Review of The King's Avatar

Esports, through the years, have yielded amazing stories tempered by colorful and magnetic personalities. It promises a wealth of untapped potentials for stories that can go toe-to-toe with some of anime's best character dramas and captivating sports series. Sadly, Quan Zhi Gao Shou offers little and captures less of the allure of the narrative weaved by esports. It’s worth noting that the genre tag did not even include “Sports”, given that esports is sports through the medium of video games. It’s a run-of-the-mill redemption action series with the questionable virtue of not having moe or harem elements, which apparently is enough to be praised and lovedin this day and age. Claims that the series is mature due to simply having "adult" characters are equally hilarious as attitude and temperament, not age, defines maturity. This is not mature, grounded series by any means. Especially not when your adults are nothing more than upscaled teenagers.

First off, we need to make one thing very very clear: adaptations are suppose to stand on it’s own. So zip it with the piteous noises about the source material. Quan Zhi Gao Shou as an anime stands or falls on it’s own (de)merits.

Let’s start with the basics: a drama is as compelling as its characters. Nothing cripples a show as much as the lack of character investment on the side of the viewers. This is supposed to be a man's journey back to the top, a sports drama people have been perfecting for years, decades even and they fucked up the one single crucial element: character motivation.

There is only one character of consequence in this show: god-mode MC-kun who’s APM (actions per minute) is so god-tier glorious he can solo MMORPG bosses. The numerous side characters the anime crammed without proper pace and care are simply background props and cheerleaders relentlessly praising and gaping in awe over MC-kun. The antagonists on the other hand are busy trying to outdo each other in a contest to see who is the most irredeemable prick to make MC-kun look better by comparison. It does get aggravating how the show executes character investment with all the skills of a stereotypical 90s high school movie.

What this show really needs and what it tellingly lacks is his reason/motivation for soldiering on despite everything so far. That should have been the core of the show’s drama and it should have been established early on immediately why we want to root for him. But they didn’t. Instead it’s left to the viewer to project their idea of why he is doing all of these. Every single platitude by non-LN readers points to various reasons they assume is his motivation and struggles moving forward. (LN readers on the other hand seem to know what I’m sure is some emotionally manipulative boohoo story somewhere detailing the why of his love of the game to fix it all up. The characterization is so sloppily executed that they're overdue at least one boohoo scene to compensate.)

The alternative is to set him up as the complete/mentor character, a paragon, that enables the growth of the people he works with. While the setup was indeed teased later in the story with just one other side character, there was never enough commitment to develop it.

A even better option is to have the main cast bounce their development off one another. Maybe they help rekindle his love of the game, and he in turn build them to a competent team from the ground up, all the while learning more and more about himself via their interactions as they form a professional team together. I assume that is the intention, yes?

Let's talk about that. The show has a tendency to jump from one scene and one event to the next without rhyme or reason, except maybe to have another excruciating demonstration on how godly-good the MC is. These scenes should have served to showcase why we would want these side characters to help the MC in his potential comeback. The MC prattles on that Glory is a team game and yet we never get the sense of how and why they work as a team, except for the fact that the MC tells us, the viewers, that they are really good players. Oh, and that they follow his commands to a T, with little to no input of their own.

Yeah, this anime's universe revolves around MC-kun it seems. Even his rivals, pros who are supposed to be his equals, are in awe of him, constantly fellate him, and their actions are almost always done with him as context. I hate to bandy the term Mary Sue around because it has lost all its meaning and therefore power in internet criticism, but yeah, this is textbook Mary Sue.

What we have so far is more a spectacle than a story. And it’s not even a good spectacle. Yes, the visuals is well within standards, CGI notwithstanding. Yes, the background looks gorgeous. The anime is certainly pretty when you look at the still frames. Put those in motion however, and it all becomes awkward. It’s grating. The show is so scared of going off-model on the characters and ended up with motion looking stilted instead of overflowing with life and vitality.

And it doesn't help that though there were a few series over the years that embraced the concepts of character motion and grounded, subtle facial expressions as powerful narrative tools in anime, Quan Zhi Gao Shou knows only three: scheming face, evil scheming face, and wacky-tries-to-be-funny face. Maybe that’s what passes for slapstick humor in this anime because the comedy genre tag certainly confuses me.

To be honest, the show is more cartoonish compared to other anime with less detailed and more fluid designs.

The action scenes are subpar as well. The anime has a huge boner for shitty shot angles, shaky shots, poor choreography, and the firm belief that adding enough flashy fluffs would cover it all up. So in other words, your average anime. If you like the fight sequences in Asterisk Wars, you’ll like this. The problem with these kinds of fights is that you get no real sense of space or flow. A fight is a synthesis: thesis and anti-thesis, action and reaction. Some of the best fights in motion pictures have both action and reaction in ONE frame. QZGS doesn't. It has a tendency to show action in a frame and then reaction in the next. What it does is merely gives the illusion of thrill because there is movement and pretty colors flashing about. Refusing to show both action and reaction in one frame rids the viewer of a frame of reference to ground the action which ends up limiting the impact of a fight. The impact here is subdued, lame even. A shame really that they prefer the Hollywood shaky-cam method instead of the clean, wide shots, and solid choreography typical of Oriental martial or action movies.

The sound is okay, I guess. Nothing stood out but I'm not an expert on these things. It's Chinese though. I've already seen several Chinese live-action flicks so I don't really care but it might throw you off if you got so used to Japanese that you can get the gist of a conversation just by listening.

Also, I want to add that like almost all hack-writing involving videogames, there is way too much emphasis on mechanical skills/reflexes and way too little on good game knowledge, map/situational awareness, proper positioning, and the value of a good support. When you play the game at the highest level, the APM gap tends to narrow a lot. It becomes more about knowing all the options available to the enemy, predicting which one he'll chose, and then proactively stopping it instead of being reactive and defensive.

Credit where credit is due, of course. The character designs, animation, and visuals are, again, well within current standard and that retirement announcement in Episode 2 captures a glimmer of the fervor an eSports gaming community has for its own flock. And while I have a plethora of reasons to go against the MMO eSport concept of the show, it does help non-gaming savvy viewers to easily identify the characters when they assume their in-game avatars.

Here’s to hoping that it’ll get better and to knowing that it probably won’t. Let it have a good arc at the very least. Let it have it’s own Mother’s Rosario.

*slyly winks at those who understands what I am implying*

Alternatives? Well, there is Log Horizon, a world-building masterwork that captures the soul of gaming in a way no other piece of fiction has, since or ever. But the one I highly recommend in the topic of esports are the Valve documentaries "True Sight" and “Free to Play”, which are available on YouTube for free. The former is a series about the lives and times of pro-players preparing for the Dota 2 Boston Major. The latter is a story of three players, set in the beginning of one of the largest and most prestigious competitions in esports, Dota 2 The International.