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.

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Yaoguai Mingdan, when I first came across this anime? Chinese cartoon? I was wondering how you would write it in Japanese, but then I realized that this is a Chinese anime? Cartoon? Well, since it is supposed to be anime I will refer to it as an anime in this review.

So, animation and character design… I was not expecting a super high fidelity CGI and amazing animation quality for this anime, and I think that’s a really good expectation to have with this anime if you are looking into it. The character designs are a quite imperfect compared to modern Japanese anime and can seem off and drawn by amateurs. But maybe that's just “Chinese” style animation, but the animation itself is not an eyesore, what is was the fact that episode 12, 13, 14, I could only find them in 360p. Ouch, otherwise it's in 1280x720, which is already pretty bad if you are watching anime on a 2560x1440 display (like me) but resolution is different for everybody. If you are running a lower resolution display it's not going to be that bad. I don't know if it is just me getting used of the animation style/quality or this is genuine, but the second half of the series appears to be better animated, I mean it's a bit minor, or it may be that the animators sucked at animating all the vines from the fist villain but I really feel especially with those flashbacks at the end that the animation has improved a tiny bit, although no major improvements.

Sound and audio. Background music? Ehh, not awful, but good enough, I mean I really didn't have high standards for this anime, but voice acting I will say is mediocre, the intro and the outro was enjoyable (intro was more enjoyable though), Chinese is different than Japanese so for me it was interesting to hear a different oral language, but at first I disliked them a bit, a lot of things with this anime will just have to grow on you.

Story. Minimal spoilers? The first part is meh, second part gets better. This anime can be moving particularly with the ending and can be more moving than some Japanese anime's that I have watched and if we want to over analyze things the first part (semi-spoiler) seemed to highlight deforestation. Additionally, the flashback of the final arc was the most moving for me, and was actually quite interesting, and I think enforces my point that this anime gets better as the story progresses. As for the ending ending, I'll leave that up to you to discover, but I have no negative opinions about it.

Overall, I have seen better, but this is not as bad as you may think, sure it's a bit rocky at first, but the 10 min episode length and good enough story should allow you to watch all 18 episodes. And I mean for self-enjoyment I give it an 8/10, because, at the end of the day, I can say that I enjoyed it and I think it was worth watching, albeit not the most glamorous anime in the world.

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Spoiler-free review

Yaoguai Mingdan itself is a good series, but the anime is a good but flawed adaptation. Let me explain: this anime is based on a Chinese manga, which they call "manhua".

There have been complaints about the voice acting in this anime. Truth be told, though the voice acting sounds polarizingly different than Japanese anime, it accurately portrays the voices of Chinese people.

It should be noted that the when compared to the manhua, the art style in this anime is severely lacking in detail. But first time viewers probably won't notice.

The backstory behind the characters is rather deep, and isn't tackled very much in this season. The anime ended up covering the weaker part of the story from the manhua only to end abruptly before things could get interesting.

However, based on the source material, the future seasons have potential, so if you can overlook the anime's flaws you might enjoy this as an ecchi with an actually engaging plot for once.

In other words, this show is essentially a romance/harem/action/adventure show, and it has a better story than High School DXD.

Thanks for taking the time to read this.

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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.

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