Recommended
This donghua is an adaptation of a novel of the same name. I have read the novel, so I will give an adaptation review in addition to a review of the donghua as an independent work. Plot Summary: Tang San, an outer sect disciple, violated the rules of the Tang Sect and thus was pursued as a traitor. In his final moments, he reveals that the techniques and designs he stole, allowed him to recreate the technologically lost legendary weapons weapons of the Tang Sect. These weapons would be his last gift to the Tang Sect, as he knows his treasonous actions would not be forgiven.Since he was an orphan raised by the sect, he returns everything, including his life to back to the sect (via suicide as atonement). After this, he reincarnates up in the Douluo Continent (Dalu), cultivating the skills he learned from the Tang Sect and slowly learning about this world and applying his previous life knowledge to strengthen himself while learning about this new world and beginning a new life.
The plot for this season is pretty simple. Tang San reincarnated into this new Douluo Dalu world; we have a brief look at this previous life before jumping to Tang San at age 6 in the new world. We get a bit of infodumping in the earlier episodes, but they are important in quickly establishing the world. Considering this donghua is now finished with 263 episodes, this S1 (first 26 episodes) barely scratches the surface, covering from when Tang San starts "elementary school" then time skips to when he is 12 and starts to attend an advanced academy, Shrek Academy. With the aid of some infodumping, we get a decently fleshed out world, giving us a basic understand of how this world works. The story does contain romance, and given the makeup of the main cast, the pairings are obvious; it can feel a bit overdone as there are cringy/sappy romance moments sprinkled throughout. The atmosphere of the world is quite consistant, with the only weird portion being the spirit arena (colleseum part) as the flamboyant design felt out of place.
Tang San is the obvious main character, but other than him most of the core main cast has been introduced. They all have different/unique spirit and abilities. The core cast is shown to be the seven monsters of Shrek academy; all of them have unique personalities, backgrounds, and quirks. The mentors have been (mostly) introduced as well, making the overall cast well-rounded. At the very end, the implied antagonist group gets a very very short intro to finish off the season with a cliffhanger to the rest of the story.
The animation and designs of this donghua are quite good; they are dated (clearly as this was released back in 2018 and it is now 2023), but they still hold up in 2023. Despite being released in 2018, the animations are better than the "trash tier" donghua being currently released. Most of the character designs are unique, which make each character easily identifiable. The world is designed to be a medieval-esque/ancient world type world. The environments, presentation of spirits, spirit rings and beasts are all done well. The movement can sometimes be a bit stiff, with action scenes suffering the most due to the age of the donghua (especially the all-out-assault with hidden weapons), but the quality is still considered quite high. One complaint I have regarding the animation is that they overuse the "transformation" or spirit release scenes. Hopefully, they will tone those down since it can get repetitive.
On another note, the architecture of this medieval-esque world is mostly consistant with one sole exception, the spirit arena. The colloseum type arena that was shown was the only immersion breaking aspect of the overall world. It felt super modern, with the lights, "tv screens", and floating announcer platform (reminencent of virtual/VR concert stages); this felt out of place in comparison to the rest of the world, but since it had little focus, it wasn't too bad.
I cannot review Soul Land without talking about the embedded advertisements. There are commercials in each episode, usually one or two, with some labeled and others not. Luckily, the advertisements are mostly for the same products so your brain can tune them out after a while, but they might confuse some viewers the first time they show up. Also, there is product placement within the episodes themselves, which, for now, are not very immersion breaking, but they are still quite noticeable.
The Soul Land S1 is a pretty good introduction into the Soul Land world. It does a good job explaining the basics of the world, building up the characters, and staging plot for the continuation of the story. There is some info dumps early on which can get a bit overwhelming, and there are some product placements within the donghua which can be immersion breaking. However, despite these flaws, this donghua's S1 is good, featuring some decent world building, action and plot. If you like chinese cultivation stories (with a rather unique cultivation method), this certainly deserves a watch. Bonus is that this donghua is a completed (one of the first) so in 2023 and beyond, you can watch this from start to finish with no waiting.
Adaptation Review:
This adaptation felt very close the the original novel, though it didn't follow the plotline 1:1. The most obvious general change has been a bit of plot shuffling around to better build up the world in earlier episodes. The first example of this is the blacksmithing portion: they originally introduced some of it before Tang San left the village to attend the school, but here they consolidated and presented it during his "job-seeking" where they did some flashbacks that showed his father teaching the technique to him. I have to say this was pretty good, since the information is more concentrated and concise (it was presented in a more fragmented way in the novel).
One point of obvious confusion is that Tang San appears to use both his spirits at the same time, when he was fighting the human-faced man-eating spider, since it appeared like he trapped the spider with his blue-spirit grass before summoning his hammer to strike it; this was something that was explicitly stated to be impossible in the novel.
In the adaptation, they also seem to reference Tang San's previous life alot, bringing it up when explaining his hidden weapons/cuiltivation methods, and especially when he has any mental struggles. This is a bit different from the novel, where this plot point was mentioned only offhandedly.
Overall, the adaptation was quite faithful to the original work, it covers roughly 1.5 to 2 arcs of the original novel: the childhood all the way to the beginning of Shrek Academy. The romance is a bit overdone, but still a great watch.
Adaptation Score (how faithful to the source): 8/10
