Kingdom

THE STAFF
- Animated by Studio Pierrot, which automatically means a shounen show with average to bad production values. In this case, very bad.
- Directed by Kamiya Jun, who has a most unimpressive roster. His best work was Blue Seed and even that was just an average watch.
- Based on a manga nobody knows about, written by a guy nobody cares about.
There didn’t seem to be much to expect from this show and as soon as it began WHAT A SURPRISE it was indeed nothing. This anime is the perfect example of what a blunt anime is all about.

1) Boring title
Kingdom??? Just kingdom? Why not the ... Seven Kingdoms? Why stop there with the trimming; how about just King?

2) Horrible CGI
The series is made with cell-shaded polygons and it looks completely low quality. Everything feels crude and artificial, from body motions to action scenes. It’s like you are watching cut scenes from a decade old videogame. I give them a credit for trying to experiment on 3D effects in order to better use them in later shows but this leaves the show as nothing more than a crude and eventually failed experiment.

3) Unimpressive soundtrack and dumb dialogues
There are no interesting songs and the dialogues are all very silly and typical. Nothing to bother listening to.

4) Lame action
There are lots of action scenes and they are all very basic. Despite having huge armies clashing with each other, you hardly feel any excitement coming out of that. Aside from the fact the soldiers move in a very crude way, they also never get any wounds despite occasionally bleeding a bit. Heck, the mooks don’t even have eyes most of the times to the point they don’t look like people but rather like mass produced blind robots. Even when the main characters are fighting, you hardly get any actual battle choreography, as it is mostly static people jumping around with a few rays of light to substitute motions. Doesn’t that render the whole use of 3D pointless? You are supposed to have polygons for elaborate perspectives and complicating body motions and instead you get the usual frozen cardboards. This doesn’t look any better than your typical 2D shonen show.

5) Basic story
- The story takes place during the warring states period of China and plays out as basic as possible. If you happen to have watched or read The Romance of the Three Kingdoms or at least be aware of a few well made Chinese war films, this will feel completely dull and childish. I mean the setting is better suited for an epic saga full of politics and hundreds of characters and all you get is a simplistic fighting shounen revolving around a dozen people.
- So what is the story you may wonder? Well, there this bunch of nations fighting each other. A prince is hunted by his usurper brother and befriends a villager boy whose best friend was used as a look alike for the prince. Together they fend off some assassins and head to the mountains where they ally themselves with the mountain folk and they storm the usurper's fortress. These three lines of text took 15 whole episodes to happen and everything else in-between was either dead time or shounen bs.
- The second arc is supposed to make things more interesting by including battles with thousands of warriors. There are absolutely no significant politics, mind games, field tactics, or common sense; it’s just some imba guy attacking and winning.

6) Annoying characters
Not only the cast is as generic as it gets, separated to black and white and be easily described in two lines of text, but they also behave in a most immature way. Which makes sense since this is a shounen story. But then again the setting is making you think it will be dark and complicating, when it hardly is and everybody behaves like an angry dumb teenager. It just doesn’t feel plausible.
- The villains are complete assholes with absolutely no depth or redeeming qualities to have a reason to like them even for being evil.
- Damn how I hate how fake everybody acts during fights. They are mostly talking than fighting for their lives. Especially when it comes to mini bosses, they kill mooks in seconds without exchanging a word but when they face the hero they just can’t shut up and just kill him. They also constantly don’t try to slay him in one strike but keep playing with him, as if this is not a duel to the death but a childish game.
- And you think the hero is any better? He will constantly be acting like a delinquent who loves to scream for no reason and will be winning against elites who have decades of experience. He otherwise has no experience at all and wins with nothing more than willpower. You call that compelling characterization? I call it bullshit!
- Even the reactions of the characters feel completely bullocks. Imagine a scene where a professional assassin kills someone. All you see is a ray of light (since the show is not making use of its own technology) followed by a most ridiculous remark by the victim’s friend. “Hey, I know this style of fighting; let me describe it to you in 5.000 words.” Aside from the fact this nobody magically recognizes a fighting style just by looking at a simplistic ray of light, he also does nothing more than infodumping us instead of saying something more natural, such as “OMG HE KILLED MY FRIEND!”

