As someone who is a huge fan of the books I must say I have really mixed feelings after seeing the series. And surprisingly for a totally different reasons than I expected to have them before watching it.

So let's start with what I liked. Acting was great. I love Cavil as Geralt. Anya as Yennefer is amazing. Freya as Ciri is stunning. MyAnna as Tissaia was also awesome. And I could name the whole cast like that. I will name one more, which I especially enjoyed and that's Joey as Jaskier (Dandelion) and the dynamics between him and Cavil. It brought me a few goosebumps, splendid.

Another good point were visuals. Be it sceneries or special effects, it looked great. Yennefer's eyes were spot on.

I also really liked the music. Especially Jaskier's ballads, this is how I imagine bards to be in fantasy stories.

But let's talk about the down sides now. The story-telling. It was so rushed. I love how Sapkowski managed to built characters in his books, even if they appeared as a side characters only in a single tale. But here? They were butchered. This is especially visible in the "Rare species" episode where development of all the side characters was so dull that I almost cried.

I would expect something like this from a movie but not from series.

This was mostly caused by forcing 2 or even 3 different story lines in a single episode. I believe that if they moved the whole Ciri storyline to a later season, it would help a lot. This way there was not enough time per episode for Geralt's story line to shine.

Also I can imagine it must have been extremely confusing for people who didn't read the books to realize that each story line happens in a different time frame.

After each episode I had feeling that it missed something, that it was too blunt. And it was those small bits of Sapkowski's amazing storytelling present in the books which had to be cut out so they can fit in unrelated storyline from a different time frame.

So I have to go against general opinion and give this only 6 stars. Simply because I know there are way better book adaptations out there so I know it could be done here as well. I really hope this changes in the second season. You already got awesome cast, effects and music. So please don't continue with butchering of the original stories.