Sousou no Frieren – Episode 19

Hopefully the payoff for all of the setup in this episode is gonna be good.
(also I hope getting my professional engineering license isn’t going to be this deadly – yikes)

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Truly, Frieren has entered its Boufbowl arc. Bet you weren’t expecting a Wakfu reference, eh? For those unfamiliar with this French multimedia franchise, Wakfu has (in addition to numerous games and some animated films) at least four seasons of fantasy adventure cartoons, and the first two – which are the only ones I’ve seen – each took fully three episodes in the middle to interrupt the quests that the main cast were pursuing to force them to play a magical mashup of American Football and perhaps Rugby (officially translated as Gobbowl in English, due to being based on another word that I’m not going to bother to look up). Basically the parallels that I’m trying to draw here are that, instead of travelling, we’re suddenly stuck in an arena for several chapters and in conflict with a wide variety of new characters who need to be sort-of introduced but who hopefully aren’t going to stay relevant. This isn’t to say that such things can’t be entertaining – I had fun with the first Boufball arc and only really got bored with the second one in the third episode (that may only have been because it wasn’t as well integrated, but it’s been too long for me to be certain).

It does feel like surprisingly little actually happens in this episode, specifically, though. Lots of details about the situation everyone is in need to be hashed out or reiterated or clarified, before and after Frieren’s party enacts their plan, and the perspective flips around Frieren’s team, Fern’s team (who find themselves fighting another team), and the team being de-facto led by Beardy McMonocle Denken, who begin hunting Frieren’s team. There are some interesting tidbits, like how Fern’s style of magical combat honed by travelling with Frieren comes off as old-fashioned, but most of the focus is on how Frieren and her co-dependent weirdos disrupt the testing environment, and how everybody else responds.

The weirdest part is how it abruptly ends in the middle of a conversation.

Summary:

Hopefully the payoff for all of the setup in this episode is gonna be good.
(also I hope getting my professional engineering license isn’t going to be this deadly – yikes)

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