2024 has been a great year for anime, and if you’re looking to dive into one of the best shows of the year, preorders are now live for Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End Part 1 on Blu-ray. This release contains part one of the critically acclaimed fantasy anime’s first season. It’s set to launch on December 17 and is currently available for $47.24 (was $70) at Crunchyroll.
$47.24 (was $70)
The Blu-ray release collects the first 16 episodes of Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End season one, plus a few special features like clean credit sequences, promotional videos, and more. It also includes a set of art cards featuring several of the characters from the main cast.
Adapted from an original manga series, the anime follows the titular Frieren, a powerful elf who has lived for over 1,000 years. By the time the show begins, she has just completed a 10-year-long quest to defeat the Demon King, alongside the heroes Himmel, Eisen, and Heiter. Because of her long life, a decade is nothing more than a brief moment in time for Frieren, and as the decades pass, Frieren slowly begins to understand human mortality and the connections she forges along the way. The result is an incredibly emotional series that hits you right in the feels, and with famed animation studio Madhouse bringing everything to life, Frieren looks magical.
If you’d like to check out the original manga developed by Tsukasa Abe and Kanehito Yamada, you can order several of the paperbacks for Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End right now. Like other manga releases from publisher Viz Media, these are your regular pocket-friendly paperbacks that read from right to left.
Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End Manga
More fantasy manga and anime deals
Frieren is one of several new, fantasy-themed anime and manga series to become popular over the past few years. If you enjoy Frieren’s wholesome story of friendship and fantasy adventuring, then you’ll likely also enjoy Delicious in Dungeon, which follows a party of dungeon-crawling adventurers on a mission to save a missing companion from the depths of an evil labyrinth–though in order to survive, they must learn to cook and eat the many strange monsters that live in the dungeon’s depths. The manga version was recently adapted into an anime for Netflix and season one is available to stream now–but if you prefer to read the full story first, you can preorder the full 14-volume manga run in a deluxe box set at Amazon ahead of its December 10 release.
There’s plenty of other great fantasy manga out there, the original manga version of Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind and the manga adaptation of The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, which you can check out at the links below. There’s also the upcoming Berserk Volume 42, which is the first new material for the long-running dark fantasy manga since the untimely passing of series creator Kentaro Miura 2021.