Zhanshen Lianmeng

This donghua pleasantly surprised me, at first I stuck with it because it was so bad it was funny, later it grew on me. It's very cheaply made but the plot is more than entertaining. It's a cultivation donghua set in a futuristic universe where humans fight monsters and other humanoids. It follows a young prodigy who was visited by a time traveler from the future who told him that he needs to get as strong as possible to face an existential threat to humanity which will invade in three years. The time traveler also bestows him some gifts and soon the main character becomes overpoweredand shocks everyone with his strength. The main story is about the main character getting stronger, constantly dealing with obscene injustice from INCREDIBLY smug/arrogant opponents and making friends with mostly female side characters. It's very simple, but fun. The show is made with publicly available 3d assets. At times it's remarkably jarring, but funny to see how they slapped all these assets together. Like characters not getting scaled properly to fit in a house that has furniture twice their size so they look like children whenever they sit on a chair, or characters dressed in outfits CLEARLY from well recognized other IP's, or even just books with English names from current day Earth. It's not all bad though. The makers were very creative making this and through clever camera angles and cuts it's mostly seamless if you don't look too hard. Though one of the walking animations they constantly use is just horrible. The overall animation is... passable. It gets better with later episodes, especially the fight scenes. The fight scenes in the first half of the series is laughably bad, then it gets better and even even enters the "cool" territory once or twice. Music is fine, it's likely using some open source music pack and I could swear one of the tracks is a remix of a Lord of the Rings piece. Voice acting is fine too, but sometimes they mistakenly put in the unedited voice file instead of the tuned one so sometimes the characters have a completely different voice, haha. The whole thing feels like an amateur's first project but it also feels like a lot of passion has been put into this. Which is what makes it so enjoyable to me. I want to see more, and a second season was announced for 2026. I kind of hate the 6 minute format though. 7/10