scenophile

Unfortunately not for me, and I was really looking forward to this one after hearing it heralded as the successor the Untamed, which is one of my favorite dramas. I found this one really hard to get through.

As a caveat, historical/xianxia always takes me a little while to get into (so if that's your genre you might click with this one faster than me), but I just found the story to move very slowly and be mostly characters having long monologues. The dubbing really did not work for me either, with every line feeling over-enunciated and the acting feeling far too unsubtle.

The plot also didn't really click. I'm not sure what it is but the villains felt very underwhelming, and everything was extremely rushed at the end. Chinese dramas have fallen victim to this so many times where everything is super dragged out until the last 2 episodes where it seems to speedrun the climax, but I feel like it especially did not work here.

There are some great moments still, particularly the fight scenes which are all very well choreographed. I know why people like this, especially if they're fans of the novel and have some context working for them, but it didn't work for me.