Long Zu

This is truly an under-rated anime. It's just sad that people assume that Chinese animes lack ideas and animations. Literally, This anime has the best animation and by far the best score which includes it's opening theme composed by none other than Hiroyuki Sawano.



I truly loved this anime. This anime was overall perfect, but one thing it lacked was a bit of "what's going on here" scenes. One moment, You are in the scene you are enjoying and than at next, you are being showed something else, of course we would understand it later on in the show but this wouldn't be that much ... easy if you were to be new here. It also has a sweet mix of romance which is perfect

It's not awful, just ok...
The animation is nice, the music is nice, the opening slaps. There are some funny jokes in the beginning, but their timing becomes worse and worse every episode, the narrative, the characters become more boring. The battle scenes are ruined by monotonous oh so panicked explanations of details. The last four-five episodes are awfully dragged out and full of flashbacks to previous episodes. The MC could be very interesting, but he gets his op powers just because, with no real growth, while still whining and being dumb. His personality is inconsistent, one moment he cool like a cucumber, the other he ... panic and cry like an idiot without any actual reason, he wants to be better, but he doesn't, just goes with the flow even though he seemed to be realistic, scrutinizing at first and even awakened some interesting power inside his body (the shooting moment), but it just didn't play any role later on. But he just became annoying and boring.
The only interesting thing left is the mystery of this little brother and the chairman.
Started with a bang and ended with a fizzle. Real pity

The premise and the early episodes seemed like they might portend an interesting story. Unfortunately, it quickly devolves into a rather trite affair. Your given the impression that the protagonist is a nescient genius who plays the part of a slacker as a result of his parents abandonment of him to gold digging relatives. But that all ends after Episode 0. After that, Lu Mingfei is just your typical underachieving, below average intellect, hero character, who for whatever reason is "special". He shows up on screen and you're just supposed to root for him, well because he's obviously the MC. ... Even when he's given the opportunity to do a whole 'training montage', he's still the underachieving, incompetent, cowardly, stooge he's always been. He just happens to be "gifted" special abilities during the (eventually) anticlimactic boss battle that (still) makes him the hero, and hence, indispensable. Lu Mingfei is a totally forgettable character with no depth or growth.

The few interesting characters barely live long enough to make an impression. And the ones that remain are just your run of the mill, cliché, 2D, anime characters you'll find in a schlocky "high/magic school" anime series. Everyone else were mere stage dressing, not characters. To tell a dull and pointless story.

It also, doesn't help that the story seemed to jump from one beat to another in a disjointed and awkward way. I never really got a sense of the why or how of this story. It was exclusively focused on the who of Lu Mingfei. Another thing that really bothered me, were the attempts to shoe horn in comedy and slice of life elements. They felt like poorly implemented fan-service for readers of the original novel. Which kind of crystalizes how I feel a bout the whole story. It all felt out of place. Like it was written by a slightly hallucinating AI LLM that got confused trying to composite popular anime genres.

What's most sad, is that this ONA has excellent animation and very good sound design. But it is squander on a lousy story, uninteresting characters, and a confused & confusing narrative. I'm baffled at the fact that Long Zu manages a score of 7.19. I was tempted to give score below three, but I've seen worse and at least Long Zu was something to look at.