THE KING'S AVATAR: Tells the exciting story of a deposed Pro-Gamer just kinda dicking around griefing low-level nobodies in the starter town
— Rei-son D'etre (@LossThief) June 29, 2017
Well, they’re not wrong.
Ye Xiu was the best know professional player of Glory, until he got unnecessarily nastily fired from his team, so the first thing he does is duck into a nearby internet cafe, apply for a job as night manager and start playing Glory again, on the newly opened tenth server where, as the tweet says, he spents his time grieving nobodies. And that’s basically Quan Zhi Gao Shou/The kings Avatar, a series of imagined battles played out within the game interspersed with scenes of young men and the occassional young woman looking really serious at their monitor, with close-ups of exciting keyboard and mousing actions. And yet…
As Youtube anime critic The Pedantic Romantic argues, this looks a bit like Sword Art Online, only without the actually being stuck in the game and dying in real life if you die in Canada the game bits. What’s more, Glory feels much more like a real MMO than SAO’s games ever did. It was this review that picqued my interest enough to watch the first couple of episodes, something made easy because the Chinese television producer behind it, Tencent, released the whole series on Youtube for wordlwide viewing. What I like about this is that it keeps the focus on gaming and gaming culture instead of having to add some supernatural or fantasy element to it.
It’s also the first actual Chinese cartoon to hold my interest enough to finish the series; it was always one of the first series I watched on a Friday night or Saturday morning this season. Even if the stakes were low and the story this season was little more than Ye Xiu getting a band of new players with potential together to perhaps form a new team when he goes back to the pro-leagues, on an episode by episode base it was always interesting. just as watching an underdog succeed despite the odds, there’s also pleasure in watching an expert quietly finishing off supposedly superior players. If you should want to watch it, I’d advise against binging it, as then its flaws quickly become apparant: each episode is basically the same story of Ye Xiu kicking ass, there’s an over reliance on some stock fighting animations, etc. Watched one episode at a time it’s perfect brain candy if you like seeing somebody play an MMO perfectly.