Review of The King's Avatar

has a lot of good action, but doesn't offer much else. nobody except the main character has much characterization at all and are mostly one-note background characters, which is also the role they fill in combat since for the majority of the show nobody but the MC does much on-screen fighting. there isn't really a story, mostly just a framework through which the conflict in the game can happen, and there really is only one conflict; MC was supposed to retire, but didn't, and now he's breaking a bunch of game records which is making the top guilds look bad. 95% of the fights thathappens in the show are because of this. the animation during any scene where a fight isn't happening isn't great, lots of ugly CG people and static movements.

you could ignore all of these issues if you were just there for the action, though, which is clearly the only thing this show is interested in. i was willing to ignore it as well, maybe it's because of my rotted gamer brain, but i just couldn't get past the presentation of the game of "glory" itself. i just couldn't wrap my head around any of its mechanics. it really just seems like a very poorly designed game, and one that i have a hard time believing is sweeping the nation to the extent that its pro players are basically celebrities. on one hand, maybe that shouldn't matter and i should just turn my brain off and watch the pretty colors. on the other hand, the entire show is about this one game, so is it really too much to ask that it makes sense?

first of all, what is going on with the MC's weapon? how is it fair? judging by the fact that literally no other player has seen it before, and nobody knows what it can do, that leads me to believe it actually is some sort of cheat item, but we're clearly meant to believe that the MC is just better at the game, and that's why he wins. people also constantly say that being "unspecialized" is worse than just choosing a class (yeah right), but it really seems like being unspecialized actually means you have access to tons of different moves, can wield a broken weapon, and its only weakness is that it lacks an "ultimate attack" which doesn't seem to matter at all, people just say that it does.

second of all, if you're going to go for the angle that this game isn't any sort of VR game or isekai or any of that nonsense, then it must be believable that they're playing a real computer game. it is not. the characters in the game move like completely autonomous people, from tripping over themselves to falling through some brittle bricks to getting hit and flying through layers of rock. anyone who has ever played a game before, and ESPECIALLY an MMO, knows that things like that are completely unrealistic. it completely breaks the immersion for me. i'm trying to wrap my head around what sequence of keyboard inputs allows someone in an MMO to do half of what the MC does in the show, and i'm immediately taken out of the action because of it. if there were any sort of rules or mechanics established to anchor to, maybe it would make it easier to handwave, but we are told next to nothing about how the game works at all, so i'm just left scratching my head.

at the end of the day, it's schlocky action with decent-to-good animation, and it's not endeavoring to be anything more than that. there were definitely some action scenes that were entertaining, and even though most characters were one-note and there was WAY too many of them, some of them were entertaining too. so i can't say it's unwatchable, but it's certainly not anything special.

oh also, mcdonald's advertisements. lots of mcdonald's advertisements.