My Rating: ★★★★★

The Legend of Heroes: Hot Blooded (新金庸武侠世界: 铁血丹心) is a Chinese television wuxia drama that started airing on 17th June 2024.

About

“A gathering of great warriors brings forth a joyful martial art world. A new tradition reboots the martial arts.” from IMDB.

Cast

Ci Sha (此沙) as Guo Jing. An actor of Yi nationality, and looks like this was his first main character role in a TV series.

Bao Shang En (包露佳) as Huang Rong. As I write this she is currently in Dunk of China (YouTube link).

Zhou Yi Wei (周一围) as Huang Yao Shi. We knew if he was in it the show must be good, although he wasn’t in many episodes. He played Huang Rong’s father. Some websites say he played a “cameo” and others “guest role”, but he seemed to have a bigger role than that.

Review

The show was based on The Legend of Condor Heroes which had been redone many times, I understand there is even an upcoming film. We were not familiar with the story or seen any of the previous TV series or films so it was completely new to us.

We thought this was one of the better costume wuxia types series we’ve seen in quite a while.

It had the typical things you see in many Chinese series with characters saying things like “I’m so old, I won’t around for too long” and “I’m not very clever”.

The story was sound, it kept moving along with developments in most episode. The typical good vs evil scenarios and you know who is going to win. The bad people are going to lose in the end, it has to be that way.

The special effects were great as well as the action sequences. It was worth seeing the series just for that. The poor actors must have spent a lot of time hanging from wires and flying all about the studio.

They put in some side characters that were, lets say, lovable rogues who popped in and out of the series. They injected some humour every now and again. The mix of series and comedic was cleverly interlaced.

There were some strong female leads and they weren’t too squeaky as other Chinese dramas. The actress who played the blind martial artist had a good role to play, a very kick-ass character.

It was directed by Yang Lei (杨磊) who had just previously worked on the internationally acclaimed series Three-Body.

I didn’t pay much attention to the music.

Summary

We really enjoyed it, I give it a 5/5. Some ratings across review sites weren’t that good but I would recommend giving it a try.

Where To Watch

We saw this on Viki. I understand it might be on Apple TV. I have noticed some episodes on YouTube but not sure if its the whole series.

The Legend of Heroes: Hot Blooded vs Legend of Condor Heroes

Right after we watched this series we found an older version called “Legend of Condor Heroes” on Viki, dated 2008. We didn’t think the special effects would be of the same caliber to the 2024 version and they were ok for its time but the birds were very badly done. We didn’t watch too many episodes but it filled in some gaps that “The Legends of Heroes” didn’t touch on, probably due to time limitations. Both the actors who played Guo Jing had a very similar look, I wonder if they sought out a look-a-like. One of the characters was so annoying that we decided to call it quits, however, it was still interesting to watch what we did of it.