Sousou no Frieren

[MFauli]

The water-girl getting a default-victory just because there's rain was stupid. If it was that easy ... and then why didn't the guy win, when he can literally manipulate the earth that's everywhere?

Was also stupid how Denken and the guy literally claimed to have ZERO mana left. Come on, you never looked like you were that exhausted, there should be enough mana left to overpower that loser group at the end.

I'm liking this anime now quite some, but what overall ruins it for me is everyone's lack of emotion. It's like everyone is suffering from depression combined with Bleach-syndrome (making a cool/smug facial expression until you lose).

Bummer Fern didn't use the see-through-spell on her team mate ;>

[Ryllharu]

The water-girl getting a default-victory just because there's rain was stupid. If it was that easy ... and then why didn't the guy win, when he can literally manipulate the earth that's everywhere?

Rule of cool. In the rain, water and lightning mages never lose. They'll always lose in deserts.

There is a limited amount of earth that can be moved in an area, what you can see and what is close. Do not underestimate the tremendous volumes of water that are coming down in the rain. It is distributed.

1 square km in even a light rainstorm (higher end of "light rain" like they were getting) gets 4 million liters of rain total in an hour.

Gathering that giant ball of water in minutes is easy.

They have zero mana left because every ounce of it went into the shield that broke. Attacks land either because you didn't put the shield up in time, or the attack vs your shield zaps your MP and the shield breaks when you hit zero.

Yep.

That's why Fern and Frieren fight the way they do. "You only need basic (zoltraak) spells." The barrier is very strong, but it also is very mana hungry, and as Richter pointed out, its activation time matters a lot, so it isn't perfect, but does the job.

The "old school" way of fighting is exhausting your opponents mana to mages. In its true purpose, killing demons, it is about being extremely fast and efficient and hiding your own mana pool capacity. Demons will always have a greater mana pool than humans.

Zoltraak is very efficient because it isn't particularly flashy. Saturation of attacks swiftly overwhelms your opponent. Experienced mages use pinpoint barriers. Novices use bigger spheres.

Modern mages are coming up with innovative ways to defeat each other, but they're missing the point.

And Flamme is wrong. Frieren isn't a peacetime mage. She's the last true wartime mage (though realistically, she spans all time periods). Someone like Denken is a proper peacetime mage. Same attitude Frieren has, and his goal is very simple.