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Glad you turned around on Xin. The cool armor helps LOL. Yeah, in the end there's a little plot armor and some shounen elements here compared to something like LOGH, but I don't mind. This is the best Chinese war anime I've seen by a fair bit. Feels like the Suikoden of anime. I think you'll enjoy the variety in S4-S5 even after S3. And me despite having seen a lot of historical KDrama and CDrama now, this series still continues to impress me with some of its ideas and battle situations. Maybe you'll get a 9 out of S4 or S5. I'd have a hard time ranking these last three seasons. I agree S1 is kind of a problem and might turn people away from getting to the better stuff. It could maybe even be skipped in a way, but I do think the backstory makes the payoff better in the end to see how far the characters grow. Since you're not shy of long anime I figured it was worth a rec for you, glad it worked out well! But it'd be hard to get some other viewers to commit to all these seasons. I'm definitely a big fan of Qiang myself.

Yeah, that aspect feels a bit shounen-ish haha. In all the KDrama/CDrama I've seen, the hierarchy/status and etiquette is taken far more seriously. His tongue would have been cut by now in anything else, lol.

Looking forward to your thoughts on S3-S5.

Yeah I see what you mean. I would say one of my biggest pet peeves with S1-S2 is Shin/Xin wearing those lame clothes and no armor, lmao. S3 fixes this and he starts looking awesome while getting much cooler. I bet the rest will be a 9/10 for you. :)

Tian Meng was a great new addition for sure. More and more characters start standing out more. You may be surprised that some of the earlier ones get a lot better in S3 and beyond too I thought.

Haha guess I don't know much real history on some of this stuff, so it went unnoticed to me. The army promotions feel like this series' "power level" thing, or the characters leveling up in a JRPG kind of way. But yeah maybe it's not too accurate. Lol, the scale gets even bigger and more grand in the later seasons. But I think you'll continue to really enjoy it.

Did you ever watch all of the new LOGH? I was thinking of giving it another chance after S1. I know it will never rival the original to me, but now that it's been so long maybe I can appreciate the new version for its own merits. Not sure though...

Nice progress on K2. Definitely an improvement?

I really enjoyed the arc with Xia "Shi Ka" Zi that I think you've seen by this point.

I haven't read the manga but I looked up some images awhile back, the art looks great and it's a lot more violent. I don't like reading manga much but I think as of S5 the anime is still only halfway through it, so there's a lot ahead. I hear the manga is getting more and more popular on digital stores along with the new seasons, so hopefully that bodes well for the anime to continue. I saw it was #1 on some digital store for 2023 somewhere.

That's another thing, the later seasons finally have blood, lol. It was kind of ridiculous how S1 censored all that.

I didn't have much to say about Zhang Ying/Ei Sei from S1, but he has some really good backstory stuff in S2 I liked a lot. Some of the female characters get better and better too.

Qi Wang/Ou Ki was a nice highlight of S1.

Haha yeah, Shin/Xin is hard headed. He grew on me so maybe you'll like him eventually. Your other complaints will be fixed for sure. S2 is a big improvement and I bet you'll really like S3 and the rest. I think about rewatching S3-S5 in the near future already! lol. Thankfully each season has a good stopping point with the manga still going, but I'm looking forward to see where it keeps going. I think a 10/10 season for me is possible at this point.

Kingdom! Making good progress. How you liking it so far?
The General characters on the horses here look like Fist of the Northstar designs haha!

Historical drama has really only gaining more traction outside of Asia in recent memory. I was lucky enough to stumble upon Jumong by complete accident in 2008 and have been obsessed with the stuff ever since. Crazy how my first experience was with such an epic. So many are still coming out per year. It's a real goldmine. It's amusing how well I know Korean and Chinese history now. There's a lot to it.

I attempted to watch the 95 episode Three Kingdoms drama from 2010 and it has the unfortunate distinction of being the only historical drama that I've dropped lol. I got 20 episodes in and it felt pointless for me to continue since I wasn't retaining anything. Some people have good things to say about it though. But I don't know what their frame of reference is or how experienced they are with the genre. Anything with "Three Kingdoms" in the title is usually a 7/10 for me at best. Which is puzzling since it's so important to their history. Most versions fail to make Cao Cao as important as he's hyped up to be. Or the casting is just all wrong. So I went into the Secret of Three Kingdoms series from 2018 with low expectations and it completely blew me away. That show was already one of my favorites before Cao Cao shows up around the halfway point and elevates it even further. Have you been able to track that one down? Not sure what the availability is like outside of it streaming on Viki over here and on Netflix in certain parts of the world. But that would be the one to watch for Three Kingdoms if any. These are all of the historical dramas I've seen. So far I've scored ten shows a 10/10 and the above mentioned is one of them.

Obviously some will be subjective. I'm not sure if you'd give all of those a perfect score. But there are two that I can absolutely guarantee. Jumong is the greatest heroes journey story ever. Just finished that one for the 3rd time and nothing tops it for me. So that's my favorite Korean drama. Then on the Chinese side, Nirvana in Fire 1 & 2 is brilliant. It's more strategic with the best writing and attention to detail imaginable. Don't want to go into sell mode too hard here since these shows are long and time consuming. But this genre has become my #1 over the years and is so addicting. Unlike anime which peaked decades back, it's the complete opposite for this. It wasn't until the mid to late 2000s that historical drama took its perfect form. So anything from the 90s or early 2000s would feel far more limited in scope and budget.

Anakin, I think you should also check out Kingdom someday: https://myanimelist.net/anime/12031/Kingdom

S1 can be rough with CGI, but the pay off is amazing when you get to S3-S5... some of the best political war drama I've seen in anime. I also noticed the S3-S5 director did a lot on LOGH, so it adds up now! :)
https://myanimelist.net/people/16373/Kenichi_Imaizumi

If you ever want to watch an awesome version of Three Kingdoms, check out this CDrama. I say this as someone who never clicked with Three Kingdoms in any form no matter how many attempts I made. But finally this drama was exceptional and is one of my favorites.

Good. I recently re-watched it and I had a great time with it. It was the first time I watched it fully in Japanese, too. I loved the voices. It's a show that transcends its intention of being an advertisement for the card game.

YU-GI-OH!!!!!!!

I've finished Jujutsu Kaisen a coyples of months ago and I've been following the new sseason and I just checked the stats for the forst season and I've noticed some of my friends have rated it rather low. That got me a bit puzzled because although not reinventing the wheel the show's quite a decent shounen,
What made you give JK a 5, my friend?