Douluo Dalu: Jingying Sai

Definitely a show you will enjoy more if you were dissatisfied by the manhua or read the novel and wanted to see a REAL adaptation. Some people may not like the animation and I do admit it can only appeal to a certain amount of people, but it is OUTSTANDING 3D work compared to Japanese 3D. The second season has the most tension compared to season 1 and some parts of the coming seasons. The battle animations honestly give me a headache because of all of the colors and stuff, but you get the story even without watching the battles. (They only last half an episode to 2 episodes anyways). This season is WAY better than season one with the sound effects because hearing a teenage girl grunting and talking is much nicer than an adult trying to do a child's voice and that child's voice piercing your ears. (Looking at you Xiao Wu) If you expect lots of character development besides rank rising, you aren't gonna get some for a while except for a few.


NOT REALLY MAJOR SPOILERS



Dai MuBai Is the 3rd crown of the Star Luo Empire, and Zhu Zhuqing is his soon to be bride. Their relationship improves A LOT. You'll have to wait until later 3rd season for improvement between Oscar and Ning RongRong's relationship, but it does get better. Early 3rd season, Oscar goes through a time where he realizes that his physical appearance does not matter all that much anymore. Fatty is at the end of 3rd season when Tang Sect becomes a thing, Tang San goes through a WHOLE character arc that I don't even want to spoil, but it'll make you sob. (Even though it's not been animated yet). Xiao Wu will not be mentioned for future reasons. (yeah I guess I gave you a big hint anyways) Anyone not in the shrek seven devils will have some minor developmemts following a DRASTIC event happening.




Anyways, I recommend you check out the manhua if you're looking for comic relief, the novel for a fleshed out story, and this donghua for a combination of the two. It's a great story and I have yet to find one like it.

Helpful

read more

TL;DR This is objectively bad and I only recommend watching if you enjoyed the manhua / novel and want to see parts animated. Read on for specifics.


Story
Classic Xianxia novel type stuff: OP MC can never lose (even to people almost double his level) and gets many power ups. If you like Xianxia you'll like the story.

Art
This looks like it was animated by the same people that made the game Shenmue. I'm not kidding it looks like an xbox 360 game. There is bad syncing of lips where at times you can't even tell who is speaking because nobodies mouth moves. There are weird jerky movements at times like the characters hit a lag spike and become a slideshow. I won't lie there are a few still shots that look nice but that's about it.

Sound
They reuse the same grunts / sfx over and over which is really awkward and at times there is no bgm during parts so all your left with is these awkward grunts, like 3 grunts from 1 person within 2 seconds.

Character
The characters are actually pretty good and are individuals but they have almost no backstory. I'm 50 ep in and I don't know anything about fatman, oscar,Zhu Zhuqing, Dai Mubai etc... This is more a problem with the pacing than the characters themselves since the backstory is better in the novel. (edit: you get some backstory around ep 80ish but only for Mubai and Zhu Zhuqing so yeah pretty late for that. Fatman and Oscar no backstory yet.)

The pacing is terribly slow. There is a lot of wasted time on spirit summoning over and over every time they get into a fight with the same exact animation. On the topic of time they also put in advertisements everywhere like ~6min 30 sec of every episode is just garbage you will skip and they're only 20 min episodes.

If you can find a decent translation good luck. I looked all over and they're all pretty bad, constantly changing names / translations calling male characters "granddaughter". Some episodes I feel like I could of skipped reading subs and just guess what they're saying because they made 0 sense.

Somehow despite this I still enjoyed it but I'm not sure if that was because it was decent or because it was so bad I couldn't stop kinda like a car crash, you know you shouldn't watch but you do.

Overall, definitely dumpster fire tier.

Extra: sometimes there's scenes where they use chess as a visual representation of their "bigly" brain power but it's really awkward because whoever animated it doesn't know how to play chess. (2 kings 4 bishops 3 rooks for one side, pawns in back row, pieces in possible the most impossible positions??)

Helpful

read more