Review of The King's Avatar

People tend to meme a lot about Chinese cartoons in this community, but did you ever imagine that a genuine example of such a thing could turn out this spectacular? Quan Zhi Gao Shou—or The King's Avatar in English—is indeed a Chinese production based on an award-winning web novel series of the same name. While it is certainly not the first Chinese anime that has been produced over the years, I do believe this is in fact the first time one of them has actually gotten overall praise and popularity from the general anime community. Perhaps the main reason for this is that Quan Zhi GaoShou feels like it fills a hole that has so far been left unexplored by Japan. While there have been tons of anime in recent years about otaku, games and people somehow being transported to game-like fantasy worlds, this is the first one I've ever seen which is actually about esports. There is nothing supernatural, fetishized or parody-oriented about Quan conceptually speaking; instead it is a story about what it's like for people in their twenties to go about their everyday lives as professional gamers and everything that comes along with being a part of that industry. As someone who has been watching esports for almost a decade now for a variety of different games and genres, I must say that this anime interested me a lot from the beginning, and while it's not exactly perfect, it definitely hits a lot of the right notes.

The story primarily follows Ye Xiu, a former top level professional gamer of a fictional game called Glory who was once recognized as perhaps the best player in the world. However, that time has passed, and in recent years he has started to decline on the professional scene as he's gotten older, and in the first episode of the anime, he gets promptly screwed over by his own team owners who want some new blood to become the new face of the team. He's forced to hand over his account to a younger team recruit and is told to publically announce his "retirement", effectively meaning that he's not allowed to compete professionally again for a full year, which considering his age is basically the same as ending his career for good. However, Ye Xiu isn't willing to give up on the game he's dedicated half his life to quite so easily, and ends up getting a job at a local internet café where he decides to start anew in Glory by creating a new alt character called Lord Grim upon the opening of the game's newest server. And thus begins the journey of an old dog trying to rise from the ashes to once again make a name for himself, this time primarily by trying to break speed records in PvE raids unlike the PvP-oriented pro scene, with the added challenges of having to find new players to team up with and also doing it all anonymously.

In general the anime revolves around a number of areas. These include the in-game events starting to play out on the new server as well as numerous issues Ye Xiu finds himself having to deal with in his newfound personal life, such as interactions with his friends and coworkers at the internet café as well as connections with old pro gamer acquaintances who start to raise their eyebrows at who this new record-breaking Lord Grim guy is supposed to be. What I really like about it overall is that it all feels very believable. Yes the MC is pretty overpowered relative to his surroundings, but for once I feel that's perfectly natural considering that we're talking about one of the most experienced and formerly perhaps most skilled player in the world now playing alongside a bunch of ordinary people.

The way this is presented is also quite respectable; Ye Xiu acts mostly like an old mentor to the people he plays with and teaches them a lot of tricks he's picked up over the years in terms of itemization, raid tactics, class and skill builds, old out-of-meta strategies and more. For anyone that's knowledgeable about professional gaming in general, there's a lot to relate to here, and although not every single detail about Glory's functions are explained in the anime (but supposedly they more or less are in the novels), it explains enough for you to get the general gist of it. Glory is an MMORPG which in this universe is supposedly the biggest and most competitive game in the world. In a general sense it seems to function more or less like your typical MMO, but the biggest difference is that your APM (actions per minute, I.E: how fast you are at giving in-game commands) is a big deal here. Whereas most MMOs have capped casting times for spells and abilities, in Glory the combat functions more like a fighting game where you can actually act faster if you can input the commands fast enough on your keyboard as well as chain advanced combos together. As a result, it is not just a game where experience, intuition and strategy is important, but also your physical ability as a player.

While there are certainly a lot of good aspects about Quan Zhi Gao Shou though, of course not everything is perfect. Perhaps most notably, the anime feels like a fairly low-budget production. The in-game fight scenes generally have average animation at best, and you can also spot a lot of reused footage, especially in the first few episodes, presumably an attempt at cutting corners and saving money. There is also some really strange and almost experimental-feeling 3D CGI utilized for various types of panorama shots of the internet café's gaming hall and the people playing in it, though fortunately these shots only last for a few seconds per episode on average. But either way, this is hardly an action-driven series at heart, so the mediocre animation isn't really a huge deal in my opinion.

Regarding the audio though, Quan Zhi Gao Shou comes with the obvious twist of... being in Chinese. Yes, this is not a Japanese dub, it is the genuine Chinese original. Of course this is by no means a bad thing, but for people used to hearing Japanese spoken in anime it can be a somewhat alien experience hearing a completely different language being spoken instead, though you get used to it in time. The anime's origins has also made accessibility to it a bit lower than normal as it's not available on any standard legal streaming service (to my knowledge), but rather interestingly enough the official (and legal) English subbed version of the anime is instead available on the Chinese streaming service's own YouTube account called "TencentVideo 腾讯视频", which is where I'd recommend you go to if you're planning on watching the series.

Quan Zhi Gao Shou is as far as I know an unbelievably long series in terms of its original novels, however only a tiny portion of it is covered in this mere 12-episode anime unfortunately. But either way, what little we got was an absolute treat to watch, even if the last episode or two don't quite end on the most satisfying ending note I've ever seen. Still, this is quite likely the best Chinese anime that has been produced to date, but I have a feeling that this is far from the last time we'll see China delivering. Current trends foresee that the anime market will be growing exponentially in the Chinese industry in the near future, and it wouldn't surprise me at all if we'll have a ton of Chinese anime of this level in 5-10 years or so. Who knows, maybe in 2025 people will look back on Quan Zhi Gao Shou and remember it as the first truly great Chinese anime that paved the way for many others to come. Or so we can hope at least.