I am from Central Europe, so I belong to the crowd that has loved the Witcher long before the games started coming out. I absolutely love the books (to the point of making my own amateur audiobooks of it) and therefore I know virually every word, every quote, every character. Maybe because of this, I cannot really appreciate the series, because it changes so much in so many ways that I find bad or lacking.

But even when I try to set myself free of the shackles of Witcher nerdism, I do not really think that the series is good. The story is so hasty! Everything moves at a neck-breaking pace and I feel like there is no proper world-building, character-building and so on. I do not understand how someone who does not know the characters from the books or at least the games can like them, understand their motivations and be invested. For example, the whole Filavandrel encounter is just so bland and so many things that should or could have been said are omitted that there is simply no emotial connection to what is happening on the screen. Why should I care? You did not give me any time to really understand these characters (apart from Yennefer, who I do not like because her character got changed so much). The shortcuts taken in the stories presented in the series are so vast that much of the detail gets lost and the motivations and gravity are incredibly lacking. I really do not like these characters. I really do not like the world-building here.

All of this is underlined by utterly mediocre and forgettable music (seriously, even the game soundtrack - especially the Witcher 3 - had better), personified by Jaskier (interesting choice to go with his Polish name instead of standart English translation - Dandelion) and his song Toss a coin to your witcher (I think that's the name) is just pathetic.

Calanthé is such a stupid character I cannot even begin to describe her. The whole battle scene in the first episode is just so weird, dryads look like Amazonians combined with people of Wakanda and look really stupid and they use crossbows which feels really disconnected with their character and overall forest tribe feel (that is what series goes for, books not that much).

Maybe I am to harsh because of my love for the books, but I really cannot recommend this to anyone who wants to start with the Witcher universe.