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A prologue to hopefully bigger things.

First season of Sword of Coming explores Chen Pingan's childhood, sets up some relationships with different characters & displays powerful individuals having some fights. The story confined to a village where cultivation levels are suppressed, so mortals and cultivators live together.

What I like about Sword of Coming as a whole is how unique this start is.

The MC is pretty useless for a whole 26 episodes. He's a guy who does a lot of stone picking, herb collecting & fishing, but is constantly dealing with cultivators, resulting in at least some action/plot developments. It's also very obvious that some people ... in the village are extremely powerful & Chen Pingan would probably not be as strong as they are for a while. Kind of sets up power structure in a more believable way, than if it were to "scale" to Chen Pingan. And if it's not obvious already, no, he doesn't cultivate yet at all.

Visuals are good, biggest thing I'd point out is how some textures were a little lower resolution than they should've been & I think some character models seem a lot more refined & lifelike than others.

At the time of writing this, I couldn't find any official english source to watch & the translations I found made understanding the overall plot a bit hard. Hence the mixed review. Hopefully there is some sort of proper western release later.

Slow beginning & weak characters make for a quite boring start. But once the show finds it's footing, it's enjoyable.

Early on the show reminds me a lot of A Record of a Mortal's Journey to Immortality:
- The visuals & plot pacing are very similar
- Both main characters begin as a mortal
- Both main characters have a story reason for slow cultivation

What results in a bad start for Shrouding The Heavens:

Ye Fan does not feel believable or relatable as a main character. Shrouding The Heavens spends the first 6 episodes showing Ye Fan & his former classmates' journey after being taken away from Earth by a ... mysterious coffin. These early episodes were mostly spent running away from monsters, and did not provide much information on Ye Fan or his former classmates. This beginning is then tied to Ye Fan's character motivations & story progression, resulting in a fairly poor & uninteresting foundation.

The story also starts slow. Most of the first 20 episodes are pretty much spent on running away from dangers, or watching other cultivators from the sidelines. These 20 episodes are followed by small arcs that don't really tie together well. It's only starting episode 36 that the show begins to find it's footing, as the different story arcs & characters connect in a more coherent way.

To anyone who is fine with a slow start & still wants to give Shrouding The Heavens a chance, mainly expect a balance of romance/harem elements, comedy, action & several recurring characters.

Decent action show hindered by an overabundance of camera cuts, sudden plot developments & a lack of proper continuity between different scenes.

This is a magic/cultivation setting within the modern world. Deities grant some humans powers, and in exchange they wish for these humans to do something for them. Our main character met one such deity as a young child so he's cool like that. Some other people can seemingly use "Taboo" powers, but I'm not sure how those were gained. Maybe I missed that plot detail.

Character & environmental models are high quality. I also think the soundtrack overall is decent.

Just sucks that it essentially ... feels like the whole show was directed by a former Cocomelon employee.

This was the first 3D Donghua I personally liked, but this might be a hard sell for a lot of people.
I still think it's worth giving at least a try to see if you're into it. But don't go in with big expectations.

I want to touch a little on future seasons, so this review reveals what you can expect later on without going to any plot details.

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Visually, I think the artstyle is inconsistent. Some environments look way too empty & unnatural. At times it's like the characters are driving through barbie land with a couple of plastic trees on a plastic ground. Even texture quality ... is inconsistent.

Animations are very stiff, and the combat sequences are not that well made. It's especially bad when the main character fights beasts for the first time. You won't even see the sword making contact with them. After first 12 episodes there are some improvements I noticed though, since the swords start making cuts on the enemies.

Both the visuals & animation do slowly get some improvements as episodes pile on:
The scifi style is pretty well pulled off & the show gets more futuristic the further you go. Past first season most fights are done midair & it's a lot prettier to look at than ground combat choreography. Nice visual effects & the animation quality feels less relevant.

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The plot begins with humans defending earth from beasts, but future seasons eventually start to become more & more scifi & eventually there's even space travel & space combat.

I think the story writing is pretty terrible outside the major plot of winning the earth back. The subplots are always very surface level "You offended me, so I will end your bloodline" type of deal.

Personally I wasn't a fan of fighting overgrown beasts or dinosaurs & thought the subplots were cringe, so the future seasons with their scifi settings are where this show shines: dope armors, lots of nice visual effects during combat, nice spaceships, nice metallic interiors, lots of combat.

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Overall I'd say first 2 season are a 6/10 on average, but seasons 3-4 are a 7/10 for me.
It's cringe, but it's also fun.

An early review, but this show is a total disappointment for me.
Going in with no information on the source material has been a pretty miserable experience.

The visuals are fine. The animations are fine.

The story is not. The pacing is not. The characters are not.

You are constantly starved of any sort of meaningful character development, fights feel meaningless & there's no plot ever being developed. There is barely any context as to what the main character is trying to do at any given time, or what happened between time skips. You are constantly asking who these random characters who look identical to eachother are.

The official? ... subtitles seem to be machine translated & also ignore on screen text.

Only reason I'm not giving it a fully negative review is because it has okay visuals & I think some people just want to watch the main character kill people occasionally & that's enough for them. Or maybe people familiar with the original novel want to watch it & perhaps it's good for that.

Reasonably good, but probably created for a younger audience.

Consistent visuals & a reasonably good artstyle. Very high contrast color scheme. Bright red / pink hairstyles. Pink/rainbow color horses. Everything pops out a lot. Environments are often very flat & lack details in textures & debris, furniture, trees etc.

