La Cruzada

In the history of mankind there have been several epic falls from grace: Lucifer's Fall, Highlander 2, Lost Boys 2 & 3. Eclipsing even the Morning Star, burned into humanities psyche is The Quest 2022.

As all of you most certainly know The Quest 2014 was an amazing fantasy competition that combined LARPing with reality TV. The 2022 Disney+ reboot was as tragic as the Two Corey's last film Lost Boys: The Thirst and a non-sequitur on par with Highlander 2.

A few details: Changing the show from a LARP competition among Survioresque candidates, to entitled young adults spouting aphorisms. The challenges that once were actually challenging and interesting, became trivial and even worse entirely faked. Character development (good or bad, influenced or not) which is a backbone of competition and reality stories was replaced by middle school acting with a bad script.

In short, I've seen it and I curse my eyes. Don't follow my path.

As a fan of the first hour (The Quest 2014 blew me away!), I can't help to compare the old and the new. I'll be honest, as soon as the soundtrack set in, and I realised they had gotten the same composers from 2014 back, I was hooked, and a second later, I was fully emersed in Everealm.

Yes, the show has its flaws, that was to be expected.

Filming with underaged teenagers makes some things more difficult in general with limited filming hours per day and such. Some of the after-challenge-talks among the Paladins came across kind of staged and clumsy although I'm sure they were authentic. As soon as a scripted character was present and asked them questions, this awkward atmosphere was gone, so maybe to that more next season?

The scripted characters sometimes - very rarely though - acted incomprehensively, especially the castle's guards and also Prince Cederic. He drove me nuts with his actions.

Some of the challenges were well thought through, others were hard to grasp for the audience and the Paladins alike, and the fact that there was no elimination this time (Thank the Fates!) often made it hard to understand how the winner was chosen.

While most of the props and costumes were top notch (I SO appreciated that the royals wore different costumes every day as royals would.), a few props and costumes looked super cheap like bad LARP equipment, and the same goes for the creatures, which is very strange because some were SOOO lifelike and others looked like unconvincing Power Rangers villains. It was almost as if two different teams had worked on the make-up, props, and costume department.

Apart from these points of criticism, there's only good things to say.

The writers filled the story with so much lore and history, so much character development. The characters have depths, they have pasts, there is no black and white. The story starts off much darker and with an imminently menacing atmosphere. All actors were 100% convincing, I suffered with them, I cheered with them. The special effects (I know how difficult CGI fire is!) were fantastic, the music combined the old Quest soundtrack and also had new beautiful themes. The Paladins were a fantastic team, each of them super likeable, and they were 100% immersed in this world - as was I.

I can't wait to return to Castle Saenctum next season!

Continue the Quest.

A good effort, with some decent acting, creature make-up and some interesting sets, but sadly lacks any kind of humour, spontaneity and all the things that made TV series like Knightmare, The Crystal Maze and even Fort Boyard interesting and fun to watch. It's far too polished and controlled by the producers and is in no way "immersive" as they claim to be.

The stakes are so incredibly low. There is literally nothing to lose here other than the plot of the storyline. There are no prizes to be won. The contestants are therefore not much more than glorified actors that occasionally must solve puzzles - the rest of the time they're told what to say and do.

Plus there's far too much post-production work that further drives home that this is highly controlled, cheap way of getting a knock-off fantasy series that's disguised as some kind of real-life puzzle adventure game show. It doesn't know which genre it wants to be in.

I was surprised. Started of rocky but ended up bringing the whole thing in 1 day.

Yes it is cheesy but it is a teen show with teen doing challenges, you can't make it like survivor level hard.

If you like fantasy and always wanted to be immersed in a fantasy world, you'll enjoy it.

I'd pay to be able to through an adult version of this ❤

A few people don't remember that this is not a new show. The Original concept for the show came out back in 2014 on ABC.

Then it was 12 people with the contestants aging from 19 to 40.