Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End was the most anticipated new anime of the Fall 2023 season and with good reason. Kanehito Yamada and Tsukasa Abe’s manga already had both critical and commercial success prior to its anime adaptation, having even won big at the 25th annual Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize.
With the iconic studio behind Hunter x Hunter and One Punch Man Season 1, Madhouse, in charge of the production and the director of Bocchi! The Rock, Keiichirou Saitou, at the helm, the series was always in good hands. And whether it be in terms of the breathtaking visuals and the animation or its profound and tranquil premise of a slice-of-life story about longing and adventure set in a classic high-fantasy world, the two-hour-long special premiere absolutely delivered and lived up to the hype surrounding this series.
Frieren premiered with more than 8.6 million viewers in Japan.
Frieren was engineered to be a hit and is completely turning out to be just that, with the premiere nabbing a record-breaking 8.6 million viewers with Live and 7 days of DVR viewing across 5.64 million households, scoring an individual rating of 6.8%.
Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End even outdid the premiere of mega Jump hit, SPY x FAMILY Season 1, which debuted with Live+7 DVR viewership figures of 6.919 million viewers with an individual rating of 5.5% amongst 4.468 million households in April 2022.
The Frieren manga also got quite a solid boost in the backlog sales, with the manga selling over 400,000 copies within just nine days of the anime’s premiere.
Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End is One of the Best Fantasy Shows in Recent Memory.
Frieren is charming, Frieren is calm, it is quiet, and it is mundane, and that’s what helps the series capture the essence of the fantasy genre and this beautiful post-war world. It’s largely different from fantasy shows like The Witcher and Shadow and Bone, but it is probably more impressive with its larger-than-life characters and its rich and emotionally poignant narrative, which appeals to the human in you and gives you this sense of feel-good nostalgia and this sense of appreciation for the world you see in your screen and the world you see outside of it.
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And all of it is captured beautifully with its sublime animation. Frieren is one of the best fantasy shows in recent memory, and we hope this series will become a huge hit. And we can’t wait to see more of it.
Anime Viewership: Jujutsu Kaisen Episode 10, Zom 100, One Piece, and More.
The Paripi Koumei live-action is also off to a great start, with more than 8.42 million people across 5.95 million households tuning into the premiere of the TV drama, which has followed the massive success of the anime that ran for 12 episodes last year.
Meanwhile, Jujutsu Kaisen continued to be steady in viewership as 6.16 million viewers tuned into Episode 10 across Live and 7 days of DVR viewing, scoring an individual rating of 4.9% across 4.56 million households. One Piece has also been quite steady, with its September batches of episodes mainly scoring a viewership of about 2.2 million Live on average and around 2.4 million on 7 days of DVR, giving these episodes a total viewership in the range of 4.4 million to 5 million. The latest of them, Episode 1077, garnered over 5.03 million viewers.
READ MORE: Jujutsu Kaisen Season 2 Hits Series High in Viewership
The latest episode of Sazae-san scored a live viewership of 7.3 million across 4.1 million households. Meanwhile, Zom 100 Episode 10 scored a viewership of 2.2 million across 1.13 million households; while production delays have hampered the series, the viewership for Zom 100 on Live TV has only improved with time.
(It should also be noted that Sazae-san only has little DVR potential since it is already a big primetime family TV anime.)
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Source: Video Research Ltd.
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