Thus all you get is a big zero of a show.

And now for some excused scorings.
ART SECTION: 4/10
General Artwork 0/2 (shitty 3D)
Character Figures 1/2 (generic)
Backgrounds 1/2 (basic but fitting with the feeling of the series)
Animation 1/2 (basic)
Visual Effects 1/2 (basic)

SOUND SECTION: 6/10
Voice Acting 2/3 (corny but fitting with the feeling of the series)
Music Themes 2/4 (average)
Sound Effects 2/3 (ok I guess)

STORY SECTION: 4/10
Premise 1/2 (typical)
Pacing 1/2 (erratic)
Complexity 1/2 (not much)
Plausibility 0/2 (none)
Conclusion 1/2 (cheesy)

CHARACTER SECTION: 6/10
Presence 1/2 (generic)
Personality 2/2 (rather cheesy but well founded)
Backdrop 1/2 (generic and simplistic but it’s there)
Development 1/2 (overblown but it’s there)
Catharsis 1/2 (overblown but it’s there)

VALUE SECTION: 1/10
Historical Value 0/3 (none)
Rewatchability 0/3 (no reason to rewatch)
Memorability 1/4 (no reason to remember)

ENJOYMENT SECTION: 1/10
Art 0/1 (shitty 3D)
Sound 0/2 (sounds meh)
Story 1/3 (as basic shonen as it gets)
Characters 0/4 (they are annoying)

VERDICT: 3.5/10

Kingdom Season 1 is a big disappointment. The show is a historical epic about wars and heroes, but it does not dig into the setting deeply. It is closer to an action adventure show about a kid fighting strong opponents, but follows a simplistic, obnoxious protagonist that barely develops. On top of these, the poor production quality hampers the excitement and the storytelling.

I had a somewhat high expectations for Kingdom:
- I had heard the manga described as one of the great historical epics, mentioned in the same breath as Vinland Saga. I had not read either, but I was absolutely blown away by Season 1 ... of Vinland Saga.
- I was very interested in its setting, the warring states period of ancient China, since I enjoyed reading "Romance of the Three Kingdoms".
- Kingdom Season 4 was airing at the time and holding one of the highest MAL user ratings of that season.

I appreciated how Kingdom S1 takes great care in depicting warfare. I enjoyed the build-up to a battle, when generals discuss strategy and foot soldiers prepare themselves. Once the battle starts, the show frequently explains strategies and the thinking behind them. On the ground, characters are constantly figuring out how to carry out orders without dying, and the emotions go through highs and lows along with the flow of battle.

However, the show is severely lacking on the visuals side to really deliver the full impact of the battles, and it hurts especially in 2022. While the use of CGI allows sweeping camera shots and huge melees, the extremely stiff and simplistic animation fails to make them convincing or exciting. One-on-one fights are not much better; the characters simply swing their weapons at each other really hard. It does not help that the environment design and background art often looked completely flat and uninspired.

Some of the hand-drawn animation does look more pleasing and expressive, and I wish the show had more of it. Also, the character designs manage to be a lot of fun. The characters have simple, distinct personalities with a variety of backgrounds and motivations, and their looks clearly communicate them and make the cast memorable. This brings us to the biggest problem I have with the show...

The main character, Xin, is very annoying and uninteresting. He is a country kid, the simple-minded and brash type, always excited to battle, with boundless ambition and confidence, and most importantly, LOUD. He has no other memorable personality traits or quirks to him, and he is given little motivation beyond "I'm gonna be the very best". He does not develop much through the season, because he is very rarely seriously challenged in his beliefs or suffers failure. On the battlefield, he displays superhuman strength and agility from the very beginning, which is never really explained. He is consistently rewarded for these personality traits and his martial prowess. This style of writing, combined with stiff CGI models, makes it hard to understand or sympathize with Xin.

