Xian Wang de Richang Shenghuo 4

“Daily life of the Immortal King” is still an easy-going, light-hearted, short and funny little thing. It has always been from the start and it stayed the same.

I have been watching this donghua since day one and always found it a relaxing, non-problematic and easy-to-keep story. There is nothing new in this season. I mean, there are new adventures, there are new obstacles, but Wang Ling is still ridiculously overpowered, Rong is always by his side, as talented and charming as she had always been. His friends are the ride or die trio, though I actually think if anyone is getting at least some ... sort of character development, it would have to be Chao and Hao who are more and more confident in their own abilities.

Not the most epic story on the “winter seasonal list” but especially good if you want to relax your mind and just enjoy some short (16-minute) long episodes of Chinese shonen donghua with some funny moments and likable characters.

Fourth season of The Daily Life of The Immortal King and maybe the worst. It would be lying to say I'm not enjoying the episodes, but the same is true if I was saying this is a really great show. I like it, obviously, because it's funny to watch ! And it seems like they chose to take this direction compared to the previous seasons, so it's a great thing to keep it this way. Thus, for the same reasons, I know it's not an anime that many will really appreciate.

Give it a chance and maybe you'll like it, but don't hope for something really ... interesting.

TLDR: I tend to be quite harsh with Donghua; they often try to minimize production costs and have much shorter episode lengths, resulting in smaller, less developed stories being told per episode. Japan has a much more robust animation industry and history, so some may consider it unfair, but Tencent and Billibilli tend to be behind many of the most popular works, a company worth billions of dollars. Daily Life of the Immortal Demon King often subverts this trend with decent production, sure not One Punch Man levels, but much higher than 95% of Donghua, especially when many solely use trashy PS2-level CGI. However, this ... season, it feels lost; the characters need further development, and the comedy has gotten stagnant, yet not unfunny. With the current direction, we've explored each episode's concept to some degree, even if it doesn't align with an earlier episode. The characters must undergo personal growth, and a proper challenge to the MC is needed, not a comedy gag. The series has had great action moments in the past, and this is exactly what is missing from this season so far. Nobody cares about the irrelevant three in the cast of the four characters around the MC besides the love interest. However, she hasn't had many further developments with the MC. In this Donghua, you can feel 100% confident knowing none of the main cast will die; this series puts comedy above all else, even story development that would make the viewers more invested/moved. Many anime also have this issue, but they tend to be shitty anyways; it is fair to compare this series to great anime as it had and maybe still has the potential to rival them in quality; at the current rate, this series will not, though...

While this season is not bad, and we are only five episodes in, much needs to be improved for me to recommend this series to the average anime fan. If you enjoy Donghua, you probably will end up liking it anyway. But if China wants to be competitive with anime, Donghua like these will not give enough soft power for Donghua even to be picked up by many anime fans. I'm still going to keep watching, but considering the past three seasons have ended with ratings of 7-8/10 for me, this is the worst season at a preliminary 6.