DOTA: Dragon's Blood

[Season 1] Definitely more entertaining and better than I expected, as I didn't have a high opinion of the Korean studio Mir. Add to that the fact that I knew a little about the world of DOTA from my sometime gaming about 15 years ago (i.e. nothing) and 8 episodes should have satisfactorily introduced me to that world; I was expecting a flat romp with lots of winks towards the party people. I didn't get so much as a threadbare explanation of the origin of the characters/world, though I enjoyed the more elegant crossing of storylines led by likeable main characters. Personally, I didn't feel that it was inflexibly clinging to gamer satisfaction: the good-looking and flashy action was just right, and in fact I found many of the intentions and decisions quite human and logical, which is even more unusual for a fantasy venture; I genuinely rooted for the characters. On the other hand, I found no added superstructure, nothing that in any way impressed me, lifted me out of my chair, and left me straight up drooling for a sequel. In any case, it went by briskly (faster than the aforementioned and similar Castlevania), painlessly, and didn't offend me in the least. A better 3 stars (14.04.2021)

Is it just me or did they replace the writers from season 1 with the clowns from the president’s office? Or do I have to be somehow educated in DOTA lore, which I'm not? Because I absolutely did not get what was going on here. I'm having trouble thinking of a single character who was consistent with their character, knew what they were doing, and yet wasn't awkwardly and weirdly enamored with Davion, who did absolutely nothing. Lina? The handmaiden and the blue-winged wyvern? The teleporter? The departure of an episodic bad guy? The connections between episodes are chaotic, and the direction of the plot is like rolling a 50-sided die. Aside from these major flaws, the other qualities from Season 1 remain, but this was all Greek to me. A better 2 stars. (23.01.2022)

Here the writers literally ran out of steam and it seemed to me that the story was planned out for those 2 or so seasons but they couldn’t manage to end it in the second one. Truly, the first 2 episodes were the proverbial last pages and after that there was an unnecessary stilted epilogue where everyone had to sort out their inner complexes and social issues in relationships and one character had to establish a new order in order to convince himself, despite his omniscience, that it wasn't the real Lotus. The entertainment literally ran off to places in the galaxy where the story had rather sporadically and bizarrely failed to go. I liked DOTA better in the D&D fantasy mode, with character development and exploration of the lore and the outside world. None of that was on the menu anymore; indeed, I wouldn't sign up for the verbal haggling of all the characters or the bogged-down, overdone fight sequences even if I had no other choice. I hope we don't revisit this particular storyline, and I'll be waiting all the more for the next installment of Arcana. I would never have believed that I'd rank LoL higher than DOTA anywhere. A better 2 stars. (16.08.2022)