...and the audience rating is extremely misleading. At least if you're not a hardcore fan of the eponymous books and/or video games. The first episode follows up a brief action shot with 30 minutes of spoken exposition. There is an unironic scene where the main character recites his backstory to a horse. If all this "tell, don't show" were at least slightly interesting, but it all seems incredibly dry and far-fetched. Names of fictional places are dropped like confetti. Random people enter the stage and recount made-up historical events like D&D-playing high schoolers.

Finally, the main character gets to prove his martial skill again and it looks like a scene straight from a video game. Fast dolly shots and slow-mo sequences capture every gruesome death in gut-churning detail. I'm can stomach a fair amount of violence, even cheesy and overly gory violence à la 300 or Spartacus. But this is just too ridiculous. It feels like watching a Twitch stream without the webcam commentary. If you're as unfamiliar with the source material as I am, you might want to give this clunker a wide berth.