As a game fan (who played Witcher games in the order of 1, 2, 3) and a book fan I find the Netflix adaptation to be...adequate. They make an entertaining watching experience, but there are things I find to be severe flaws.

First of all let's list the good stuff: choreography is amazing - it makes Geralt truly fight like a mutated master swordsman that he is. Cast is well chosen - everyone fits the part perfectly. Production value is very high - something I was worried about but I'm happy to find out that Netflix spared no expense. It is also very faithful to the source material - all the major stories get told as they happened.

If I have to describe my feeling now, however, I'd say that the entire show is cast under the shadow of a dark, ominous cloud brooding together with Geralt. Henry Cavill has chosen to portray a brooding, dark, and monotonic Geralt. That is entirely fine. After all, Geralt is often like that both in the books and in the games. However, that is not what he is all the time! Based on the books, for all his brooding Geralt does enjoy the regular human sensual pleasures, so feasting and drinking (not of the royal kind) will get some laugh out of him; Geralt is a professional and can be incredibly patient and understanding when investigating monster details; Also Geralt often takes some secret pleasure in being considered powerful if not feared by the common folk... The list goes on. So Geralt has many more sides than just "dark." Adding a little of these other sides of his character would have made him so much more fleshed out and believable.

The dark cloud reaches over the writing, too. Here the show I think suffers from a too literal adaptation of the books. I read both The Last Wish and Sword of Destiny. Those short stories set up an entertaining premise and make a fun read, but in term of the quality of literature they are not on the same level as A Song of Ice and Fire, for example. The dialogues are often multi-page monologues giving ominous moral expositions, and the writing, while mature and pensive, are not quite clever or sharp. When adapted for the show, the result is similar: characters seem to break into monologue mode out of nowhere - which in many cases is not how real human beings talk; their lines are often incredibly pensive and reflective, but often devoid of smartness or delight. Of course the show is supposed to be dark and mature, but that does not conflict with high quality writing.

The show also has this mind-boggling triple story line, each taking place at a different time. It's not an issue for me since I read the books, but my girlfriend was completely lost and I had to explain many things to her. I don't imagine this structure would work well for those who are not intimately familiar with the source material. But hey, I might be wrong on that.

Overall I think the show has much room for improvement. Perhaps the showrunner ought to approach this project less as a "adaptation," but more as a "recreation?" There's a reason why the best part of the Witcher 3 are the parts where CDPR wrote entirely new stories and characters - Bloody Baron, Olgierd & Gaunter O'Dimm etc.