect spells, but after visiting many locations that Frieren had once visited with the hero’s party, she begins to ponder the missed opportunity to form deeper bonds with her now-dead comrades and cherish the new opportunities she has with her current ones.
Finally, an anime that takes advantage of long-living elves to hurt me deeply! Emotional anime fans rejoice! If you are looking for more anime recommendations like Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End, head on down below.
Anime Like Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End
For Fans of The Trials of a Long Lifespan
To Your Eternity
One day, an entity, for reasons unknown, threw an orb to Earth. With no emotion or identity, the orb is meant to gather sensations and is able to take the shape of things it encounters as it learns.
For many years, it was a rock, and then it became moss, and when a wolf took its last breath near it, it became the wolf. After wandering for some time, it met a boy. After a long struggle, the boy, too, took his last breath.
With human form, now the orb sets off on his never-ending journey where he will meet many new people and have many new experiences.
Both Frieren and To Your Eternity are long, wandering anime about ageless, long-living characters who have skewed concepts of time. The life of a human is but a blink of the eye for them.
As such, both series follow main characters that have difficulties understanding human emotions, but are continuously trying to understand them and the human experience. Of course, most often, it ends in heart-breaking emotional tales or melancholy moments of serenity.
While Frieren has the journey framed around the titular character collecting magic and retracing her journey, To Your Eternity is often just aimless wandering. However, as he possesses the ability to become people he bonded with, it uses that for moments of action and does later manifest a pretty intricate plot.
The Ancient Magus’ Bride
After being abandoned by her family, Chise Hatori is a 16-year-old teenager without hope.
In order to not have to worry about herself, she sells herself to slavers, only to be purchased by Magus Elias Ainsworth.
There, she is told she will become his apprentice and, in the future, his bride. Together, they work to build a relationship and work to control her own magus powers that will eventually result in her early death.
Anime has literally tons of fantasy worlds, but they all feel rather boilerplate and showcasing the world is less of a focus. Both Frieren and The Ancient Magus’ Bride are fantasy anime that explore the emotional tales of the characters, but also showcase a vast and interesting fantasy world.
The Ancient Magus’ Bride isn’t a journey anime. The main characters always return to a home. However, it, like Frieren, does follow a female main character who has difficulty connecting to others emotionally. Alternatively, the male lead is also a long-living creature that has a similarly difficult time understand human behavior. For an even further extra layer, a main antagonist is also an immortal whose suffering has shut himself off from kinder human emotions.
Both series explore the emotional aspects of characters that have problems connecting either due to how they were raised or because time has different meanings to them.
Somali and the Forest Guardian
With humanity all but extinct after severe prosecution, the world is ruled over by spirits and all manner of strange creatures.
One day, a golem that serves as guardian of the forest meets a young human girl.
She has no memory of her parents, but the golem decides to at least seek out other humans to return her.
Both Frieren and Somali and the Forest Guardian are set up to follow long-living beings in a fantasy world. While Frieren has always been journeying, Golem is, as the title says, a forest guardian.
The fundamental difference between Frieren and Somali and the Forest Guardian is not so much what it explores, but how it explores it. Both series are about emotionless and long-living characters dealing with the concept of death. However, unlike Frieren who is learning to cherish those she gets close to, Golem is wrestling with the concept that he will stop functioning and leave someone he cares for behind very soon.
While both are emotional tales that explore those emotions with episodic visits to new fantasy locations, Somali and the Forest Guardian is more of a wholesome childcare anime since Golem’s companion is a very young child that cannot care for herself.
Vivy – The Fluorite Eye’s Song
In a theme park ran by AI, there is a lonely stage where the first-ever autonomous humanoid sings in order to fulfill her mission of making everyone happy with her songs.
This AI, named Diva but given the nickname of Vivy by a young fan, has an encounter with an AI named Matsumoto who explains he traveled from 100 years in the future where AI have advanced so much that they rebelled and started exterminating humanity.
Together, he guides her to singularity points on a hundred-year journey in order to change the course of history.
What are androids if not sci-fi’s version of elves. Though, there are elves in sci-fi too. Anyway, both Vivy and Frieren tell different stories, but play with the same concept of showing time pass through a being who does not age or die like normal humans.
While Frieren just showcases a long emotional journey following an long-living elf, Vivy provides a unique twist on time travel by showcasing moments in time through the eyes of an android that never dies.
Both series use these concepts to tell short tales surrounding the areas the main characters visit or the points in time they are at. However, Vivy also comes with an overarching plot that encapsulates all these emotional short stories.
While very different in setting, both Frieren and Vivy are actually excellent at displaying the emotional impact of watching the world change and die when you never do.
For Fans of Journeying
Kino’s Journey
Accompanied by her talking motorcycle, Hermes, Kino travels through her mysterious world, spending only three days and two nights in each town. The idea is that three days is enough to learn almost everything about a place. This is the story of her journey.
Both Frieren and Kino’s Journey are about the journey of the titular female character. Furthermore, they are both episodic anime that use the various new settings as a way to explore deeper than surface concepts.
However, while Frieren is exploring more emotional concepts, Kino’s Journey is often more focused on philosophical concepts based around the unique societies that she visits.
If you enjoy journey anime that shows a diverse world that really feels like you can get lost in it and explore it through watching, Kino’s Journey offers that. However, Kino’s Journey doesn’t focus very heavily on the main character herself in comparison to Frieren who is very much the focus of her own series.
