Story: 4/10 Compared to the novel, the pacing is extremely rushed. Every episode features one of the climactic moments from the novel, so the show just feels like a montage of all the cool fight scenes, with very little down time in between. For context, many of these fights happen weeks if not months apart from each other but the donghua does not make this very clear. I think they were maybe worried the slower pacing of the novel would be boring in an animation so they focused on the martial arts more. While martial arts are a big part of the novel, I would say it focus more on the philosophy behind martial arts, as well as Daoism, Buddhism and Confucianism and how they play against one another.
The animation also changes the order of events, often combining 2-3 separate events into one to save on time and money I assume. This makes things a little awkward, and can sometimes make the characters actions and motivations seem strange without the prior context established in the novel.
Art: 6/10 It's OK for a CGI Donghua. I feel like when held up against shows like Scumbag System it obviously looks a lot better, but it's also not as good as other CGI donghua that are years older. The facial expressions can often look hilarious or uncanny valley, which I wasn't always sure if that was intentional.
My biggest complaint was in the set design/backgrounds. They frequently re-use assets and scenes throughout the donghua which makes the setting and location hard to determine, which is only compounded by the animation not clueing in the viewer enough about where/when the story is. For context, this is based on a historical(ish) novel that takes place during the Northern and Southern Dynasties (420-589AD) in China. However the animation changes the name of a lot of the major locations and figures(possibly due to censorship/political reasons?). The characters are constantly traveling all over China (big part of the plot) and a lot of this is lost when it seems like they're just moving between the same 3-4 recycled scenes. Strangely enough they went and created some really cool scenes for 2 important moments in the show. I can understand wanting to make an impact with these scenes, but I feel like it might have been a waste of resources since both of them actually just happen in a generic forest in the novel. Would have rather they spent the time, instead of creating these two lavish set pieces, on creating a few other basic ones to improve the flow of the story. Title cards establishing time+place would also have been helpful.
Sound: 3/10 The re-used the VA's from the drama CD for the main two characters. They did OK, however I felt their performances on the drama CD were better. This is probably due to one of the main characters being very very different in the animation from how he is portrayed in the novel.
Now I'm not sure if this is just a result of the pandemic, but I've noticed a lot of productions from the last 1.5 years have extremely poor sound design. A lot of low quality stock sound effects are used and it tends to break immersion when I keep hearing the same SFX from a 20 year old RPG maker game in my 2021 donghua. I'm willing to accept the pandemic interfering with recordings on this though.
Character: 5/10 A lot of the characters are changed either greatly or subtly in this adaptation. The most obvious is one of the protagonists YWS. I'm not particularly complaining as his character is so hilarious in the donghua, it was the only thing keeping me watching for all 16 episodes. Very meme-worthy performance. That being said, he's supposed to be a much more serious character, so having him burst out with his Signature Laugh^TM during an extremely emotional moment made me not sure if I wanted to laugh or cry.
Enjoyment: 4/10 I had my hopes up after seeing the first 2 episodes. It seemed like a pretty decent quality adaptation. When I had first seen the trailer over a year ago, I wasn't too hopeful this would be a good adaptation at all. After watching everything, it was just OK.
Conclusion: As web novels are becoming more and more popular, we are seeing more and more adaptations following. However, I am a little worried the rush to take advantage of this hype will cost on production quality for many series. That, and the growing amount of censorship is a problem too.
Thousand Autumns is probably one of my favorite novels, yet I hadn't even realized the animation was out and for free on Youtube until 6 months after it aired. I really don't think this animation is making many waves, despite how well-liked the novel is because they are essentially so different from one another, it's hard for fans of one to like the other adaptation. Anyone except for die-hard fans probably won't bother.
TLDR; go read the novel instead.