Kingdom S1 spends an overwhelming majority of its time with Xin, so the other characters are not given much time to shine. Zheng is introduced as "the other half" of the story (as seen in the poster), and he offers a very different type of story and point-of-view from Xin's. However, his story almost completely takes a back seat to Xin's later in the season. We do spend a lot of time with one particular side character, exploring his personality, motivations, and battles. He becomes a stand-out in the show for me, and even has some impact on Xin as a character, but he comes late in the season.

The show misses out on exploring other storylines by focusing so heavily on Xin. With a large cast entangled in power struggles and wars, the show could have explored palace intrigue, statecraft, diplomacy and espionage, and even everyday lives of the commoners and the nobles, etc. While the show touches upon some of these briefly, it does not follow up on them; for example, a powerful figure is introduced as the de facto ruler of the country and a dangerous rival, only to disappear from the story shortly afterwards. The later seasons supposedly expand on what has been set up, but I am struggling to have faith in the series.

Despite my many complaints and general dissatisfaction, I have sat through all 38 episodes of the season. A part of me just wanted to be able to say I finished it (and leave a review), but another part of me wanted to see it improve and realize its potential. The show does steadily get more interesting as the season progresses, but the earlier parts are much too clunky, and the later improvements are not significant enough. Kingdom has announced a Season 5 at the time of writing, so I may come to enjoy Kingdom more in subsequent seasons. However, after these disappointing 38 episodes, I will not be bringing myself to watch Season 2, at least for a long while.

Kingdom (English Dub) Review


Story (5/10) Average (Because of this adaptation changes)

The story for Kingdom I thought in this anime adaptation was mediocre at best, not nearly as good as I wanted to be because of the reasons I will explain below. Firstly the censorship, I am someone who is coming fresh off of the manga and with that being said hell yes I am once again pissed off at Studio Pierrot for butchering and so poorly handling a great manga like this. They've done it with Tokyo Ghoul and then they've done it here with Kingdom, one of Young Jump's to best selling ... manga in recent of all time doesn't deserve this. The reason I feel the censorship in a series like this isn't doing it justice is because firstly this is a seinen with war and death thrown in your face constantly watering it down to shonen levels of censorship is a blatant disrespectful for the truly mature rated series that Kingdom should be treat as. One would say "oh all that dismemberment and nudity doesn't make that much of a difference" and to you I say "I feel the series and others like it ie Berserk would have never have sold as much as they did if didn't have such content, it's integral to what makes them what they are and removing/censoring it makes the scenes that were showcased in the manga have far less impact than it should have had." Not only that but then when it comes to the actual story, although debatable if the Assassination Plot Arc and the Training Arc were truly important I personally feel they the reason they were removed weren't because "oh you can live without them" but when you look at characters like Lei, Qiang (btw all the names I refer to is what MAL calls them) majority of her characterization happens within those two arcs we get a deeper understanding of her and also the fight between her and Li, Xin which was great and also removed. This I feels should not have been skipped over and it I felt it hurt the overall story's quality. To be honest the only true reason Studio Pierrot removed those arcs was not because they were short but because like they wanted to cut corners and save a buck here and there. (like damn near every category when it came to this adaptation)


Art and Animation (3/10) Poor

Oh man oh man where the hell do I start.. this is by far the biggest offender to this entire adaptation of one of my favorite manga. Studio Pierrot I hate your decisions with a burning passion! I know the genre that Akatsuki no Yona is similar to that of Kingdom and although I have not watched that series yet I doubt that from an animation standpoint that war anime series was not butchered as badly as this was. This is by far some of the worst CG I've ever seen in an anime for the time it came out, this is definitely down there with Berserk 2016/2017 honestly I would put this below them because at least in that dismemberment censorship wasn't a thing. You would think for the serious and most important fight scenes in the Arcs that were adapted by Studio Pierrot they would do it justice NOPE damn near all in censored CG bullshit. And even when it was in hand-drawn only like small percentage of the time did it look the way it should. There were scenes where also the hand drawn scenes just looked down right dreadful also and I was more even than offended when I saw that.


