Douluo Dalu 2nd Season

After ╠ 6 years // 2,229 days // 3,911 minutes of runtime // 263 eps ╣ the OP Tang San's story is finally over and what a great journey.
I have been watching this series when the MAL entry divided this into 13 eps per season which was somewhat difficult to keep track but at long last it was united into a single one.

I will convert it into 2 parts first 234/260 eps in one and last 3 in another.

Part I -- till 234/260 ep --
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Animation: It has one of the greatest 3D animation ever. It is definitely top-tier. Some may feel uneasy about the ... 3D but after a few episodes in you will get used to it.
Story: The journey of Tang-San along with the Shreks consists of a lot of great fights, romance, comedy and some good drama. There are some average episodes but the overall experience is just awesome. Return of Tang-San's father and Tang-San becoming GOD are one of the greatest scenes.
Characters: There is a lot of character progression in the series. The romance between the characters are progressed continuously and they show their affectionate in some form rather than just being in love.
Enjoyment: Just a ton of fighting in every way possible.

Part II -- last 3 eps --
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Animation: There is a sudden change in animation quality as well as the 3D models of the characters; this can be seen from the first scene. This is due to change in studio change??
Story: It seemed to be somewhat rushed and some information have been removed but the story can be understood.

Overall
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At end it is just a phenomenal series and definitely my Top 5 Donghuas. The animation is top quality with deep character development and this is best enjoyed at 1080p. There are some places where subs of Power moves differ compared to last episode but you can understand what they are saying.
Chinese/Mandarin can be somewhat hard to hear but you will get used to it along with the 3D animation.
Episodes are of small runtime max 15min (except the last 3; those are 30min each). The last few eps has teases of SL2 even one preview is done with UE5 which looks just mind blowing.
The last 3 eps are somewhat rushed but still it is definitely a must watch; Cannot wait for SL2.

◄8/10►

I've been watching Anime/Cartoons for 20+ years, and Douluo Dalu is one of my favorites and I genuinely believe it's a masterpiece. It's my favorite shonen and my favorite Isekai.
My PERSONAL enjoyment of the show was a 10/10.

Pro:
-The best power system out of any show I've ever seen. It's genius
-Great worldbuilding
-Having seen almost no Donghua before, this show felt EXTREMELY unique and inventive
-Lovable main cast (Shrek seven devils)
-tons of fighting
-there's romance, there's drama, I laughed and I cried; it's dope
-Although the Protagonist is OP, the other group members are still very strong and useful. There's a lot of fighting in this show, and they actually ... use TEAMWORK everytime instead of it being basically multiple simultaneous 1v1's like in many other shows.
-Sidecharacters matter and are basically never throw-aways, the show somehow manages to bring back many side character back in a way that makes sense and is satisfying.
-The end of the show ties up everything pretty neatly imo

Con:
-3D isn't for everyone
-The animation at the start of the show is not that great (it does getter better though!)
-It's Chinese so the english sub isn't that great. My guess is that chinese doesn't translate well to english in general? I've noticed this with other donghua as well.
-Due to covid, the last ~fifth of the show is somewhat rushed, with episodes being only 10 minutes instead of 15

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 background music during parts so all you're left with is these awkward grunts, like 3 grunts from 1 person within 2 seconds.

Characters
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 impossible positions??)