Quanzhi Gaoshou Specials

The first season has had growing pains and, fortunately, the lessons learned have been incorporated. The first episode of the ONA is a confident, competent stride with all-around better animation and direction. It now uses creative ways and shot angles to help express the emotions of a moment and that presents one of the biggest leaps of the franchise coming from Season 1’s piss-poor direction and a tendency to telegraph everything to the viewer, sometimes in the most obnoxious slapstick way possible, reinforced by the janky animation of that season. Here, however, the motions are more fluid and subdued. And it’s a much better product ... as it gives its important scenes weight, power, and reverence.

Although it seems like they blew almost their entire budget on episode one and episode three, preferring to can episode two to a fate of having less-fluid animation and leaning on still frames slightly being moved to give the illusion of action. An understandable compromise, but it's worth a mention nonetheless because it could symptomatic of technical inconsistency, especially if this was a longer series.

Set in a LAN tournament, the All-Star, the ONA has done a pretty competent job at evoking the atmosphere of a LAN. It has maintained a higher standard of storytelling, touching on the themes of the shifting of generations and the passing of the torch, as the new bloods challenge the old guards of the game. The old has to give way to the new, as they say; and yet the old guard also still have so much left to impart. A further exploration of this dynamic, this nebulous era of the old and the new coexisting before one moves on and the other takes over, would hopefully be the direction the series takes as it moves forward.

Fittingly for the theme, the main character has been sidelined to a mentor and spectator role in this story and he belongs there, in the mentor seat. As per my thesis way back in season one, if you’re going to make your main character a perfect/complete/faultless character instead of a still-flawed person trying to figure out what went wrong and how he can be a better player, then make him be the enabler of character growth in the people around him, his future teammates especially. Of course, the main goal would still be to setup his return to the competitive scene, but it’s certainly better that he’s never the primary focus even then. Rather, his return is and should be treated more as a celebration of the hearts he touched in all the years he played GLORY.

The main drawback of the ONA is its spectacle. Ostensibly, it is a setup of both his return to the competitive scene and the participating teams that will oppose him but the limited runtime means that it is going to be primarily a spectacle. And, for a spectacle, it fails to be truly spectacular because of the way it conducts its fight scenes. The “dynamic” still frames aside, it still refuses to use wide angle shots to properly convey the entirety of a fight. As I’ve said before, a fight is a synthesis: thesis and anti-thesis, action and reaction. Here, there’s still the tendency to have action occur in one frame, showing only one character, then the reaction in the next frame, showing the target. Refusing to show both action and reaction in one frame rids the viewer of a frame of reference to ground the action which ends up limiting the impact of a fight. We’re merely following pretty colors flying around, at times even the DBZ-style of two thick colored lines colliding, instead of truly appreciating the choreography and flow of the fight. It has to resort to the same old dust eruption and flashy lights that just obscures and makes the scene messier in order to illustrate the impact of the attacks which is a piss-poor substitute to actually seeing the entire sequence of one person starting his attack and then hitting his target and seeing the target react to that, all in one frame.

At least Episode 3 is doing better in that regard and there’s cause to hope for a much much better season 2.

Have a happy MDL Changsha.

TNC! TNC! TNC!

Having loved the first season, i was very eager to see this second season.

It is short, and deserves being called a OVA more then a 2nd season tbh.

The story is as always interesting, who doesnt enjoy the path of a betrayed hero back to the top while those who discarded him sit on the side line in confused frustration.

The characters too are interesting and anyone who has read the online web book for which this originates knows already that our Hero is the pinnacle of deadpan badass lol.

I particularly enjoy Chen Guo who while might not be tasteful to the culture she is part of ... is 100% honest in her reactions and always makes me laugh.

So the story was good and the characters ok however this was let down a fair bit by the bland and shiny art. They changed from the beautiful and tastefully done mood settings of the first season, with the subtle and realistic facial expressions, to a sharp and uniformed picture that looks more like something from a advertisement then anything meant to create sympathetic emotions.

The weapon changes became matrix style and the men look the same.

The sound and the CGI as well was over the top, with all subtly gone out the window (hopefully to return in the 3rd season). While the first season did have some repetitive CGI it fit the picture well and one hopes they may look at going back to the original art company.

In final: If you liked the first season and the web book its worth watching, but expect to be feeling like somethings missing as the beautiful and subtle quality of the first has been tossed aside for shiny fancy 'cutting edge' that does nothing but cut the watcher...