Sound (6/10) Fair
More Specifically (6.75/10) Fair+

The sound for Kingdom I feel was one of the little things Studio Pierrot got right at least. For the most part for sound effects, voice actors (which I'll get to in a minute) and definitely background music they did quite a good job. If there's anything I enjoyed the absolute most was the opening anime theme song for this adaptation, I never skipped it because I love the song that much same can be said about the first ending song I loved it, the other ones not so much. As far as the English Dub is concerned I felt majority of the voice actors they chose fit the characters they were assigned to which is very good but when it came to the voice acting that the voice actors gave off they where hit or miss most of the time for me. Damn near all of the voice actors sometimes instead of acting out their lines just sounded like they were just reading their lines off the script and forgetting to put the right amount of emotion behind said lines when needed. They would also do this weird pause within a middle of a sentence that isn't completed, this pause would be like a second and a half before they continued and that broke the immersion a lot for me multiple times, it felt like they were reading their lines, got to a point where they had to think before they read the rest of the line and then continue the rest of the script, it was mad annoying and for season 2 I will be watching it in sub.


Characters (7/10) Good

When it came to adapting the characters Studio Pierrot did an ok to good job they didn't really fuck anything up here, majority of the characters were adapted well. Like I said though with the removal of the two arcs I feel that was a hit on the characterization of Lei, Qiang and at least for the Dub voice actor the character of Nuan "Hou Ken" Pang they made him speak in Thous and Shalls which felt extremely out of place since the manga did not do this for him and even if it did no other character spoke like this so it I felt out of place and it kind of ruin the character who "as far as the manga portrayed" as a character to be feared wasn't as fearful to me. Wang, Qi 's english voice actor I felt sounded exactly the way he was suppose to but there were times in his final fight I felt his rage was not portrayed correctly either that's more of the voice actors fault though. Other than those three characters all of the other ones where nigh perfectly adapted.


Enjoyment (2/10) Dreadful

Dreadful is definitely the first word that comes to mind when I think about my enjoyment level when it came to this adaptation. I heard it was bad but I just had to see for myself. To be honest I wouldn't be surprised if the reason I put this entire series on hold 3 years ago and didn't come back until now was because of how terrible this adaptation was. The censorship in nudity and dismemberment, the English dub's spotty voice acting and last and definitely not least the pathetic CG animation quality and spotty hand drawn animation quality are all some of the biggest insults you can give to any manga series when it comes to adapting it into anime format. I was frowning for damn near my entire time watching this adaptation in my head constantly was telling myself "why the fuck I'm I watching this garbage?"


Overall (4/10) Bad
More Specifically (4.75/10) Bad+

I rarely give out 4s let alone finish them or even go as far as to write a written review about them, but as a Kingdom fan I feel I have to give my full thoughts on this and my constant hatred for Studio Pierrot continues to burn. Studio Pierrot other than like Yu Yu Hakusho I feel have let me down time and time again recently, I heard GTO and Akatsuki no Yona aren't bad but man everything damn near else they just can't help to not do a great job on in my eyes. Kingdom as a series deserves far better than this and this anime adaption will make many newcomers to the series that don't read manga stay as far away as possible which sucks. I heard many many people say that Season 2 isn't nearly as bad as the first so I'll see about that when I get there.

Well where to start. I came upon Kingdom one day while I was searching the great archives of MAL for something to watch. I saw the picture and read the synopsis and said wow sounds really entertaining. I scrolled down to check out the reviews and saw that is was getting 8s and 9s. "Sounds like Kingdom might be a gem," I said to myself, "I should check it out." So I found it and started watching it and oh boy what a gem I found myself in for.

