Dragon Quest: Dai no Daibouken (2020)

This show is both a reboot, a manga adaptation, and a videogame adaptation at the same time, and I don't mean that in a good way.

Dragon Quest Dai no Daibouken (2020) is a reboot of an anime that was cancelled decades ago and was adapted from a long running manga, why's that important? Because since it's been animated before the people working on this project won't bother putting any effort into re-animating the same thing, so it was expected that they were gonna rush the pacing.

I've made a comparison between the two versions, and so far this reboot managed to fit 30 episodes worth of ... content into 15 episodes, at first it doesn't seem so bad as the first 4 episodes managed to set things up properly, but then it starts to become apparent when you see the big progress Dai (the MC) has made by training off screen, which doesn't feel earned at all.
If that wasn't bad enough, there's a scene where the two protagonists, Dai and Pop, depart on a boat, and suddenly it cuts to them in the middle of a forest running to save a little girl, it's like the director isn't even trying, you can tell there's a lot of content that's been left out between those two scenes.

Now to be fair the story isn't deep or anything, so rushing the pacing might be better than spending more time than needed on each arc, however, there's a limit to how much you can rush a story before it feels amateurish.
Imagine playing an RPG where the dungeons are too short you get from one boss to another in like five minutes, there's no build up or time to grind, but defeating regular enemies gives you too much EXP that it's easy to over-level.
You get to the point where nothing feels earned or satisfying, you're only playing to get things over with, that's the feeling I get from this show.

Speaking of videogames, you're probably wondering if there was actually a Dai no Daibouken game, well don't ask me, I don't play Dragon Quest, but I know the franchise and I know the manga was inspired from it but has an original story, so technically it's not a videogame adaptation, but it does take place in the same universe I guess. Why's that important? Because CGI.

The use of CGI in this anime is weird, it doesn't look cheap but doesn't work well either, because ironically the art style is too 2D (if that makes sense), so the CG effects don't look like they fit, when a fire ball is shot for example it doesn't feel like the characters can touch or interact with it, it looks so odd and out of place.
And doesn't help that there's a fight scene animated in CGI, it looked like they randomly slapped a scene from the videogames.

Speaking of animation, the people in Toei Animation are probably the most talented at faking good animation, most people look at the bright colors and call it "great animation", but what I see when I'm watching this show is still images, lots of them, combined with the CGI I talked about, they use those effects to make it look like things are moving, there are even times when they use the classic method at faking animation used in sword fights, where a still image of the character moves closer to the camera and then it cuts to both characters standing still implying that the slashing already happened, not to mention the many times they close up on a character's face and move only their mouth, so yeah the animation may look good at first but if you pay attention you'll see that it's actually cheaply made most of the time.

The atmosphere of the show screams Toei Animation, to be fair it fits with the Dragon Quest franchise, but it gets annoying when the violence and overall feel of it is toned down compared to the manga and the old adaptation, some scenes don't look as dark because of the bright colors, it might be a personal preference, but it was a problem I couldn't ignore.

The music is nothing special, there aren't many tracks made yet, only a few that keep playing in every episode, there wasn't a single scene that stood out because of the music, the show will probably get better music when it gets to the part where the old adaptation left off, but for now it's just mediocre.
The opening and ending too are, in my opinion, pretty forgettable, even though I listened to them more than once to give them a chance I can't remember them at all.

With the production stuff out of the way let's get into the story and characters.
The story is nothing original, there's a demon lord with an army almost ruling the world, the protagonist who lived his entire life on an island raised by monsters, is visited by princess Leona, he saves her life when she gets attacked, so she sends him a tutor who trains him to become a proper hero and go fight the demon lord army, a pretty generic story that has nothing more to it aside from Dai's tutor Avan having a bunch of other disciples that Dai gets to meet along the way.

The characters on the other hand are probably the strongest point of this series.
The main characters are pretty much the same stereotypes you'd expect from a typical shounen series, Dai is the brave good-natured hero who never gives up, Pop is the coward who grows a pair when things get serious, and Maam is the reliable strong female who, despite not being strong at battles, is very good at supporting the group and making crucial decisions, the three are nothing special individually but they work very well together and have good chemistry.

What I consider the best part of the series though is the antagonists, being a demon lord army that wants to rule the world you'd expect them to be one dimensional villains, and although some of them are, but most of the ones introduced so far are surprisingly more than that, they each have their own unique personalities and actually care about things such as honor and glory, they don't just fight for the sake of being evil, there was even a time when it's shown that some of the soldiers from the Demon Lord army are good people (or good monsters, to be more accurate).
You might say not being one dimensional doesn't necessarily mean they're deep and interesting, which is a fair point to make, but it does make you care about both sides during a fight and that makes them more fun to watch, not to mention some of those antagonists go through some interesting development.

So overall how do I describe this adaptation? Is it bad just because the old version was better? This reminds me of two popular shounen series that got rebooted, Fullmetal Alchemist and Hunter x Hunter, both started off rushed and toned down, but got better as they diverted from their old counterparts, so although those were made by entirely different people, I can say Dragon Quest Dai no Daibouken has a lot of potential and I'm having high expectations from it in the future.
As for right now I can't give the show more than 6/10, which is a decent rating because I did enjoy watching it after all, but nostalgia played a big part of it.
If you want my advice, keep the show under your radar but wait for another 15 episodes or so, it's hard to tell if it's gonna be worth your time right now, or you can watch the old version (if you can find it that is) and then get onto this adaptation, since there aren't many differences aside form the deleted content.