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Chessman

Sweden

Chessman

Sweden
The Legend of Shen Li chinese drama review
Completed
The Legend of Shen Li
8 people found this review helpful
by Chessman
Apr 10, 2024
39 of 39 episodes seen
Completed
Overall 7.0
Story 6.0
Acting/Cast 7.5
Music 6.0
Rewatch Value 5.0

I Watched It So You Don't Have To!

It’s astonishing how average and mid modern dramas have gotten. This shouldn’t be normalized, it’s borderline criminal and just continues to prove that it’s young kids that’re writing these storylines and handing them to teenagers to select actors and direct the dramas. This drama in particular (just like any other to be fair) overlooks the viewers, thinking we’re all stupid and I don’t know if this is as a result of the actors’ sheer incompetence or just the basic shortcomings of this storyline. For one, the actors keep showing us subtle hints of what’s about to happen making it really easily and at best ‘basic’ to predict how things pan out 10-20 episodes later.

The beginning (episode 1-4) to be fair had me hooked as I expected a lot from the lead pair following their astounding success in Princess Agents and honestly speaking it’s been underwhelming, and the saddest part is this is not new to most of us, we’re pretty much used to these average shows. The storyline is WEAK, all over the place, and lacking a sense of direction. Loads of pointless scenes taking up most of the screen time (this isn’t new tough), and most scenes just lacking the gravity of maybe what the writer would’ve wanted to be depicted. Take for example “The Extra natural Heaven.”, it looked just like any other mortal palace AT BEST and throughout the entire drama I never even understood what the extra natural heaven looked like, just some blue mountains drawn in Adobe Illustrator and rendered into the footage.

The CGI was another aspect of the drama that I thought was all over the place as well. I got the sense it was all designed by an overworked drunkard. There didn’t seem to be any kind of articulation in the CGI or any form of distinction. I’ll just save your time on this: The CGI is rubbish basically.

And finally, on to the acting which wasn’t that bad to be honest mainly from the lead pair but beyond that it was such an average or less than average display. The storyline doesn’t seem to help out and compensate for the average actors at times instead all I saw was them getting more screen time. And then the amount of the times the FL got saved by the ML were countless that it even got boring and predictable. You could literally see it coming miles away. LAZY WRITING!! I think the Western women will have to skip this one lol.

It's the first time I’ve seen two useless episodes in a drama that had me question WHY. They were better off just ending the drama at episode 37 but guess what, they needed to remind us of some annoying and irrelevant character and give her a happy ending. Them shamelessly adding two episodes to the drama simply because they needed to build up a quick love story for the woman in red (couldn’t be asked to search for her name) that no one cared about and hardly even remembered. To this point I’m still wondering why they did that and as if that wasn’t enough, they spawned a new character (potential husband to woman in red) that they just shoved into the last episodes and left it for us to figure out his background or even who he is. Honestly do these guys thing we’re this thick.

Just to sum this up, this drama suffers from lazy incompetent writing that’s been given a platform and a reckless director who couldn’t be asked to get more from the actors.
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