Review of The King's Avatar

I don't really understand why so many people liked 'The King's Avatar' so much. It seems to have all of the makings of what a good anime should have, but it doesn't deliver. The story is that the protagonist, Ye Xiu, has to quit professional e-sports because his team has forced him into retirement. He was underpaid, cheated out and was of course the former ace, and is replaced by some cocky newcomer, who is paid more. Ye Xiu then wanders into the nearest internet café (around 2 streets away, literally the first one he finds) and finds some work there. There is no more story tothis anime. 'The King's Avatar' seem to conclude whatever it wanted to tell you after episode 1, and then proceed to spend the rest of the season raising Ye Xiu to Kirito levels of over powered.

The format of the typical episode is as follows: Ye and his party members find some sort of problem (be it beating a boss raid, dealing with people who don't like them, or... well, that's really the only two scenarios that seem to show up). They hit a snag (or may not) and deal with it. They win.

There is no real suspense because you know that Ye Xiu, the 'God of Glory' (Glory being the e-sport they play) cannot lose. He has won every championship, is indisputably the former MVP of his old team, and was called the best player of the game by some. There is literally no way he can lose in a scrub server, even when other e-sports teams try take him down (because apparently he plays some broken class, called an 'unspecialized', that borrows skills from all other classes, and only he is good enough to play this; in fact, he even calls someone better than him except for the fact that his APM isn't high enough, why can't that guy play an unspecialized?). Ye Xiu knows he's OP and is accordingly cocky, and wins every game regardless.

With how massively overpowered he is, and since he was paid so little, it leads you to wonder why in the world his old e-sports team even let him go for someone who is seemingly an order of magnitude worse than him, and is paid more than him?

Did I mention that the one internet café he goes to has another amazing Glory player (who he teaches because obviously she is only good mechanically but needs his help in tactics), he finds a noob online coincidentally who apparently has amazing mechanics that rival pros and has e-sports greats help him (including aces of other teams) beat high scores?

I may sound over the top, but honestly, how an anime that does this terribly dealing with a sensible plot is beyond me. The only thing I got out of these 12 episodes is that Ye Xiu is amazing at the game, and that despite being forced to retired unfairly he will come back to the e-sports scene (in his mid-20s, I might mention). The first part happened in episode 1, and the second part will presumably happen in season 2 or 3.

The art is definitely good. The reason a lot of people got hooked is the trailer that had very good visuals, and indeed, the fight scenes are pretty well done. Sometimes other sections aren't as well done (like backgrounds) which can jar a lot with the fight scenes. While they reuse a few scenes a lot (like Ye Xiu flying around with his ninja shunpo), its excusable as they have A LOT of fight scenes, and all of the ones I recall were well done. Sound wasn't memorable, but still decent and fit the series.

There is no characterisation (I mean, unless you count one player learning how to play the game a bit better thanks to God Xiu as their character growing), and most people are fairly 1 dimensional. The game itself also seems to be terribly balanced (you can steal people's weapons? one of Ye Xiu's party, a professional e-sports swordsman, steals another player's orange rarity weapon after killing him. How the hell is that balanced?), and nobody knows Ye Xiu's face because as an e-sports player he hid it (which seems impossible, considering you play e-sports games on a stage usually with a camera trained ON YOUR FACE, they even show him playing on a stage in the last episode). This leads to nobody believing him when he tells them he's really good, and being super amazed when he is. Game screens don't show a game window, but scenes from the game as shown in the anime, so while I'm not really sure how they can control these characters so precisely, it works decently because the producers don't have to worry about the controls making sense; it's not meant to, and that's fine.

Overall, the King's Avatar had very good visuals, a decent sound track, and... nothing. Pretty much everything else was terrible. I don't know whether the novels were adapted badly, or whether it reads better, or if some of the plot holes are explained somewhere outside the anime, but as an anime, the King's Avatar is bad.