I thought it was pretty good. Henry Cavill did a great job as Geralt. For the other actors Triss seemed miscast but I thought the others were fine. If Poland is just "Redania", other Slavic countries like Montenegro are spitting distance from Africa. A few black people doesn't seem to much of a stretch. There are no obvious Turks/Ottomans, Christianity/Crusades etc so I don't know how far you can really take it. I've only played the 3rd game and not read the books, for what it is worth.
The time shifted storylines were not as jarring to me as the strange tonal shifts from "cable show" to "made for tv". Its almost like different teams were producing these. Early on you have nudity from main characters, good action scenes with cool choreography, decapitations, and the like, to go with a dark tone for the series. Later on, you've got some strange Beauty and the Beast story, and then what looks like an unused episode from Hercules or Xena where our heroes team up with a dragon for a set piece battle with minimal blood, highly generic action, and a cringe worthy capstone where the two leads kiss while casting a spell to save the day!
This is what I'm talking about. The first video has a fight that had some thought put into it other than "everyone fights", and the disarm at the end is cool and looks like something that would actually work. Possibly NSFW violence.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBASUVS-9SEThe second video is much more saccharine, with some generic sword swinging and the kiss. Even the dragon is only implied to have burned the guy with his dragon fire.
https://youtu.be/1GrinnzwV30?t=25I've seen that before on Netflix where you have Daredevil with excellent, cable quality action, and then they mail it in for the other Marvel series. But this is the first time I've seen it within the same show. Am I imagining this as some "Studman69" with impossible standards, or is there something to it? What do you think?