Nie Feng finds himself in a life or death altercation with pursuing enemies; In order to avoid being caught and possibly interrogated he chooses to fall off of a cliff. Unbeknownst to Nie Feng, he would find himself reincarnated in the past at age 16 where he relives his past struggles as a crippled/poisoned son of the Nie family Patriarch. With memories of his past life still intact, Nie Feng decides to go on a journey to right the wrongs done to him, his Father and close relatives. Will Nie Feng be able to find safety away from internal strife, noble family conflict and cultivationor will he fall behind?
Story & Characters: 5/10
The Peak of True Martial Arts is your typical regression style series where the main character returns to the past with their memories intact and tries to fix the problems that plagued their previous life. Nie Feng is focused entirely on the prosperity of the Nie Family and he does this by defeating enemies that covet their resources, manpower and status. However, after a certain point Nie Feng's involvement against opposing noble families always ends before they get assistance from external parties which leads to an endless spiral of fighting and unfulfilled destruction. An example would be the Si family and Kou family young master on the island, instead of explaining the misunderstanding when Nie Feng defeats both he waits until the Si family escalates the missing young masters to Kou family before he intervenes after cultivating with Yuanling crystals. There is so much meaningless development that could be avoided and further new experiences that spring up as a result of Nie Feng's decision affecting the future but the story dwells on the past experiences too much. Overall, the story is very repetitive and becomes uninteresting because of the lack of new experiences breaking the endless cycle of noble family and disciple drama. Characters are thrown around too easily and it seems like they only exist to fill the dialogue between action; When it comes to action they are disposed of to make way for Nie Feng's character development. This becomes a common occurrence especially when it comes to opposing characters of the Si, Kou, Qinghe and Cheng families where the young masters are slowly culled to pave the way of cultivation for Nie Feng. The only interesting characters and meaningful interactions were toward the end with the chamber of commerce and Meng family female elder. This is where Nie Feng meets his past life love interest but yet again the development is superficial because it's so late in the series that we don't have any emotional entanglement with any of the important characters.
Art & Sound: 3/10
The art and animation are poor for the release period. The character rigging is rough so the fight scenes feel unnatural and jarring to watch; It doesn't help that there isn't any proper physics and characters can fly around or jump across without any inertial forces. The character design is not bad but the detail in skin, hair and costume leave a lot to be desired. The backgrounds and ambient lighting is poor with low detail and density in the background of many scenes. Art is definitely not this series strong points.
Sound is a miss in my opinion. The voice acting is poor quality and they try their best to make the sound as immersive as possible by mimicking the environment the characters are in (an example they try to replicate reverb from characters speaking in caves/underground chambers but it just sounds like a cheap filter) The music isn't special and they don't make use of theme songs in hero sequences for emotional impact. Sound effects are a miss too, overall sound design could definitely be improved.
Overall & Enjoyment: 3/10
I previously rated this series a 6/10 after 4 episode but I revoke my old rating. This series is well deserving of a 3/10 because there is nothing special that occurs in the series apart from constant familial fights and drama. Nie Feng is always belittled as the Nie family's cripple and there is apparently no news that he became a transcendental-esque master at the age of 17 which makes many unseen enemies attack him.
