Mixed Feelings
This donghua is an old one. I've finally gotten around to watching it. I remember when this first came out, almost 10 years ago, when the manhua was at the height of its popularity This donghua is adapted the manhua by the same name and is one of my all-time favorites. I once spent about 2 years translating about 250 chapters (chapters 69-331) under the name Yue Er. Considering that this donghua has 2 seasons out, I will also talk a little bit about S2 in this review. Before I being my review, I would also like to point out something out. This was among thefirst attempts by AC.QQ, now owned by Tencent, at breaking into the animation/donghua market, so some of the poor production quality can be attributed to this.
Plot Summary: Feng Xi, our MC, is a run-of-the-mill new college student looking to start the sterotypical college life (fun times, getting a girlfriend, etc). The campus beauty, Su Jiu'er, quickly starts to get close to him, even becoming his girlfriend. Other girls also start to associate with him, some even in suggestive ways. The MC is at the peak of life, but not everything is as it seems.
Despite my initial muted, but high hopes for watching this very old adaptation for an all-time favorite manhua of mine, I have to say, it is a very very sub-par, and that is putting it nicely. A more apt and honest way of putting it would be a dumpster fire production. Why? This is because plot presentation, sound work, animation, almost everything is done very poorly. Like mentioned before, this is one of the first attempts to create donghua by this company, but it borders unwatchable for me in 2024. It may have fared better back when it was released, but there are plenty of similar shows (especially anime) that would be more worth watching, not to mention simply reading the manhua would be a better use of your time and provide a better understanding of the story. Let's go over the different aspects of this donghua:
Plot
The plot of this story (manhua and donghua) is set in a "modern" college setting. The plot development, characters, comedy is all reminiscent of mid-2010s school-type romance/harem stories. It includes all of these tropes, the good and the bad. The season can be seperated into 2 arcs, the first being 6 episodes and the remaining 12 for the second arc. From a "bigger picture perspective", the first arc briefly introduces the world with a very generic hook, and the second arc starts to dive into the meat of the story, but the problem is how the plot is structured. The donghua tries to mix the harem/romance/jealousy comedy (that is EXTREMELY CRINGY) into the story then flips around to immediately try to progress the important plot, creating a very disjointed mess. The plot also intermixes flashbacks in a seemingly random way, making things confusing. If I hadn't read the manhua (source before) the story would have been very difficult to follow and confusing; only with this crutch can I actually understand what the donghua was trying to portray. Not a very good job in my opinion.
Characters
The characters for this manhua/donghua are very generic. All of them in this season fall into very obvious tropes. The MC is the "ordinary nobody who is somehow special and girls gather around him" type that is a staple of school setting harem type stories. All the girls introduced are all part of the "harem" and fit into some category as well. Despite the generic start, the donghua does begin to grow the characters past their cliches by the end of the season.
Animation
This donghua is 10 years old, as of this review (2024), so don't expect anything extraordinary. In fact, even if you go back in time to 2014/2015 when this was released, it was mid-low range for the animation quality. This was originally released as either 480p or 720p back when it first came out, so any higher resolutions are simply upscaled reuploads (even on official uploads). The character designs are also very reminiscent of mid-2010s style as well, with big eyes and such; they designs themselves are taken from the manhua and anime-fied. The animation itself uses many repeated frames, quite common to older 2D animations. The action, when there is some, isn't that fluid or great, but it is still watchable; again, just don't expect high quality.
Sound
The sound work in this is terrible. The voice acting is a bit off key and not very pleasant to listen to. The taoist girl is supposed to be act like a kind of emotionless machine but her "monotone" voice comes off as grating. The BGM, likely used to "set the mood", is loud, desynced from other sounds (like voice acting) and goes on or off at a flip of a switch without transition, making them seem seperated from the actual show. Other effects are also not well synced in volume. On top of this, the BGMs themselves are pretty bad. There isn't much good to say about the sound production, other than the nice OP and ED.
Final Thoughts
This donghua starts off as very generic and only starts to distinguish itself by the end of Season 1. It followed the trend of stories that were popular at the time: school-setting romance/harem dramas. The base story, from the manhua promises potential, but the show did a very poor job in adapting that story to the screen. I do not believe watching this show is especially worthwhile; I believe reading the manhua would be a much better way to experience this story (at least for this season, CH1-74).
Score: 4/10
Adaptation Review:
As I said earlier, this is an adaptation of a manhua of the same name and S1 covers chapters 1-74. I spent quite a bit of time translating this manhua many years ago.
Considering the age of the donghua, I can't say that this was great. As an adaptation, it does follow the story, and does try its best to fill in some of the blanks/plot holes, and since the manhua is furthur along in the story, they bring foward some foreshadowing plot points from way later to explain some things.
As with any adaptation, there are changes. The changes are minor though (if you discard censorship), they change a bit of the MC's behavior so that they can make the MC and FMC get into a relationship earlier. They also rush the first arc a bit, instead focusing the donghua more on the more original and compelling story that starts from the second arc forth.
As with any Chinese work, there is of course censorship of gore and any R-18 activity implications. There are some pixelated scenes and some of the R-18 activity was either toned down or more implicit rather than explicit.
Overall, while this adaptaion does closely follow the manhua, it rushes the first arc to get to the more "divergent from tropes" and original second arc. The second arc is where the original source material starts to build the story up (instead of relying on the usual school harem tropes) so I can't complain that they rushed the beginning. However, despite them following the manhua, the messy and cringy presentation of the plot makes it difficult to recommend, so I would suggest simply reading the manhua for this season.
Adaptation score(how faithful to source): 7/10
