When I came across The Daily Life of the Immortal King or Xian Wang de Ri Chang Sheng Huo I was kind of intrigued by the synopsis but a little cautious once I saw this animation came from Haoliners Animation League. While I ended up being quite the fan of Spirit Pact, stories like Hitori no Shita and Gin no Guardian had long convinced me not to expect too much from them.
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The Daily Life of the Immortal King – Better than expected.
However, sometimes low expectations help because honestly if I’d expected a lot from the Immortal King I’d have probably been disappointed whereas I was instead pleasantly surprised by a low key story of an over-powered character trying to more or less just go about his daily life. I was getting serious The Disastrous Life of Saiki K vibes from this only found most of the characters less annoying and while the humour wasn’t laugh out loud worthy there were a few chuckles along the way.
The Immortal King is about a character named Wang Ling who is pretty much born overpowered and even as kid defeats a demon-king but leaves someone else to take the credit. Now entering high school, he’s looked down upon as weak but its pretty clear he is over-powered.
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Throw in a rich girl trope of a character with a whole bunch of assassins after her and a romance that makes little logical sense but somehow manages to end up being kind of sweet and feel rewarding, plus some inter-school rivalry and a whole bunch of flying swords and you basically have a sense of what Immortal King is going to offer.
By the way, they really aren’t kidding about the whole Daily Life thing in the title as you will watch Wang Ling searching for, ordering, and eating dry noodles a lot.
At 15 episodes this didn’t quite wear out its welcome but I’m not so sure about the whole second season that’s potentially coming because I’m just not sure what is left to tell in this story. I mean, we already took The Daily Life of the Immortal King to world ending level danger in this season and his character growth felt pretty satisfying but it doesn’t feel like this set-up has much left to offer.
What I will say is that this story does get better as it goes. Largely this comes from the small changes in Wang Ling’s character as he becomes closer and more invested in Sun Rong (the love interest) and the two students that he kind of becomes friends with. Also, the green, spirit dog thing is pretty funny.
The ending of Immortal King takes a turn for the more serious that feels fitting given the character changes at that point and honestly I was pretty happy with how this wrapped up.
If you are after anything sensible though, you probably won’t find it here. This one is cliché driven with spirit swords, assassins who declare themselves amazing and spectacular right before they get taken out by someone opening a door, and obvious punch lines to set-ups such as the exploding cauldron while trying to craft pills but provided you are in the mood for something a little on the absurd side it all works well enough.
Visually, it isn’t amazing animation but it all works well enough with fight sequences feeling suitably flashy for the powers being splashed about.
The Daily Life of the Immortal King isn’t unmissable but it is quite watchable and available on Netflix so there’s worse ways to spend a day than binging this one. It is in Chinese though so even if you’ve watched enough anime that you aren’t as reliant on subtitles, this one is going to require you to pay a bit more attention.
If you’ve checked out The Daily Life of the Immortal King let me know what you thought in the comments below.
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Karandi James