Mo Dao Zu Shi: Xian Yun Pian

I can't fathom why this season is rated as high as it is, giving it a 5 feels overly generous already. I have never seen a show as rushed as this, to the point where literally nothing makes sense unless you've read the source material. Watching it feels like sticking eight bookmarks randomly into a book you haven't read and then ONLY reading the eight pages you landed on with zero context. The story wildly jumps through time by huge increments, often without ANY indication that time has passed, nothing is ever explained, characters and things just show up and immediately are forgotten for the restof the story. I don't know why they only got eight episodes to work with instead of fifteen like the first season, but the creators seemed determined to squeeze fifteen episodes worth of story into eight anyways (and then add their own fanfiction on top of it which takes up another 2+ episodes, which is MAYBE not such a great idea when you are seriously pressed for time already...). The result of that is a jumbled mess of unrelated scenes just vaguely strung together without rhyme or reason. A few episodes in I gave up and read the novel instead. Armed with that knowledge, I could finally understand what was going on, but even then, it was a rather unsatisfactory experience because they combined several scenes from the novel into one to save time more than once, regardless of the scenes fitting well together or not and absolutely shredding any natural character interaction in the process (for example, one character goes from hating and accusing a girl of fraud to shouting at her to awkwardly being in love to having a baby with her and getting murdered in like 30 seconds flat, without the fraud case ever getting resolved, without us ever seeing how/why they fall in love, NO TIME, GOTTA MOVE ON TO THE NEXT SCENE). It's frustrating to watch even if you do know about everything that was cut out in between, because it leaves the characters as empty husks that just stumble through the vauge resemblance of a plot, with no time to actually show character traits or relations that make them unique. From an adaption standpoint, there's also the issue that core concepts of the plot were completely changed, and at least in my opinion, for the worse. SPOILER NEXT. A big part of what makes the characters in MDZS so intriguing is that many of them aren't just shining perfect heroes. They struggle and fail and do terrible, unforgivable things, especially the protagonist, but the reader can hardly hate them for it because the circumstances they do these things in are relateable. The animation takes these interesting, multifaceted characters and declares "Nope! Anything bad they ever did was because they were the victim of an evil conspiracy!" Not because they gave in to their anger and grief. Not because they used a power that they had always been warned they would lose control of. It's because someone secretly fed them evil energy or some bs like that. Turns out, the heroes were always perfect and never did anything risky or wrong, immediately stripping them of that entire interesting aspect of their character. Demonic cultivation is in the title, for god's sake, but I guess the writers for this animation thought it was better if it is just the same as normal cultivation, lol. SPOILER OVER. The only thing elevating this season is the art and music, which are once again absolutely stellar, though they did reuse quite a few shots from the first season, which does make it feel a bit lazy in comparison. Summary: A beautiful show that got absolutely RUINED by the abysmal pacing and massive cuts to the story. Watchable only if you've read or seen the source material or another adaption already, and even then you have to be okay with detrimental changes to the core narrative. If you enjoyed season 1, don't ruin that enjoyment by watching this.

I’m not very good at expressing my opinions in writing but I felt that I needed to try for this show. I absolutely adore the novel and the 1st season of the donghua (Chinese anime) and I have been obsessed with it since I found the show last October. While this 2nd season is still beautifully animated the characters are still wonderful, the story is sorely lacking and I feel really bad for “anime only” watchers. I don’t know how they followed along with the story as its messy. It’s just difficult to follow the story if you don’t have knowledge from the novel tofill the the gaps. The past and the present scenes don’t flow well this season. This could have been prevented if they had had the original 15 episodes to flesh out the story but for some reason they only had 8 episodes to work with. Continuing with talking about it being a shortened season, I felt it was a disservice to the show to put in filler in a season that needed every minute to tell its story. The season felt so rushed and I don’t understand why they put the filler in. I guess I’m just disappointed in this season. It’s not necessarily bad, but it could have been so much better.

Mo Dao Zu Shi S1 did exceptionally well. Therefore, S2 was no exception. Like always, the animation is very good, the story is intriguing as always, and the characters never cease to amaze me, both in a good and bad way. However, I ended up repeating the first season's mistake: I didn't understand the story again on the first watch again. It's not the donghua's fault as it is on mine, so that's an easy thing to overlook. Other than that, and the shorter run time, I didn't have any problems with season 2. Overall, Mo Dao Zu Shi S2 is great, but S1 was just slightlybetter. If S2 had around the same number of episodes as S1, I feel like it could've easily been 10/10.

Thoroughly enjoyed the second season. I was glad to see more of WWX and LWJ in the present day, although we still saw the scenes from the past that were missed in Season 1, which is great. Although I wanted to rate it 10 based solely on my enjoyment, I did rate it 9 in the end looking at it from a perspective of someone who only saw anime and nothing else. As I have read the novel, watched the drama, I did not really get lost in the plot and it was really just going naturally. However, I did feel like story was a bit quick paced (sadlyit only had 8 episodes) and it might leave you confused. It did jump back and forth from past and present so this could have also caused a little bit confusion. I feel like everything that they did discover and will discover in the future (S3) is important to understand for the story. If you never read the novel, you might find yourself lost. However, it was still very intriguing and I loved every episode. So, overall : 9 Story: 10 - can't wait for third season Art: 10 - so so beautiful Sound: 10 - ^ Character: 10 - we finally get some more depth on some characters. Protect Jin Ling at all costs! Enjoyment: 10 I do recommend the second season but you might have to re-watch before the third season is out!

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