The sixth drama and my first full Chinese drama is called Chinese Paladin 仙劍奇俠傳. Having grown up in a Chinese family, I've seen countless martial arts based dramas. Only problem was, I was way too young to remember anything or even understood what they were talking about. So to fix up a piece of my childhood, I searched for a good Chinese drama to get into. The martial arts based dramas set in ancient China are known as 'wuxia' dramas (武俠). They are typically found in Chinese literature, but with modernization, the same stories were revived in forms of movies, television series, manga and video games. Chinese Paladin in particular, was originally an role-playing game.
The storyline revolves around Li Xiao Yao (Hu Ge), an irresponsible jokester who travels to Dream Island in search of a cure for his sick aunt. While Xiao Yao is at Dream Island, he meets Zhao Ling Er (Liu Yi Fei). He falls in love with her and marries her. However, Xiao Yao's trip to Dream Island was a plot by the Lunar Sect Cult to kidnap Ling Er. Afterwards, Xiao Yao wakes up with no memories of going to Dream Island. He meets Ling Er again, who is distraught with the situation in which she's married to Xiao Yao but he cannot remember it. Xiao Yao trusts in her and they both go off in an adventure to fight the Lunar Sect Cult as well as reclaim his memories.
As I mentioned earlier, Chinese Paladin is based off an RPG and thus, is structured into small arcs the same way most video games are. This ends up affecting the flow of the plot. After watching a portion of the drama, it jumps into another section with little relevance to the previous arc. Eventually the drama returns to the main plot line. The digressions from the main story were admittedly a little annoying, but not enough to stop me from finishing the drama. Hu Ge does a pretty good job with portraying Xiao Yao as a character with a very playful personality but with a strong sense of righteousness. Liu Yi Fei is absolutely beautiful to watch in Chinese Paladin. Her character, Ling Er, is very innocent but is very firm in her beliefs like Xiao Yao is. As with most wuxia dramas, I feel Chinese women tend to look more beautiful in traditional clothing. Although admittedly, it's perhaps they would look silly wearing it outside from filming a television series or movie. Lastly, with a number of wuxia dramas, there is quite an amount of CGI used for several scenes. Sadly, it's certainly not at the level of Avatar. In fact, there were times I found it very tacky. However, most of the martial arts scenes were done with traditional Chinese theater techniques that while it's clearly fake and choreographed, there were still amazing to watch. More importantly, the fight scenes were fun to watch to see just how ridiculous it could possibly get.
The soundtrack for Chinese Paladin is actually one of my favorites. There are five good songs from this drama. I will admit, since it's been years since I've seen this drama, I can't quite remember where the songs were used. Nevertheless, look for the songs "一直很安靜", "六月的雨", "殺破狼", "消遙嘆" and "終於明白". All five songs in essence are ballad tracks. Some have a little more "power" behind the voice, others more emotional for the particularly sad scenes. It's hard to pick out my most favorite song among these five. However, "六月的雨" is a slightly more popular song among Chinese people who've seen this drama.
Despite the digressions from the main plot, Chinese Paladin is a good drama. The soundtrack and the martial arts scenes are pretty good and make up for the deviations in plot. The ending is fairly conclusive in that everything gets explained. However, I wouldn't say it is my most favorite simply because of the bittersweet ending. I won't go into much detail, but I will still say that it wasn't the ending I wanted but understandable for the sake of the storyline. I would recommend this drama but don't expect too much from it.
