Yaoguai Mingdan

English name: Monster List. There are 3 arcs, 6 episodes each from 18 episodes, each episode around 10 minutes long, except for the first episode which is 20 minutes long. The donghua is set in a world where unbeknownst to humans, there are monsters that take on the form of humans, co-living with humans. A storytelling driven by fate and promises.

In the first arc, it starts off with hot seductions on men from a spirit monster girl called Hehuan, absorbing their life force and killing them. The protagonist Feng Xi's life changes when turns out his new girlfriend Su Jiuer, is also a monster wolf ... girl. Su Jiuer knows Feng Xi had long forgotten who she really was, they were together before. Vulnerable right now, she wants to protect him from other monsters. When Feng Xi and Su Jiuer crosses with Hehuan. It tells the tale of these monsters as they approach the protagonist to converse and fight for their promises. Good arc.

In the second arc, at witness of Feng Xi’s accidental released hidden power, by the Taoist master watching him, he sends his priest girl disciple, a cute black hair girl Guo Shuang the task to get close to Feng Xi and watch over him, and with opportunity cultivate with each other (by sex), don't worry, it's just some teasing, no sex ever happens. Feng Xi already had a similar experience with Hehuan so he’s really cautious, but Guo has no malice. It can be established that both Guo and Su like Feng, but as they fight together against other monsters, will there be room for love or just sacrifice? Good arc.

In the third arc, like how Feng, Guo, and Su were fated in the present, they were fated in the past. It tells of Feng Xi and Guo’s past reincarnations, the origin of the story when humans and monsters were at war. Their past reincarnations like the present also fought against that same strong monster. Good arc.

This donghua is an old one. I've finally gotten around to watching it. I remember when this first came out, almost 10 years ago, when the manhua was at the height of its popularity This donghua is adapted the manhua by the same name and is one of my all-time favorites. I once spent about 2 years translating about 250 chapters (chapters 69-331) under the name Yue Er. Considering that this donghua has 2 seasons out, I will also talk a little bit about S2 in this review.

Before I being my review, I would also like to point out something out. This was among the ... first attempts by AC.QQ, now owned by Tencent, at breaking into the animation/donghua market, so some of the poor production quality can be attributed to this.

Plot Summary: Feng Xi, our MC, is a run-of-the-mill new college student looking to start the sterotypical college life (fun times, getting a girlfriend, etc). The campus beauty, Su Jiu'er, quickly starts to get close to him, even becoming his girlfriend. Other girls also start to associate with him, some even in suggestive ways. The MC is at the peak of life, but not everything is as it seems.

Despite my initial muted, but high hopes for watching this very old adaptation for an all-time favorite manhua of mine, I have to say, it is a very very sub-par, and that is putting it nicely. A more apt and honest way of putting it would be a dumpster fire production. Why? This is because plot presentation, sound work, animation, almost everything is done very poorly. Like mentioned before, this is one of the first attempts to create donghua by this company, but it borders unwatchable for me in 2024. It may have fared better back when it was released, but there are plenty of similar shows (especially anime) that would be more worth watching, not to mention simply reading the manhua would be a better use of your time and provide a better understanding of the story. Let's go over the different aspects of this donghua:

Plot
The plot of this story (manhua and donghua) is set in a "modern" college setting. The plot development, characters, comedy is all reminiscent of mid-2010s school-type romance/harem stories. It includes all of these tropes, the good and the bad. The season can be seperated into 2 arcs, the first being 6 episodes and the remaining 12 for the second arc. From a "bigger picture perspective", the first arc briefly introduces the world with a very generic hook, and the second arc starts to dive into the meat of the story, but the problem is how the plot is structured. The donghua tries to mix the harem/romance/jealousy comedy (that is EXTREMELY CRINGY) into the story then flips around to immediately try to progress the important plot, creating a very disjointed mess. The plot also intermixes flashbacks in a seemingly random way, making things confusing. If I hadn't read the manhua (source before) the story would have been very difficult to follow and confusing; only with this crutch can I actually understand what the donghua was trying to portray. Not a very good job in my opinion.

Characters
The characters for this manhua/donghua are very generic. All of them in this season fall into very obvious tropes. The MC is the "ordinary nobody who is somehow special and girls gather around him" type that is a staple of school setting harem type stories. All the girls introduced are all part of the "harem" and fit into some category as well. Despite the generic start, the donghua does begin to grow the characters past their cliches by the end of the season.

