not for readers

It seems to me that this is a 100% bad adaptation. I feel no connection or emotion toward any character. There’s no clear goal—just a person thrown into a mysterious world to explore it. The animation is poor; it lacks movement in simple, minor scenes that should have enhanced the sense of fun in exploration. If they had added just a bit of animation to convey the feeling of discovery, it would have been much better. Instead, what I see is one event after another without understanding what’s happening. There’s too much silence and strange scenes that fail to communicate the story properly. The animation is bad, and they really cut and cram everything into the episodes.

The Chinese dubbing also fails to convey the characters’ emotions. I just feel like this anime is a passing event in my path. All the characters look alike—I can’t tell them apart. If I saw half of someone’s face, I’d assume it’s the protagonist, but it turns out to be someone else. This anime makes everything so mysterious that it completely killed my motivation to continue watching.

The writer seems to want to include everything and name it whatever they want, leaving nothing out: churches, sects, potions, game systems, quests, investigations… but what’s the point? Where’s the connection? Watching this kind of storytelling is exhausting. It consumes all my emotions and curiosity without giving me anything in return.

Do not argue with me, try to convince me, or attack me—this is my personal opinion. Be mature.

I'm kinda annoyed how the visual presentation is betrayed by the writing. I wonder how the script for this show got a pass.

LotM fundamentally fails to present its (on paper) rich worldbuilding, mysteries and overall plot in an interesting way leaving me with a (in a bad way) barely comprehensible, unappealing and rushed story. I wonder whether people rate it based on the visual aspect alone and have any thoughts on it beyond 'it looks cool, 10/10'.

But hey, there are just three episodes left. I'll just do myself a favour and read the web novel instead of watching anything beyond the first season.

I'm watching the English dub because I can't stand the Chinese/Mandarin dub, so I'm on episode 5, and so far it's good, it's not awesome to have me go crazy over it, but I say it's good and enjoyable, and the animation is great so far as well.

As of episode 5, this anime is an 8/10.

It seems to me that this is a 100% bad adaptation. I feel no connection or emotion toward any character. There’s no clear goal—just a person thrown into a mysterious world to explore it. The animation is poor; it lacks movement in simple, minor scenes that should have enhanced the sense of fun in exploration. If they had added just a bit of animation to convey the feeling of discovery, it would have been much better. Instead, what I see is one event after another without understanding what’s happening. There’s too much silence and strange scenes that fail to communicate the story properly. The animation is bad, and they really cut and cram everything into the episodes.

The Chinese dubbing also fails to convey the characters’ emotions. I just feel like this anime is a passing event in my path. All the characters look alike—I can’t tell them apart. If I saw half of someone’s face, I’d assume it’s the protagonist, but it turns out to be someone else. This anime makes everything so mysterious that it completely killed my motivation to continue watching.

The writer seems to want to include everything and name it whatever they want, leaving nothing out: churches, sects, potions, game systems, quests, investigations… but what’s the point? Where’s the connection? Watching this kind of storytelling is exhausting. It consumes all my emotions and curiosity without giving me anything in return.

Do not argue with me, try to convince me, or attack me—this is my personal opinion. Be mature.

I really like how an innocent topic on the forum escalated into a full-blown argument, where fanatics gang up and trash someone just for daring to have a different opinion. That’s the kind of community Lord of the Mysteries has—good thing they’re not accusing the person of racism or something even worse this time.

As for the show: by episode 9, you can clearly see that the source material is rich with events and nuances that the adaptation often forgets to explain or presents in a way that assumes you already know what’s going on. Honestly, Chinese works often suffer from an overload of unnecessary fluff. I wouldn’t be surprised if the book includes absolutely everything, with endless dialogues about the weather or chapters spent savoring what kind of sandwiches the main character likes to eat and what tea pair them with. At its core, though, it’s still the same cultivation story where the protagonist races forward for more power, fighting all sorts of strong and not-so-strong idiots along the way, which was pretty obvious from the opening of the first episode.

The static visuals are often good—still-life scenes are drawn with real care. The character movements separate from the backgrounds aren’t that bad either, though sometimes they move like the studio forgot to add in-between frames. Although there’s a telegram chat I’m in with 900 people discussing all kinds of anime, and folks there share animated LOTM stickers whenever the topic of clunky/jerky animation comes up. There are issues when 2D characters move against 3D backgrounds—it often looks pretty unappealing. Also, some camera pans over the city make you unintentionally recall PlayStation 1 graphics.

The main issue, of course, is the directing. It’s clear the head honcho wanted the show to be chopped up into TikToks and go viral for extra promotion. Because of that, there’s not a single scene without some over-the-top nonsense trying to make it stand out from the rest. I wouldn’t be surprised if it turns out each scene was made by a different team, and they’re all competing in the office to see whose work gets turned into TikToks the most.

I really like how an innocent topic on the forum escalated into a full-blown argument, where fanatics gang up and trash someone just for daring to have a different opinion. That’s the kind of community Lord of the Mysteries has—good thing they’re not accusing the person of racism or something even worse this time.

As for the show: by episode 9, you can clearly see that the source material is rich with events and nuances that the adaptation often forgets to explain or presents in a way that assumes you already know what’s going on. Honestly, Chinese works often suffer from an overload of unnecessary fluff. I wouldn’t be surprised if the book includes absolutely everything, with endless dialogues about the weather or chapters spent savoring what kind of sandwiches the main character likes to eat and what tea pair them with. At its core, though, it’s still the same cultivation story where the protagonist races forward for more power, fighting all sorts of strong and not-so-strong idiots along the way, which was pretty obvious from the opening of the first episode.

The static visuals are often good—still-life scenes are drawn with real care. The character movements separate from the backgrounds aren’t that bad either, though sometimes they move like the studio forgot to add in-between frames. Although there’s a telegram chat I’m in with 900 people discussing all kinds of anime, and folks there share animated LOTM stickers whenever the topic of clunky/jerky animation comes up. There are issues when 2D characters move against 3D backgrounds—it often looks pretty unappealing. Also, some camera pans over the city make you unintentionally recall PlayStation 1 graphics.

The main issue, of course, is the directing. It’s clear the head honcho wanted the show to be chopped up into TikToks and go viral for extra promotion. Because of that, there’s not a single scene without some over-the-top nonsense trying to make it stand out from the rest. I wouldn’t be surprised if it turns out each scene was made by a different team, and they’re all competing in the office to see whose work gets turned into TikToks the most.