I enjoy the emotional story beats fine enough. I just find myself wishing the cast could be more unique and have a more entertaining adventure. And when it comes to showing how much fun this story can be, this exam was the perfect example of that with how it introduced tons of new characters that, compared our main crew, I found were a lot more entertaining. And bringing up that last bit of what you said, battles sequences are fun enough, but without characters you can get invested in, they can easily fall flat. So while I admit I may not care about the main cast as much as everyone else, I still like seeing them interact with different people and I wanna see how those interactions turn out. That’s why stuff like the second half of this season really stood out to me as some of Frieren’s best story telling so far since it manages to balance humor, conflict, and the bonds between the different characters in a way that the show didn’t really bother too much with in the first half. Though this probably just sounds like rambling so for that, I apologies and hope you have a great day.