Animation
This donghua is 10 years old, as of this review (2024), so don't expect anything extraordinary. In fact, even if you go back in time to 2014/2015 when this was released, it was mid-low range for the animation quality. This was originally released as either 480p or 720p back when it first came out, so any higher resolutions are simply upscaled reuploads (even on official uploads). The character designs are also very reminiscent of mid-2010s style as well, with big eyes and such; they designs themselves are taken from the manhua and anime-fied. The animation itself uses many repeated frames, quite common to older 2D animations. The action, when there is some, isn't that fluid or great, but it is still watchable; again, just don't expect high quality.

Sound
The sound work in this is terrible. The voice acting is a bit off key and not very pleasant to listen to. The taoist girl is supposed to be act like a kind of emotionless machine but her "monotone" voice comes off as grating. The BGM, likely used to "set the mood", is loud, desynced from other sounds (like voice acting) and goes on or off at a flip of a switch without transition, making them seem seperated from the actual show. Other effects are also not well synced in volume. On top of this, the BGMs themselves are pretty bad. There isn't much good to say about the sound production, other than the nice OP and ED.

Final Thoughts
This donghua starts off as very generic and only starts to distinguish itself by the end of Season 1. It followed the trend of stories that were popular at the time: school-setting romance/harem dramas. The base story, from the manhua promises potential, but the show did a very poor job in adapting that story to the screen. I do not believe watching this show is especially worthwhile; I believe reading the manhua would be a much better way to experience this story (at least for this season, CH1-74).

Score: 4/10

Adaptation Review:
As I said earlier, this is an adaptation of a manhua of the same name and S1 covers chapters 1-74. I spent quite a bit of time translating this manhua many years ago.

Considering the age of the donghua, I can't say that this was great. As an adaptation, it does follow the story, and does try its best to fill in some of the blanks/plot holes, and since the manhua is furthur along in the story, they bring foward some foreshadowing plot points from way later to explain some things.

As with any adaptation, there are changes. The changes are minor though (if you discard censorship), they change a bit of the MC's behavior so that they can make the MC and FMC get into a relationship earlier. They also rush the first arc a bit, instead focusing the donghua more on the more original and compelling story that starts from the second arc forth.

As with any Chinese work, there is of course censorship of gore and any R-18 activity implications. There are some pixelated scenes and some of the R-18 activity was either toned down or more implicit rather than explicit.

Overall, while this adaptaion does closely follow the manhua, it rushes the first arc to get to the more "divergent from tropes" and original second arc. The second arc is where the original source material starts to build the story up (instead of relying on the usual school harem tropes) so I can't complain that they rushed the beginning. However, despite them following the manhua, the messy and cringy presentation of the plot makes it difficult to recommend, so I would suggest simply reading the manhua for this season.

Adaptation score(how faithful to source): 7/10

A disaster. There is no other way to describe Yaoguai Mingdan. And since I really wish to see chinese animes to shine, I'm being biased and merciful, which should tell you a lot about me calling Yaoguai Mingdan a disaster. But the truth remains whatever we wish for :
This show is a disaster, and there's not a good thing about it, in whatever aspect you look for.
Take the dialogues for example. Dialogs are a good support of information, for the story, the characters, the events, the relationships and so on. Here, dialogs were so poorly thought that they are often used to fill the ... sound space. At best, it's a bit confusing but with little or no consequences, but at worse, it's fully misguiding the viewers into believing something that the authors themselves didn't mean to tell.
Hell, sometimes even the characters themselves looked confused at their own sentences !
Ah, but here's something good about Yaoguai Mingdan : The art is funny. Well, it's so poorly animated that it's funny, so it might be an accident of sort.
Still, don't be surprised if it looks like you're watching some kind of a South Park adaptation : some characters seems to miss some axes in their limbs (what's the use for a knee or two nowadays ?), or you will see them moving their legs a bit too fast for the distance they cover. The opposite is also true and it's a common occurence (and I can't stop laughing about it).
With Art comes the story, which is pretty much the best thing about Yaoguai Mingdan, so I can't tell you much without spoiling it : well, it's a mix of asian/western clichés, so along the way the anime itself becomes more cumfortable, like a warm blanket of déjà-vu and ready-to-serve hot drink of past plots...
So now I'm going to be a bit rude : this anime don't lack talent, it's lacking WORK, alltogether. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying there isn't any. Maybe it's just lacking because of some external pressure (budget ? delay ? astrological planet alignment ?)
But because I wish for chinese animes to shine, I would still like to give some praise and encouragements to all involved in this anime. While I can't recommand this anime to anyone (unless you're very well prepared), the (very) stubborn viewer could still find himself enticed by - something - about this show (this could vary a lot from one viewer to another). To me, Yaoguai Mingdan was almost a torture, but it could still serve as a prelude for some better work in a near future.