The King's Avatar is definitely one of the most unique Chinese dramas I've ever watched, and I thoroughly enjoyed it from start to finish. If you're not looking for a romance drama and you're interested in gaming, this drama is for you! The gameplay is masterfully put together, and the quality of the graphics pushes this drama from good to great.
Synopsis
The King's Avatar is a 2019 Chinese drama adapted from a novel of the same name that centers around the life and career of professional gamers playing a game called "Glory." Glory is an MMORPG game where players can either play against other players or go on quests to defeat NPCs. Ye Xiu, played by Yang Yang, is a professional gamer who ranks at the top of the Glory gaming league with his team, Excellent Era. However, due to pressure from shareholders to create a "new face" of the team, Ye Xiu is removed from the captain position. Instead of continuing on with Excellent Era, he decides to leave the team for good and finds himself across the street at the "Happy Internet Cafe," which is owned by Chen Guo, one of Ye Xiu's biggest fans. Since nobody knows who Ye Xiu looks like in real-life, he applies to be the network manager at the cafe and continues to play Glory under a new account, starting from square one.
Initial Thoughts
I wasn't sure about this drama at first because I was skeptical about the concept of a full-on gaming drama, but The King's Avatar blew me away with the graphics and editing of the gaming scenes. Yang Yang also starred in a romance-gaming drama a few years ago called Love O2O, and I thought this drama would give off a similar vibe. However, The King's Avatar was much more advanced in its gaming graphics and focused a lot more on team dynamics than a romantic relationship between the two leads. This drama is mostly centered around Ye Xiu, and there isn't an obvious first female lead or second male lead which I enjoyed because it kept me focused on the main plot of Ye Xiu's return to the professional gaming scene.
What is Glory?
As mentioned before, "Glory" is an MMORPG game where players can either play against other players or go on quests to defeat NPCs in "dungeons." Once you reach a certain level, you can choose one of the 24 classes in the game to specialize in. This includes the Battle Mage (which Ye Xiu played while in Excellent Era) and the Launcher (which Ye Xiu's best friend Su Mu Cheng plays). I'll give an overview of each of the classes later.
When you play the game, either against other players or in dungeons, you are able to level up by beating others and gaining experience points. You are also able to obtain special items and equipment by killing monsters or by buying them with actual money online. However, if you die in the game, you will lose experience points and drop whichever items you brought with you into the game, at which point others can take your equipment (which is called scrap picking). The professional teams often play in these maps to gather rare materials to level up their own armor and weapons before a professional match. These rules don't apply in the professional Arena games.
The teams in the professional leagues often have matches against each other and generally has 3 rounds. The first round is the Individual Challenge (1v1), and there are generally 2 matches that take place (1 point for each match won). The second round is called the Arena Challenge (still 1v1) where the person who wins the first match of this round stays in the game (with the previous game's health) and continues to fight until he is defeated (up to 3 matches, 1 point each). The last round is the Team Challenge where each team starts with 5 players along with a 6th player on the bench as a substitute. Each kill in this challenge is equivalent to one point, and it's the most important challenge in the game. In each game, if there are no kills, the overall health points of each team determine the winner.
The Structure of the Drama
Glory is constantly described in the drama as a team game instead of an individual one, and even the first episode showed that the lack of teamwork, no matter how good an individual is, can lead to defeat. Therefore, since this drama is centered around Ye Xiu's return to the professional gaming scene, he needs to build a team that can take him back. The initial team that is built include Tang Rou who is Chen Guo's competitive and daring friend, Bao Rongxing who is an amateur gamer, and Qiao Yifan who used to be in a professional team but was never good enough to participate in real matches. Ye Xiu sees potential in all three inexperienced players and decides to take them under his wing. He teaches them new skills and brings them along on quests.
Over the course of the drama, there are many coincidental run-in's both online and at the internet cafe with other amateur players that specialize in different fields. For example, recruit #4, Luo Ji, is becomes their strategist and mathematically calculates the best way to win each match while on the sidelines. Ye Xiu recruits each one of them using different methods to see which players would be best suited to play against each of the teams. Since the lineup of each match depends on the team they're playing, Ye Xiu is very strategic in finding who he wants to be on his team. The end result is an 11-person team called "Team Happy" that has most of the core classes.
Final Thoughts
The King's Avatar is a very straightforward and focused drama that leaves little room for filler scenes. The main character's goal is set from the first episode, and Ye Xiu's determination (along with Yang Yang's strong acting performance) kept me hooked. I liked how it didn't dwindle too much on the unnecessary scenes and largely focused on the main storyline the whole way through.
While there were some cheesy parts to the drama, I'm so glad they didn't add a romance component to this drama. The King's Avatar is already quite heavy on the main plot and the emphasis on teamwork is far more important to the story than an unnecessary love triangle. There were definitely instances where I questioned whether Ye Xiu and Su Mu Cheng would get together due to their chemistry, but the drama instead focused on the almost familial bond between them (due to their childhood memories together) and their love for Glory.
There are a lot of characters in this drama, but they're all connected to the main storyline in some way, and I liked the switch in storytelling perspectives. The distribution of screen time was fair, and we got to know a lot of characters and their backstories quite well, which is hard to do when there's 15+ important characters in a 40 episode series. The drama humanized even the "villains" in the show, and there wasn't really a character I particularly hated.
Finally, like I mentioned before, the Glory gaming scenes were the best part of The King's Avatar. The concept of the game is not new (written as a novel before and other RPG games like "Diablo" have a similar foundation), but the execution is like something I have never seen before. All the game characters have an uncanny resemblance to their real-life selves, and the movement of the game characters was incredibly fluid and fun to watch. Glory is played from a first-person perspective, but us as viewers watch the game from a third-person perspective so we can see everyone's movements clearly. The tactics and strategy used in the gameplay were also very well-thought-out, and the cleverness definitely added to the twists and turns of the drama itself.
The King's Avatar is the first of its kind, and it sets an amazing precedent not only for future gaming dramas but also for modern Chinese dramas as a whole.