Review of The King's Avatar

This was a weird one for me. Right, so the story follows Ye Qui, the best player of a massively popular game called Glory. He is captain of one of the most successful teams in the game, but he is soon deposed and forced into retirement by jealous team mates. Having to start from scratch, he starts to gather a team with the aim to ascend be pinnacle of the game once more. So, this is a Chinese anime and it's the first I've watched. The language took some getting used to and I must say, I prefer Japanese. That said, how about the anime itself?Let's start with the characters. I wasn't very impressed with them to be honest and probably only one individual stood out (it wasn't the protagonist.) As for the protagonist, he reminded me of Sakamoto from Sakamoto desu ka, an OP character with little beyond his impressive expertise. For instance, I never got the sense of anguish that comes with being forced to retire and there was this too cool for school look on his face everytime that I enjoyed, but ultimately did little to add to his character. This was because I could never tell what he was thinking and he never seemed to struggle with anything. I mean, for all Saitama's power, you at least know he suffers from ennui caused by his strength. At least Saitama struggles at something.

Aside from that, the world building was... I dunno. It was set in China, but I never got a sense of the culture and as for the game itself, apart from the name of a few places, I didn't understand anything that made it tick. How about the story and plot? While I liked the whole redemption story, the pacing was a bit too quick and I kept having character after character thrown at me. Soon enough I could barely follow what was going on.

The music didn't strike me as anything special and in fact they kept changing musical tones within action scenes which I found a bit jarring. And the animation... This again, was pretty weird as there was a lot of 2D and 3D. Now, as individual components, each was fantastic and some of the 3D work was breathtaking. However, when meshed together, it didn't work and I found myself cringing a couple of times.

With all that said, I really enjoyed this show and will happily watch a second season since it's about e-sports. I would recommend it if you don't want to think too much about what you're watching. It's good, harmless fun