Gaishi Dizun

This donghua follows a young student who seemingly has no talent for cultivation. He falls asleep whenever he tries to mediate and his fighting ability is pathetic. Through luck he suddenly breaks the barrier suppressing his talent and unlocks his cheat-like ability to absorb knowledge and learn quickly. He uses his powers to beat up the never ending torrent of arrogant bad guys, make (mostly female) friends and learn about his past.

The story start off pretty weak and remains dull throughout but it does have some slightly interesting parts. The worst part of the progression in this show is that the main character doesn't really ... have to put any effort in to become stronger. Everything comes extremely easy to him. Another part is the lack of agency over cultivation. He's extremely lucky to keep stumbling over "ancient pool of power" or "ancient fountain of power" or "primordial place of power" which keep allowing him to just sit down, absorb the "essence" and ascend to a new level. It feels incredibly unsatisfying.

The characters come and go. Baddies are introduced and die shortly after, and the sidekicks just share a short adventure with the MC before getting sidelined. Only one of the sidekicks gets a tiny bit of a backstory, but other than that there's nothing. I got faintly attached to a few of them to be honest however. They're not bland sidekicks, they're just more of a device to the current plot line than anything else.

Animation is bad. It would have looked dated in 2013., let alone in 2023.

Fighting scenes are fine. There's some creative use of abilities here and there but it suffers at the hands of the cheap animation.

There's 10 minutes per episode (not 12) with at least one fight per episode to I guess keep people interested, which really doesn't leave much time for compelling storytelling but it was enough to keep me somewhat interested and entertained. The last few episodes are a slog to get through though and the worst part is that the story is not even close to finished. I don't think this will ever get a sequel and if I knew what state this would be left at by the end I'd have thought twice before watching it all. I'm utterly dissatisfied.

6/10