I came to this drama as a fan both the screenwriter Wang Juan (his previous work Joy of Life is in my top 2-3 favorite dramas) and the Douluo Dalu novel. However, I recognize that novels and dramas are two fundamentally different mediums and that it would like be impossible to faithfully adapt the novel into a visual medium, especially given China's copyright laws. I will try to give my thoughts on the drama on its own merits and leave the comparisons to last.

The good:
- The core cast (Shrek seven devils and teachers) play quite well together and they're really fun to watch. The scenes of teambuilding and the students just hanging out were probably my favorites from the whole drama and I'd honestly watch a slice of life drama with them just hanging out and bickering

- On a related note, the acting in general is good. Nobody was terrible although performances all around were a bit flat. Some people have objections to the FL's acting, I didn't mind it and found her cute.

- The CGI is good, especially for a c-drama. The show is very effects-heavy and fortunately most of the time the effects aren't bad enough to be distracting and occasionally the effects look really good (spirit rings being an example)

The mediocre:
- Fights were kind of boring in general. There were 2 good group fights but a lot of the minor fights featured most of the fighters standing there looking dumb while the fight happened around them. Also, there wasn't much strategizing, fights tended to be decided based on power.

- Plot was ok but really didn't give me much suspense or pathos. I mostly kept watching because hanging out with the Shrek seven devils is fun, not because I was dying to find out what was going to happen next. The overall plot felt very messy as well, the core question that the writer posed turned out to not matter at all and new questions were raised in the last episode.

The bad:
- The music was very random and didn't help build suspense or emotion generally. I think this was a big reason why the plot didn't click with me, the soundtrack really doesn't give much feels.

- Skips and does poorly soooo many characters/moments/plot points from the novel (more on this later)

Overall thoughts:
- As far as cultivation dramas go there are definitely worse. I'd give the drama an 8/10 as a standalone drama
- However, as a fan of the source material, I can't help but conclude that the screenwriter had no interest or appreciation for the novel, because very few of the interesting characters and plot points in the source material are preserved. 4/10 adaptation

Average 6/10

Comparison to the source material:

- Most obvious point is obviously that the character of the protagonist is very different. Novel Tang San is a strategist and inflappable due to his prior life. Drama Tang San is a normal young man as the drama couldn't show transmigration.

- The thing is that this may have actually been an opportunity, not a problem. Having Tang San start out innocent and wide-eyed allowed the chance for him to have a full character arc in a hero's journey type plot where he develops from his baseline into a character more similar to novel Tang San, smart and steady. This does not happen. Tang San is written very inconsistently and his character is poorly defined, even by the end.

- Related to this, one of Tang San's core skills, making hidden weapons is largely excised from the script. It's still present in some capacity but it is no longer focused on and barely even relevant to the plot, showing up in only 1 fight.

- So many funny and/or interesting characters were glossed over or cut entirely. Obviously can't show everything but seems like they went a bit far in culling characters. For instance, in the novel Shrek Academy has multiple teachers and Fei Lan De is just the principal. In the drama he appears to be the only paid employee of the school. Budgetary constraints? Maybe.

- Most of the fight strategizing is cut out. This is a minor point as I think it would be very difficult to translate fight strategizing into a drama.

- Worst for me is just an overall loss of hype. There are a lot of climactic moments in the novel that illicit a sense of awe or fear. The drama does an exceptionally bad job at translating these. Nobody in this drama has the sense of power or danger that they should have. Nothing feels like it has stakes. The villains don't feel dangerous.