Cultivation stories are very popular in China, in this type of story individuals accumulate some form of energy, usually called Qi, by a process similar to meditation. The accumulated Qi is that individual's cultivation and allows then to become powerfull and prolong their life. The cultivation process is often subdivided into several stages, which allows one to have an idea how powerful an individual is by which stage of cultivation he is in.
Doupo Cangqiong follows the story of Xiao Yan, who as a kid was touted as a genius with great talent for cultivation. However, suddenly and without apparent reason, Xiao Yan's cultivation stopped progressing and in fact started to regress, which made his reputation take a turn from genius to trash. The show follows Xiao Yan's climb in the cultivation world, from trash back to prodigy.
One of the staples of cultivation stories is that the main character is both overpowered and weak at the same time! You may find that statement odd, but because cultivation takes place over many years, older characters tend to be stronger than younger characters. There are no "old man past his prime" in cultivation stories, the older a character is, the more time he had to cultivate. Doupo Cangqiong makes full use of this dynamic, alternating situations where the main character is heavily outclassed and situations where he gets to be an overpowered badass dealing with people around his age.
It must be said that season 1 is by far the weakest of the show. This show was a pioneer in the recent explosion of chinese 3D shows and as such, it took then a while to get a proper handle on it. Based just on season 1, I wouldnt recommend this show. However, having seen the subsequent seasons I definitely recommend getting through it to get to the latter seasons. The latter seasons have improved character models, the animation steadily improved from season to season and the fight choreography improved as well.
For me, season 1 earns a rating of 5, but the show as a whole (up to season 5) earns a score of 7, with the more recent seasons being clearly better than the early seasons.
