To be fair, she doesn’t need to show her powers.
Summary:
- Frieren has mostly been using the same spell over the course of the series.
- She doesn’t need to use anything else, because nothing can pose a threat to her.
- She is much stronger than we’ve been shown so far.
If you’ve been watching Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End (Sousou no Frieren), you probably know that Frieren is a great mage — and a member of a party that defeated the Demon Lord.
That has been mentioned a couple of times in the series, and we have seen glimpses of her true power against Aura. However, nothing so far was able to even remotely pose any danger to her. Funnily enough, this also means that a lot of her potential was left unexplored.
Frieren used a new spell in the latest episode
In the most recent episode (25), we finally saw Frieren showing slightly more of her power. She showed a new spell, Judradjim, one that we haven’t seen before — and it seems to be significantly more powerful than Zoltraak. It’s reasonable to assume that she has even more powerful spells — she just never had any reason to use them.
It was the first time we actually saw Frieren in any sort of danger. After all, she had to face herself. While that ultimately proved to be another obstacle she overcame with a bunch of smart tactics (and Fern’s help), it allowed us to look at her powers that we haven’t seen in the series before.
We know for fact that she’s even more powerful
The fact that Frieren doesn’t show all her powers is actually very realistic. She was stated to conceal her mana during the fight with Aura, something she’s been doing for a while.
Besides, she doesn’t really need to go all-out versus anyone — she’s just that strong. She has a practically unbreakable defense, can fly away when in danger, and uses Zoltraak to deal with the enemies — which is definitely not the spell that was used against the Demon Lord.
In fact, we were given some foreshadowing regarding Frieren’s magic arsenal back during her fight against Aura — it was mentioned that their prior confrontation was much flashier. That might or might not have referred to Judradjim — although the flashbacks with her training with Himmel suggest she can use even stronger spells.
Power level discussions don’t belong here
Is Frieren overpowered? Well, it really depends on your definition of the term. She’s definitely stronger than any enemy she faced so far, but the series is not just about action and power levels.
A lot of the time is spent on character interaction and development, and you can’t solve these problems by just blasting them away with Zoltraak.