Changye Kaita Zhe

"Zhangye Kaituozhe" translates literally to something like "Expansion by the Pioneer". The title advertises a show in which our main character, Duke Galway, founds and expands his realm. But this is better described as the best tabletop RPG anime ever made. The whole story feels like it was lifted out of a good D&D-like campaign, with some political power grabbing, some creative abuse of the magic system, some combat, and no murderhoboing.

We follow a party, led by a Warrior, usually accompanied by his trusty Rogue companion and a rotating cast consisting of two Wizards, a Paladin, Druid and more, depending on who could show up ... for D&D night. The group is trying to make a place for themselves in the world, and are often confronted by a political plot or malicious villain who they have to figure out and confront. Even as the party acquires a settlement and underlings, they still prefer to solve most problems personally, because this is after all a D&D campaign. The Dungeon Master is benevolent but prefers to keep the story rooted in politics and mystery solving, so the party members are never given overwhelming personal power and always struggle a bit in direct combat. The story can at times be slow to advance and it can even feel episodic.

The production quality is good. The 3D animation in particular is very detailed and far above what I've come to expect from Chinese 3D showings.

This will be a two part review, evaluating the work as an original story and as an adaptation.

The general plot of Changye Kaita Zhe (Blade of Dawn, original WN chinese name is LiMing ZhiJian which directly translates to Blade/Sword of Dawn) is: a relatively well-educated man from Earth, after death, is isekai'd into the AI of some observation satellite over an unknown planet. There he observes this unknown planet for hundreds of thousands of years before damage to the satellite activates a preservation program that beams the MC's now AI consciousness into the body of Ga-wen, an ancient pioneer that died 700 years ago. ... Once in this new body, he accesses the memories of to learn the general situation of the world and realizes a disaster much like the one that happened 700 years ago may soon happen again, prompting him to start to quickly rebuild his fief with his (original body's) descendants. Since the kingdom is still in the medieval and feudal era, he applies philosophies from Earth to release them from those shackles and start an "industrial revolution".

Now onto the review: The premise of the story itself shows alot of promise, it has fantasy, magical elements and has kingdom building elements. The general animations and art style are quite good, though the action/fight scenes could really use some work (they are too stiff). It's quite a decent watch. However, when looking into the plot development and world building aspect, it leaves alot to be desired. There are simply too many plot convenient things that happen, and much of the world building is lacking, especially if you don't understand much D&D (it seems it has many D&D elements though I don't really know much about D&D). His first time traveling to the shadow realm prompted a "goddess meeting and status window" and got him a book that somehow informed him of the king's assassination of his brother, like what? Was that really necessary? The plot is also a bit too disjointed, and not much explanation of how the developments went from a to b; there seem to be some measure of time-skip that lead to certain developments that don't quite get discussed. (More in the adaptation comparison section). These problems with the plot progression, plot convenient events, time-skips and lack of world-building, can really confuse those who are new viewers. Despite these problems, this donghua is still a decent watch.

Now as an adaptation:
There are many problems and changes I find quite disagreeable. If I were to describe the general changes to the plot from the novel, then there would be two main points. First, this donghua adaptation changed the serious, world and kingdom building type novel into a more childish comedy fantasy story (with a touch of romance [like between Heidi and the old knight]). Second, when it comes to the plot, it felt like they took a giant ax to the world-building and plot, then strung together major plot points from the novel and made some things up to fill in the gaps.
The first major change was the whole meeting the "goddess" in the whole shadow realm and the status/save&load screen. That was really unnecessary. There were no game-like moments in the novel, and from there he obtained a kind of cheat book that allows the MC to find out about some assassination attempt that he used to threaten the king to return his pioneer/colonizing rights. In the novel, the MC skillfully used rumors and politics to manipulate and pressure the kingdom to recognize him and return his right to pioneer.
The book that allowed him to simulated/view the past and had the Magic Net formula was originally found in the Shadow Realm, and had a back story of why/how it was created. The novel used this to introduce the concept of the Shadow Realm and display the differences between how the kingdom's nobility viewed magic and what magic could potentially do; essentially, a low ranking magician was desperate to save his daughter and used the power of math/precise calculations to supplement his low talent as opposed to brute force that the traditional magicians view as important.
The donghua also cuts out tons of kingdom building and tech advancement. In regard to the kingdom building, they cut almost all the slow reforms the MC used to increase productivity and reform the feudal order, but slowly enough to lead the serfs to our modern concept of "freedom" rather than just drop it on them and cause a culture shock. When it comes to tech development, all of the research and development and the trial and error as MC tried to translate Earth's technology to this planet's tech were all left out. Instead, what we got was new tech randomly dropping in with little explanation on how it was created.
Now comes the problem with the contrived plot: 700 year old humans (like the old knight) and the evil organization he was connected to. Humans shouldn't live that long, this change really makes the reappearance of the MC less meaningful (at least among humans). They also worked in some ancient feud between the knight and the evil organization instead of having the paths of the two groups accidentally intersect (evil group was worried about MC and monitoring him but did not want to get into conflict yet). This battle between them also ended up pulling in religion/the saint which didn't happen in the novel, these should have been completely separated events.
The dream world arc was actually not bad and I don't have much complains about that.
Finally, the "final battle" and the guns/cannon should not have made their way into the story yet. While I do agree it was cool, the MC was trying to keep a low profile while developing his power, so he would not have invited anyone to watch his battle. This battle should have depleted the MC's salvaged magic armor and weapons and then the guns would have been invented/deployed after this first defensive battle.
Overall, the adaptation was not very good; as I had previously said, it felt like they took an ax to the plot and strung together major plot points with some childish ideas to fill in the gaps left behind.
Adaptation score (how faithful to source): 4/10

This anime, which we can liken to a "colony sim" game, at least differs from other Chinese anime in terms of subject matter. If we imagined that a game with fantasy, colony sim, rpg and open world tags was adapted to anime on the basis of a power struggle with dnd-like politics and the player was turned into the lead character in this anime, we would be pointing to this anime. A viewer who likes the aforementioned game tags will not regret giving this anime a chance. However, it should be noted that it is not a very high quality production, and it is possible ... to see a very fast narrative in terms of story flow and fast progression that cannot normally be achieved in short periods of time.

Although we can overlook this negative aspect to some extent since the anime is set in a fantasy universe, it will be quite possible to say that some of the characters fail both in terms of dialog depth and uniqueness, especially the "evil" character, a character who has no depth, whose goals and reasons we do not know, and who seems to do evil just to do evil. It could be argued that the motives and ideological justifications of such a character could have been left to the audience, but the fact that the script as a whole lacks such depth makes us conclude that this idea can only lead to good. Until the final scene of the series, because in the very last scene we learn the purpose of our first villain. This is a minus for those who can't wait until the finale and like to understand the series as they the plot progress.

There is also a Kant sequence that follows, which I felt like I was watching a DnD adventure in my bones, and this sequence is much better rendered, backgrounded and conveyed to the audience to some extent than our first "bad" character. The characters that are not rendered deeply and the dialogues that lack emotion, as they are members of both the "good" and the "bad" sides as a whole, lose the effect of the fiction written in a black and white opposition, thus negatively affecting the progression of the story as a whole. So this series as a whole convinced me to read the novel. Not that bad, but bad enough to make me read the novel... or good enough, I don't know.