News
Frieren Online Festival Interactive Experience Hosts Digital Museum, AR Experience, More
posted on by Adriana Hazra
Shogakukan announced on Wednesday it is hosting a "Frieren Online Festival" interactive experience from December 4 through May 31. Tickets to the festival cost 1,650 yen (about US$11) and grant fans access to a digital "Museum Area" as well as audio guides, custom avatars, and custom backgrounds. Basic access to the interactive event is free. The event will launch at 12:00 p.m. JST (December 3 at 10:00 p.m. EST).
The "Current Journey" section of the digital museum opened on December 4 and the "Past Journey" section opens on December 25. The fan interaction period for the festival will be from December 4 through January 31, after which the platform will offer a single-player experience. The staff of the festival released a schedule for the events.
The event is accessible via smartphone or PC and an S-PACE account is required. The interactive part of the experience allows fans to submit messages to the manga creators, share opinions with other fans, submit art, and design spells.
Nobuhiko Okamoto (voice actor for Himmel) narrates the Japanese audio guide, and Shogakukan noted a different person will narrate the English audio guide.
The Frieren: Beyond Journey's End anime premiered with a two-hour special on September 29, 2023. It is the first ever television anime series to premiere in NTV's "Kinyō Roadshow," a Friday evening programming block usually reserved for feature films. The anime then started airing later episodes in October 2023 at 11:00 p.m. JST in NTV's new anime timeslot, "FRIDAY ANIME NIGHT." The first season ran for two consecutive cours (quarters of a year) until March 2024. Crunchyroll streamed the first season as it aired, and it is also streaming an English dub.
Viz Media has licensed the manga, and it describes the story:
The adventure is over but life goes on for an elf mage just beginning to learn what living is all about. Elf mage Frieren and her courageous fellow adventurers have defeated the Demon King and brought peace to the land. But Frieren will long outlive the rest of her former party. How will she come to understand what life means to the people around her? Decades after their victory, the funeral of one her friends confronts Frieren with her own near immortality. Frieren sets out to fulfill the last wishes of her comrades and finds herself beginning a new adventure…
Yamada and Abe launched the ongoing manga in Shogakukan's Weekly Shonen Sunday magazine in April 2020. The manga has won several awards, including the New Creator Prize for the 25th Annual Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize in 2021 and the 14th Manga Taisho Award in 2021. In addition, the manga was nominated for Best Shōnen Manga for Kodansha's 45th annual Manga Awards in 2021 and the 46th awards in May 2022. The American Library Association's Graphic Novels & Comics Round Table (GNCRT) included the manga in its top 10 list of 2022 Best Graphic Novels for Adults Reading List.
Source: Press release
