Mo Dao Zu Shi: Xian Yun Pian

Continuing his masquerade as the deranged lunatic from the Lanling Jin Clan, Wei Wuxian resides in the Cloud Recesses while his former cultivation classmate, Lan Wangji, searches for answers about the demonic severed arm they have in custody. With an overwhelming dark energy emanating from the arm, the two are forced to work together in order to keep it contained. However, the demonic arm is not the only dark force lurking in the region, and as spiritual tensions rise in the mountains of the Gusu Lan Clan, it is up to the two of them to try and restore the natural order.

The story of Wei Wuxian's fall from grace continues as more light is shed on his descent into the path of demonic cultivation. The demonic arm only further strains his mischievous spirit. This is the time for him to prove that he has truly broken free from the forbidden path and is not the maniacal sorcerer that everyone remembers him to be.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

Wei, Wuxian Main

Kimura, Ryouhei Japanese

Lan, Wangji Main

Tachibana, Shinnosuke Japanese

Jiang, Cheng Supporting

Midorikawa, Hikaru Japanese

Wen, Ning Supporting

Shimazaki, Nobunaga Japanese

Nie, Huaisang Supporting

Hanae, Natsuki Japanese

Lan, Sizhui Supporting

Tsuchiya, Shinba Japanese

Jin, Ling Supporting

Kaji, Yuuki Japanese

Lan, Xichen Supporting

Morikawa, Toshiyuki Japanese

Jiang, Yanli Supporting

Hayami, Saori Japanese

Jin, Guangyao Supporting

Ishida, Akira Japanese

Xiong, Ke Director, Art Director

Liang, Sha Script

Liu, Xing Script

Zhu, Ke Script

Reviews

Sep 18, 2019

lt_wassile

Recommended

Arguably one of the best Chinese studios out there, G.CMay Animation, decided to develop a season 2 for Mo Dao Zu shi -also known as Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation-. What they’ve managed to create is an emotional and stunning piece of animation, along the lines set out on the first season.
However, instead of taking the time to unfold the extensive backstory of the characters as they did in the onset of season 1, this time they took the plunge to the action-packed wonderful pace of the end of the 1st season from the very start, making it really enjoyable.

Without changing too much the recipe ... that lead to the success of season 1, Mo Dao Zu shi presents a character-driven story based on a Chinese cultivation world setting with a fair amount of action scenes, Wei Wuxian comedic paintbrushes, and an amazing work in the artistic department; still, a darker tone is set, mainly due to the darkening/despair effect that both the misfortunate events and the demonic arts have in our protagonist.
Besides, the moral conflict WW brings to the table much more complexity and tragedy making the show much more interesting. So, though we are not facing a really complex story, they way things are told and conducted make it a really nice piece of storytelling.

Moreover, though the cast is pretty much the same, we can observe that on season 2, G.CMay Animation steps up in the characterization of both our main cast and the intricacy of the villains/evil, as on season 1 felt kind of cartoonish, given the usual pillory attitude which Wei Wuxian displayed combined with the childish goals –and attitude- our main villain -Weng Chao- had. They have managed to portray much better their feelings, their ambitions, what they seek in life, generating in the viewer different impressions depending on the characters –and their actions/state of mind/circumstances- displayed on screen. Furthermore, the score was absolutely breathtaking and well used during the course of this season, endowing much more emotion to a lot of shots of this anime.

Speaking about visuals, this show continues to do things incredibly well. Striking use of angles, elegant coloring, and smooth shading gave so much detail that even the slightest feeling was portrayed on screen; even conversations felt much more realistic than on your usual anime thanks to the animators work. That being said, this last statement can also be applied to action sequences, as both are amazing –even the use of CGI was nice-. Last but not least, backgrounds, oh backgrounds, what can I say other than what an amazing display of talent it was (again)?

So, to sum up things, season 2 has hands down taken another step forward in its project of making Mo Dao Zu Shi franchise one of the all-time great productions of the Chinese anime industry.

Reviewer’s Rating: 8

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Oct 1, 2019

souji5okita

Recommended

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 to ... fill 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.

Reviewer’s Rating: 7

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Aug 24, 2021

SleepySera

Mixed Feelings

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 rest ... of 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.

Reviewer’s Rating: 5

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