Frieren: Beyond Journey's End

Frieren holds the highest score in MyAnimeList's history — 9.28 out of 10 — surpassing Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, which had sat at the top for more than fifteen years. Madhouse's adaptation premiered in fall 2023, also landed a 100% Rotten Tomatoes score, and won Crunchyroll's Anime of the Year for 2024; the manga has sold 35 million copies worldwide. What earns that reception isn't spectacle — it's a fantasy about an elf mage slowly reckoning with how briefly humans live, using that premise to sit with grief and memory in a way genre fiction rarely bothers to. Unlike My Hero Academia's action-driven crossover, Frieren won over literary critics who don't normally touch anime — a much harder crowd to move.