Douluo Dalu 2nd Season

I've been watching Anime/Cartoons for 20+ years, and Douluo Dalu is one of my favorites and I genuinely believe it's a masterpiece. It's my favorite shonen and my favorite Isekai.
My PERSONAL enjoyment of the show was a 10/10.

Pro:
-The best power system out of any show I've ever seen. It's genius
-Great worldbuilding
-Having seen almost no Donghua before, this show felt EXTREMELY unique and inventive
-Lovable main cast (Shrek seven devils)
-tons of fighting
-there's romance, there's drama, I laughed and I cried; it's dope
-Although the Protagonist is OP, the other group members are still very strong and useful. There's a lot of fighting in this show, and they actually ... use TEAMWORK everytime instead of it being basically multiple simultaneous 1v1's like in many other shows.
-Sidecharacters matter and are basically never throw-aways, the show somehow manages to bring back many side character back in a way that makes sense and is satisfying.
-The end of the show ties up everything pretty neatly imo

Con:
-3D isn't for everyone
-The animation at the start of the show is not that great (it does getter better though!)
-It's Chinese so the english sub isn't that great. My guess is that chinese doesn't translate well to english in general? I've noticed this with other donghua as well.
-Due to covid, the last ~fifth of the show is somewhat rushed, with episodes being only 10 minutes instead of 15

Runtime expected - 240 * 20 = around 4800 mins
The runtime reduced from 16 mins to almost 12 minutes by the end.
Actual runtime after songs, recap, adverts and mid scenes - 240 * 13 = 3120 mins

This is an average isekai cultivation donghua.
Reborn in a cultivation world with all memories of martial skills from past life martial world.

Pace of story - Slow (pace is randomly high at end)
Screenplay - Decent
Direction and Editing - Bad
... Animation - Decent - There are good fight scenes. Rest of it is fine.
Character development - Bad. The MC has slow character growth despite being an adult to begin with.
The father of the MC is an aura farmer. Some characters are given more screentime despite no depth.
Some characters who needed backstory have barely any.
Power fantasy angle - MC is powerful because of isekai, luck and family souls inheritance.
But the pace destroys any chance of enjoyment.

PS - Watch director's cut movie instead of last 3 episodes.

TL;DR This is objectively bad and I only recommend watching if you enjoyed the manhua / novel and want to see parts animated. Read on for specifics.


Story
Classic Xianxia novel type stuff: OP MC can never lose (even to people almost double his level) and gets many power ups. If you like Xianxia you'll like the story.

Art
This looks like it was animated by the same people that made the game Shenmue. I'm not kidding it looks like an xbox 360 game. There is bad syncing of lips where at times you can't even tell who is speaking because nobodies mouth moves. There are weird jerky movements ... at times like the characters hit a lag spike and become a slideshow. I won't lie there are a few still shots that look nice but that's about it.

Sound
They reuse the same grunts / sfx over and over which is really awkward and at times there is no background music during parts so all you're left with is these awkward grunts, like 3 grunts from 1 person within 2 seconds.

Characters
The characters are actually pretty good and are individuals but they have almost no backstory. I'm 50 ep in and I don't know anything about fatman, oscar, Zhu Zhuqing, Dai Mubai etc... This is more a problem with the pacing than the characters themselves since the backstory is better in the novel. (edit: you get some backstory around ep 80ish but only for Mubai and Zhu Zhuqing so yeah pretty late for that. Fatman and Oscar no backstory yet.)

The pacing is terribly slow. There is a lot of wasted time on spirit summoning over and over every time they get into a fight with the same exact animation. On the topic of time they also put in advertisements everywhere like ~6min 30 sec of every episode is just garbage you will skip and they're only 20 min episodes.

If you can find a decent translation good luck. I looked all over and they're all pretty bad, constantly changing names / translations calling male characters "granddaughter". Some episodes I feel like I could of skipped reading subs and just guess what they're saying because they made 0 sense.

Somehow despite this I still enjoyed it but I'm not sure if that was because it was decent or because it was so bad I couldn't stop kinda like a car crash, you know you shouldn't watch but you do.

Overall, definitely dumpster fire tier.

Extra: sometimes there's scenes where they use chess as a visual representation of their "bigly" brain power but it's really awkward because whoever animated it doesn't know how to play chess. (2 kings 4 bishops 3 rooks for one side, pawns in back row, pieces in impossible positions??)