Now, quite honestly this anime is something of an abomination. The thing is, this is a japanese anime made from a chinese novel in some form of a cooperation. This is the part where it becomes something of an abomination. You can easily see how they mutilated the novel to fit in with the usual fast-food japanese crap(the low-level crappy animes that they send on a conveyor belt for the addicts). Hell, they even changed the small parts of the novel that you do see, they changed A LOT of the dialogue, jokes and story, now it's pretty much like any other japanese anime... The good stuff is gone and we have yet another generic junk-food anime that pretty much only differs in its setting. Honestly, it's pretty much a completely separate story from the anime with how much they changed everything. Well, it's somewhat interesting and a few of the jokes hit home, so it's not a trainwreck, just average.
Not only does about 90-95% or more of the content get left out with only the absolute bare minimum to keep the story going, almost all the jokes are either destroyed or not included, which also makes the included jokes feel out of place. Seriously, I felt quite bored watching it, if anything it was a bit interesting to see the "xianxia" world animated.
Of course they use japanese, and I'm fine with that even if names are changed and everything looks more like a western magic animation than a xianxia chinese one, but a lot of the funny parts are lost due to translation or perhaps the japanese didn't feel the rougher parts that are more in-line with chinese culture were funny.
So, you get a husk with almost no comedy(at least I hardly laughed at all while watching both the seasons) and all and tons of scenes to make you cringe because it's f**king horrible in almost every way possible. No, sorry, it's not horrible, it's average. Really, it's one of those animes that shouldn't be compared with the novel at all. If the novel is a 10/10, the anime is a 2 or at most 3/10.
It's pretty sad, but what was I hoping for? It's similar to all the manhua's(or manga's) which also completely screws up a novels good points. Just that this might be even worse because they japanized it, trying to force the novel into a japanese format that has a very similar style and animations to the japanese stuff(like the reactions, especially in the joke scenes but pretty much everything is the same). Seriously, it's not even the same novel anymore when not only does most of the events get left out but almost every single scene and event is changed up along with adding new jokes that just aren't that good(the standard cliché jokes you'd find in japanese stuff).
So... Really, it's barely worth watching unless you're bored and have nothing better to watch or read. Or maybe you loved the novel so much that you want to watch this anime that is pretty much like a japanese parallel story set in the same universe with different stories. Read the novel instead, it's f**king awesome. "Once Upon A Time, There Was A Spirit Sword Mountain", you can find it on qidian (webnovel.com) for free. The novel is hilarious, this anime can pretty much be considered an insult to it, but that is often the case with adaptations into anime or manga from novels since it forces things into a smaller format with almost no content. Only that this was even worse than the usual adaptations because of the differing cultures and that chinese novels really doesn't fit in anime's since you can't compress an xianxia to such an extent and still have something good left. All the good stuff is in the long text, compressing it makes you lose almost all of it.