Story:6
I have to admit at this point, I'm only done watching episode 2 and can't really go ... in-depth at this point. Seems to be an average story so far. On to the next point.

Art:2
At this point I would like to say something positive about Kingdom. The 2D art is beautiful to look at. Now you might ask me, "If the 2D art is so impressive why would you give it such a low score?" Well I'm glad you asked. See Kingdom likes to think that it is special, and instead of gorgeous 2D animation it decided to use 3D animation that is less impressive than what ReBoot had over in 94. The animation looks bad, especially during the fight scenes. Now this wouldn't be such an issue if the main genre that Kingdom goes for is action. If I had to come up with a sentence to describe how the fights look it would be this. Remember when you were a child playing with action figures? That is remarkably close to how it looks in Kingdom. Needless to say I was far from impressed.

Sound:5
From a musician's view point, the OP and EP were both good pieces that you could skip and not miss a thing. The music during the anime is fine, just completely unmemorable

Character:5
Now because I haven't seen a whole lot of the anime at this time, I can't really say if the characters get flushed out to any good degree. On to enjoyment.

Enjoyment:9
I feel like I'm going to have to explain this one a little. See it started at about the 5 min mark of the first episode. The characters were talking to someone and I realized something, this might be the worst dialogue I have ever heard in my life. Cheesey doesn't even begin to describe how awful it is. As an example at one point a character is on the ground saying "I'll kill them" and he has to say this about 10 times in a row. The delivery is beyond incredible. In fact it wouldn't surprise me to learn that the Actor had a stroke in the middle of the line and the director just said, "Eh, F it. It'll do.". Every single moment that characters are speaking is a gold mine of laughs.

TL;DL
This is an example of an anime being so bad it's good. Voice acting is bad, writing is awful and the animation is disgusting. If you can get past that bad animation you can have a few laughs.

OVERALL:3 out of 10

I'm frankly disappointed, and its for two major reasons:

1. The studio artwork, sound, and pacing were a bit off at times. Some scenes that should have taken longer were cut short and vice versa, the sound was at best average but the worst was the animation. Not only did it fail to capture the depth of the manga even remotely, but the use of CGI at certain scenes wasn't appropriate. I don't have an issue with CGI use, but it was clear that they were still figuring out when to use and not use it in the first season. The artwork ... also was lacking for some scenes.

2. The manga in of itself is lacking. I love the gritty artwork and historical backdrop, but the characters are severely lacking. The main character (Xin) is the typical "Naruto" character, with ridiculously long speeches about arbitrary or childish points, superhuman strength, a crudeness that everyone seems to overlook at take as charm? Him, like many other characters, are incredibly one-dimensional and the entire premise of his character is pretty ludicrous. The guy is so strong that he might as well be one punch man where the occasional loss is so minor that its really just more plot armor to justify himself being even stronger in a world of already ridiculously strong characters (that get introduced out of the blue to create challenges for Xin to overcome or pillars for him to aspire towards). It was a great premise, but the execution did not age well and that was primarily due to characterization and how the story revolves around that characterization.

Is it worth a one-time watch? Yea...it might even be nostalgic for many people. But it is a heavily flawed anime, and the 1st season is a mix of its best and worst all in one. I did enjoy the humor though...

First things first, when this anime started out i thought, hey, greatest general alive, that should be pretty awesome, i bet he will become strong fast etc etc, Not the case, He is weak and stupid all the way into 2nd season.

Sure he seems strong at times and sure he can beat a couple of enemies. but his stupidity ruins everything, He can't do anything right and it pisses me off, and cmon, in 2nd season he becomes a 300 squad general, and the gear doesnt even change, he bought armor and isnt even using it.

Also when he meets other 300 squad generals that should ... be his equals, They are not, He is like a 5 year old compared to a general with 40 years experience.


This is a anime for people looking for political and drawn out boring animes.
The story progresses very slow, i mean the first season is 38 episodes, and the time span is no more then 2 years or something like that wich is fine in animes that is about something else.

