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Written for teens/YA
Not very inspired world building using the more standard xianxia/wuxia tropes without adding anything significant. Pretty much standard hero quest.Generally male-centric as usual which befits the target audience, one supposes. While it has a "balanced" by numbers gender representation, not so much on the intelligence/power scale of things.
Characters are presumably supposed to be young (late teens/early 20's possibly) and have the cognitive skills of teenagers. Either swing a sword, and if that fails, swing the sword some more. Planning? Ideas? Not so much. Saving their compatriots involve running to be physically close to them, getting caught in the same trap, not analyzing the enemy and just generally not having a plan to proceed. So the IQ level isn't set to be very high.
The main story only makes sense if one doesn't look too closely. Early, it seemed that there was some attempt to offer different perspectives on either side but the execution defaulted to "let's not make it hard to determine good vs evil because our audience is dumb".
Barely adequate acting but the material probably isn't there for any actor to get into it. So mostly saying their lines in the cheesiest method possible. CGI is below average by 2019 standards.
It all boils down to a barely watchable (with fast forwarding) drama that is only good for spending time at home during a quarantine. A drama made with little inspiration or vision in all aspects - acting, character, story, plot, dialogue, cinematography, music.
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Acting - Young actors new at their craft.
Directing - Low budget and it showed. Sloppy editing/timing/acting where the director clearly cut corners and let it slide. Scenes that needed 5 seconds drawn out to 30 seconds or more. Rather than a buildup of tension, it dragged the scene down. This happened many times from even the earliest episodes - which does not bode well for the series.
Screenwriting - Too much filler, cliched conversation. Bickering - this was cute maybe the first half dozen times, then it became tedious. The characters were a bit superficial in development - especially the side characters. The usual character archetypes but it gave the sense of being 75% done and could have been refined in presentation. Very odd choices - action/dramatic scene interspersed with casual conversation or obvious exposition.
Storyboarding - A bit confusing and disjointed. Starting at the middle, then going back to the beginning makes a bit more sense if there was some storytelling device that needed this artifice. But the way it was done detracted rather than added to the story being told - why not just do it chronologically? And the decision to cut back from the confrontation scene (ep 4?) (and this is a LOOOONG back story) left me confused. A poor choice - maybe driven by inexperience.
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