Review of The King's Avatar

QZGS suffers from a fairly simple problem: it's boring. It's hard to see what the stakes are; the characters are under-sketched and typically emotionally flat; and it's not clear at any point that the show intends to go anywhere. The music is solid but repetitive--the OP gets reused as the main hype music and directly quoted in its entirety in the last episode. But I did melodramatic mando-rock, so I'm pretty okay with it. The show mostly consists of watching people play a game whose rules are completely opaque to me (with several years of WoW under my belt but not a lot of other MMOexperience). The gameplay is mainly battle sequences; and I will admit it has pretty solid fight choreography and loving attention to detail--diversity of poses and strategies, plenty of awesomeness happening. In fact the art in general is where the show really shines, despite occasional dips into uncanny valley territory (do yourself a favor and don't look too close at the blatantly CG backgrounds, or the people in them, who are rendered almost photorealistically--I'm assuming as an artifact of motion capture or something--compared to the stylized main characters). Main character art is delightfully proportioned and expressive (surprisingly, given the under-emoting of the characters themselves).

So why'd I give it a 7? Because it's fun to watch, and because it gave me a great chance to brush up on my Chinese. Because being Chinese makes it different from so much else in the anime world. Because the characters, while types, are at least different types from what I'm used to seeing in Japanese animation. And because I'm curious to see where it goes--if it ever starts going there.