nathandouglasdavis

The pacing's too fast. The entire manga feels like those recaps they do at the beginning of TV episodes. Excitement isn't everything to a story. There needs to be a sense of depth to characters' actions otherwise it comes across as empty. This story's all about overcoming adversity, but it only focuses on the overcoming half while the adversity half is more implied than anything. The art isn't great. The backgrounds are often just blurry swaths of color. A few times, it throws in out of place 3D images. When animals show up, they're drawn badly. And the humans are all drawn generically beautiful so it's difficult to distinguish between them. There was even a point where I had to ask myself whether a character was the main character or not, they're so indistinct. The art definitely deteriorates as the series goes on; faces especially get noticeably worse (the art at the beginning of the series might rate as a 5 out of 10). The main character, Li Fu Chen, is constantly revealing amazing and unexpected abilities to onlookers whenever fe shows off the results of feir training. But other than that, fe's just like every other character in this manga: a husk of a person filled only with thoughts of cultivation, strutting and dominating those weaker while playing lip service to those stronger. I could see this potentially being interesting to someone who enjoys fight scenes, but even those lack interesting choreography so it just comes across as dust clouds and action lines to me. In the beginning, the only break from the mundanity comes from the girl introduced in chapters 34 and 35, as fe is Li Fu Chen's only real rival. From chapters 53 to 73, the storylines start to include a bit more variety (demon fighting, disguises, tomb raiding, parallel dimensions) which makes them more interesting than the constant, pointless fighting between people. In the end, this manga's failings all come down to the overly fast pacing. Just as we need spacing between words, we need pacing in a story for it to be engaging. [In my original post, this final line constituted what was known as a "joke." You see, my review originally had no spaces in between words, which was admittedly extremely difficult to decipher. So when a moderator asked me to add spaces, I was more than willing to compromise and write a translated version which included spaces beneath the garbled mess (but I also kept the garbled mess so the joke would still make sense). Apparently, this wasn't good enough and the moderator has now insisted that I take out the unspaced paragraph altogether, which leaves us in the awkward situation of me having to assure you that this conclusion isn't just a random non sequitur and is actually meant to tie together the entire review in a humorous little bow.]

[Reviewed at chapter 123]