The problem with this anime is that they got you interested in the main characters development, you wanted to see him grow stronger and kind of overpowered, Instead you get political warfare.

For the record i have not seen all of the episodes in season 2, i felt that after wathcing 13 episodes i've had enough.

tl;dr: IF you are looking for an anime with an overpowered MC, this is not the one, political warfare and kings and shit? this is the anime for you.

The animation is so trash even 2 minutes in I want to drop it. If their budget was this low they shouldn't have even tried to make the anime. I've literally never seen an anime with such bad animation. You occasionally see anime with CGI horses or sometimes some monsters. But never 100% pure shit-tier CGI. Even the dub is terrible and I love dubs, it's worse than the 90's dubs of foreign live action TV shows. I can't believe this anime is rated so highly. Watching the 50 minute long first episode (1+2) was like actual torture. Skipping all the way to episode 39 ... the animation is just as bad. If you're wondering if it ever improves.... no, no it doesn't. Absolutely appalling.

About the only thing with actual 2D animation is the few childhood flashbacks from what I saw. I dropped the show after the 3rd episode as you might imagine. I've never seen such a terrible anime.

Wang Qi - KOKOKO (a laugh btw) even if the story is not about me I'm the best character of this season KOKOKO

Zheng Ying - The story is about me !!! So follow my orders !!!

Wang Qi - KOKOKO you want to die little kiddo? You know I'm like the best general ever ?

**IN THE BACKROUND ... Some Berserk 2016 FRYING PAN NOISES become louder more and more ... With them an ugly CGI model starts appearing in the screen until you can only see that ... A face ... This ugly face occupies the whole screen and then it starts talking **

Xin ... - HEY YOU OLD MAN !!! DID YOU JUST SAY "YOU WANT TO DIE LITTLE KIDDO? * He speaks loudly and with big distortion from the microphone *

**Wang Qi is perplexed by this kid's audacity and by the apparent brain damage **
Did he just repeat what I said ? ** He thinks to himself **
I think it is better for me to reatreat before my ears and eyes start to bleed ...
** And so he does ... While he leaves he looks back at him and thinks **
Maybe in the second season ? ... Ohhh yes he has potential KOKOKO
**Wang Qi leaves with a big smirk on his face **

**Zheng Ying seemingly noticing the discomfort of Wang Qi **
Zheng Ying - I need Lu Buwei to make better CGI *He says it out loud*...

Xin - ARE YOU SAYING THAT YOU NEED LU BUWEI TO MAKE BETTER CGI ???? REEEE NOOO THE CGI STAYS ...

Zheng Ying - But I'm the future Qi Shi Huangdi I can do whatever I want and btw stop saying redundant shit !! Your emperor commands it ...

Xin - YOU SAID IT "FUTURE" SO THE CGI AND THE REDUNDANT DIALOG STAYS FOR THIS SEASON !! I'M GOING TO BATTLE, YOU STAY IN YOUR PALACE AND DO NOTHING AND PIAO IS MUCH BETTER THEN YOU btw ...

**THE BERSERK 2016 FRYING PAN NOISES START TO DISSAPEAR WITH HIM**

And so this story ends

A literal child, malnourished and with 0 training other than sparring using wooden swords with his childhood friend, single-handedly saves a king, defeats multiple assassins, an entire village rumored to be filled with murderous bandits, trained armies, battle-hardened war generals, etc. etc., all without getting much more than a few scratches. He also annoyingly yells and avoids letting others speak during pivotal plot progression points, somehow winning over the hearts of all while saying nothing much at all.

The mountain people concept, mountain king and their masks are cool and I'm hoping maybe things become a bit more fleshed out in later seasons? But that's really ... all that's holding this at a 5 and not substantially lower. It would actually HELP if this show had some kind of magic or wuxia-xianxia backing behind it, to try to explain the absurdity of the children's inexplicable skills. At the moment, however, I can't say I recommend it. I will continue to watch and see where it takes me, but so far this is a hard miss for me.