Girls’ Last Tour
With all civilization dead, only Chito and Yuuri remain. Together they decide to hop on their motorbike and wander aimlessly looking for their next meal and fuel.
Despite a bleak existence, they remain each other’s light in this dead world.
Both Frieren and Girls’ Last Tour are journey anime that work with the same concept of “Mono no Aware,” or the fleeting, ephemeral nature of life. Everything in the world is temporary and should be enjoyed in the moment because you may not get another one.
However, while Frieren is about a journey through a fantasy land, Girls’ Last Tour is about a journey through a world that has ended. Life will always end and new life will be born in the world of Frieren, but Girls’ Last Tour has almost nothing left. So while Frieren offers up just as much hope as there is melancholy, Girls’ Last Tour has only melancholy. Yet, both still have the same message of enjoying what can be enjoyed when you can, even if it seems meaningless.
Wandering Witch – The Journey of Elaina
Ever since she was a child, Elaina has been enamored by the stories in her favorite book. It tells the tale of Nike, a famous witch who enjoyed many great adventures around the world.
After becoming a fully-fledged witch herself, she departs, becoming entangled in a number of stories of those she meets around the world.
Both Frieren and Wandering Witch are about mages traveling the world and getting caught up in the stories of others. However, while both are episodic, Frieren does have some semblance of an overall plot. Wandering Witch is very much using the short stories as a plot.
While they have similar set ups and showcase an interesting fantasy land, Frieren and Wandering Witch differ a bit in their main characters. Frieren has her very obvious flaws, but is otherwise an easy to like main character. Alternatively, Elaina has very obvious flaws, but those flaws kind of make her a little more difficult to like. You will find Elaina’s self-centerness either very refreshing or insufferable – sometimes it varies by the episode.
It is also worth noting that Frieren has sad undertones because it deals with grief and an ever-changing world, but Wandering Witch is a lot darker than it looks. Some of its episodic stories are pretty messed up.
Mushishi
In this world, there exist Mushi, spirits that often exist with no purpose. However, these Mushi can affect the physical world in countless forms from diseases to more pleasant phenomenon.
Why do these Mushi exist?
That is the question that Ginko the Mushi-shi, a researcher on the phenomenon, asks himself as he travels the land investigating Mushi-related incidents.
Both Frieren and Mushishi follow individuals who travel in order to learn. Frieren is collecting spells and Ginko is studying mushi. On their never-ending journey, they meet people and explore small episodic adventures.
However, what these series have in common is a passion for melancholy. Frieren more frequently explores pleasant moments thanks to her companions, but they are ever-aging and her she is still gripped with regret from not cherishing her previous companions. Mushishi, alternatively, features some good phenomenon that Mushi can cause, but more often than not, Mushi lead Ginko to some sort of sad tale to observe.
Overall, Frieren is an anime about the main character’s journey, but Mushishi is about short stories and uses the main character as a mouthpiece to tell them.
For Fans of Grief and Survivor’s Guilt
86
For years, the Republic of San Magnolia has been at war with the Giadian Empire. They were constantly plagued by their hordes of unmanned drones until the government created an unmanned solution of their own, finally able to wage their war without casualties.
However, that is not quite the truth. The “unmanned” combat weapons are actually used by those of the 86th sector of the Republic, but they are not considered even human.
This is the tale of both Shin, an 86er and battle commander, and Lena, their sympathetic handler who remotely commands the detachment from inside the city.
Although 86 and Frieren are innately different in that one is a journeying anime through a fantasy land and the other is about child soldiers fighting a sci-fi war against self-replicating machines, what they share is a passion for emotion – particularly when it comes to death.
Like how Frieren watches her friends all slowly die because she is ageless, 86 is about a skilled commander watching everyone he ever knew die because of war. Both series are unique in that they never gloss over the emotional toll that these events have on the main characters nor do they allow the main characters to shut themselves off from feeling emotions either.
In fact, both Frieren and 86 are actually about main characters taking steps to better bond with those that they are close to.
If you like anime that doles out melancholy and happiness in equal measure, but puts a lot of effort into telling deeply emotional tales, then 86 is pretty amazing at it. It does, however, have more action in it.
Violet Evergarden
After the Great War and her time in it came to an end, Violet Evergarden is adrift. Her purpose was once only battle, and now she must find a new one.
After recovering from the loss of her arms, Violet takes up a job at the CH Postal Services. Here she transcribes people’s thoughts into what should be emotional letters. While the “emotional” part seems to greatly escape her, she aims to learn how to move people with words.
Both Frieren and Violet Evergarden start “at the end,” so to speak. The main character had been on a world-saving adventure or in a war, and the anime starts after that. As such, it focuses very much on the “what comes next” of it all.
While Frieren journeys to gather spells and keeps getting children foisted upon her by dying friends, Violet Evergarden is about a girl raised to be a tool of war getting a normal person job. Both Frieren and Violet Evergarden have titular main characters that are learning to connect with people.
Violet Evergarden has a disconnect from emotions since she was raised to fight and die. Frieren has a disconnect because she outlives most people she meets. As such, you have two emotionally stunted characters learning to feel and cherish for the first time. It is a very rich set up for some deeply emotional tales.
Do you have more anime recommendations like Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End? Let fans know in the comments section below.