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Story revolves around a humans vs demons premise, where the war has been at a deadlock for 6000 years. It's overall well told, abilities, strength, character thoughts are all expressed well. And the show pacing is very good.

However I personally find that often the show feels too contradictory between characters & world lore:
There are several virtues ... that the knights are trying to uphold. "Compassion, honesty, bravery, fairness...", yet the people who receive screen time are always bickering and fighting like toddlers, adults included. There are moments where some bystanders even mentioned a knight freezing people around her during a fight. Another time some temple officials overlooked a murder attempt. They seemingly can also fight in the middle of busy towns for some reason. One of the central adult characters for this season was even willing to beat up a child in a fit of rage because the child gave him praise.

The characters are all mentally unstable & it's never explained that the knights would be corrupt or anything. I can only assume it's a narrative conflict.

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For the most part I enjoy fights & I actually could tell how most skills used between different disciplines were consistent with their class. It didn't feel like everyone had developed completely unique skills, it was consistent with lore. None of the fights thus far were that over the top, usually they were very simple trading of blows. You attack. I block.

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Putting aside the conflict between how you'd expect this society to work & how it actually seems to work, I genuinely don't have anything negative to say. It's a pretty good show.

Having read some cultivation novels, it is really refreshing to be watching one.
A Record of a Mortal's Journey to Immortality has a simple premise of a normal boy following the road towards immortality by chance. It doesn't focus on his powers & doesn't spend time explaining how cultivation works in detail. It focuses on the relationships he forms & the hardships he faces.

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The skin textures & facial models look extremely good, and animations are fairly fluid. Most environments & enemies are decently designed. Same goes for all the SFX like fire/sparks. Unfortunately the show is made to be weirdly PG & they don't really show ... gore, which I think should have been a crucial aspect of the show considering how many people are killed or injured.

There is one major issue regarding graphics that will be relevant even in later seasons, and it has to do with several characters looking very similar to eachother. This is amplified with women, since for men they can add beards & make them uglier, but all women have a similar, beautiful face shape.

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The prologue in my opinion is a 9/10 from a storytelling perspective, although perhaps the pacing could've been adjusted to be a little slower when it comes to explaining the cultivation aspects, especially for people new to the genre. Some camera cuts also are a little too fast & if you blink you may lose context. Past the prologue there won't be anything notable regarding story, but it's all reasonably well written in the sense that it's usually not bad & is fun to follow.

The fights past prologue will however be larger in scale, which I am fairly sure some people will enjoy.

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My two dislikes for this show are how often the main character Han Li will stand around like a tree stump whenever interacting with women, and how sometimes combat scenes drag on for a little too long.

Overall this should be a good watch for most people.

When I previously tried 3D Donghua back in 2018, the high rated shows like Soul Land & The Legend and the Hero were wildly unimpressive visually & pacing wise. Some of these post 2020 releases however are clearly beginning to raise the bar.

This show has consistent visual delivery, good animation quality & nice SFX. I think character designs are mostly good, but somehow the main character's transformation/power up design is a complete flop & I prefer just about all side character designs. The fight choreography is enjoyable, and some moments mix music & animation in a way that's a little reminiscent of Arcane's music video ... segments.

It just sucks that the story is not the best & there are some cringe moments. But for every bad moment, there's a good moment to balance it out.

Looking forward to the next season if one is coming.

This manwha is quite the amalgamation of genres & themes, so I think writing a review to warn readers could help some people.

The main character is a 70 year old male from a murim world, who gets transported to another world & eventually turns into a female.
Most of the fights are done with mechs, rather than martial arts. The MC is also often times sidelined in order to showcase plot developments & other characters. Later on the politics will be about 90% of what you read.

From my personal view:
I honestly never liked the characters or plot in this manwha. I kept going because I was ... curious where the story was going and was hoping to see some fun scenarios unfold. But I never feel like I got the payoff I was hoping for at any point.

This murim has many ups and downs, but overall it's a captivating read. Despite having a main character with futuristic technology in him, the story has always been in a historical setting thus far.

Story (6,5 / 10):
Yeo-woon is the son of a cult leader & one of his servants. He and his 6 brothers who are full blood nobles are in competition for the throne, but due to the mixed blood status Yeo-woon faces great difficulties. He had made a pact not to cultivate and therefore is in no shape to compete against his brothers when the time to enter the demonic academy finally arrives. ...
However before he can even join the academy, he is assassinated... Or at least would have been, but he is saved by someone from the future and is injected with nano machines, which can alter and repair his body, and is also accompanied by an artificial intelligence.

Sometimes the story is quite nice to follow, but there are many times where practically nothing is happening, or the way the story is told is way too chaotic for my tastes. It's mostly basic fights between the antagonists and main character, but with real story elements sprinkled here and there.

I have some difficulties following the dozens of sect names & events, so story isn't the easiest to follow, but this might be because I read it with translator changing nonstop.

Characters (6 / 10):
There is real character development to be seen for everyone, but it's not done in a way that feels significant. It's also hindered by the fact that there are far too many characters in the manhwa to properly explore. Everyone is mostly sidelined, but after maybe chapter ~120 some side characters have received more time in the spotlight.

Art (7 / 10):
The art is good, but character designs are sometimes far too samey and I get lost in understanding who is who.

Enjoyment (7 / 10):
I enjoyed beginning and the currently ongoing arc, but the middle part was an unenjoyable mess to me.